Word: tombaugh
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...many years the astronomers at the Lowell Observatory, which Percival Lowell built with his own money at clear-aired Flagstaff, Ariz., have been pointing their telescopes to the path in the skies where he had said his planet would be moving. The night of last Jan. 21, Clyde W. Tombaugh, 24, an assistant at the observatory, saw a strange blotch of light on a new plate. He hastily took the photograph to Vesto Melvin Slipher, director of the observatory. They were quite excited. Here visibly was Percival Lowell's proof. Night after night they rephotographed the planet. Pictures showed...
...been 42 years since Clyde Tombaugh, at Arizona's Lowell Observatory, discovered the last and outermost of the solar system's nine known planets. But many astronomers have never given up hope of finding a tenth planet even farther from the sun. They have been encouraged in their search by irregularities in the orbit of the eighth planet, Neptune, which some suspect could be caused by the gravitational tug of a mysterious "Planet X." Until now, however, all efforts to sight Planet X have failed...
...examples of patient scientific research. After the discoveries of Uranus and Neptune in 1781 and 1846 it was suspected, because of small irregularities in the motions of these distant wanderers, that there was still another, even fainter, planet. Astronomers calculated a probable orbit, and in March 1929 young Clyde Tombaugh took up the search. He examined scores of telescopic photographs, each showing tens of thousands of star images, in pairs under the blink comparator, or dual microscope. It often took three days to scan a single pair. It was exhausting, eye-cracking work-in his own words, "brutal tediousness...
Melting Martian Frost. Tombaugh found that the largest crater in the best Mariner photograph is located where visual observations have spotted an oasis. Parallel markings in the southern part of the crater coincide with the position of a short canal mapped by Astronomer Percival Lowell...
...Tombaugh believes that the canals are faults or fractures, several miles wide, in the Martian crust. Their darkening and fading may be caused, he says, by the intermittent escape of hot gases that melt a thin layer of frost and vegetation. The oases where the faults intersect, he speculates, are probably impact craters where moisture gathers and promotes the growth of moss or lichenlike plants hardy enough to withstand the harsh Martian climate...