Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. And I'm wis. So when you were a kid, did you know what you wanted to be when you grew up. I wanted to be a millionaire and live in a mansion, okay, so, and then after that I wanted to be an author. So you're kind of on track. No, well, not for being a millionaire and an author. That's really hard to do. Um. I really thought for a long time as a child that I wanted to be an astronomer. Like I really thought that, uh. And I was obsessed with our World Book Encyclopedias and all of the various entries on the Solar System, and I would trace them and I would make these trifled pamphlets out of notepaper for each planet. But in the making of all of these pamphlets, which I published to my family, I would always get frustrated with Pluto because we just didn't have enough facts in the nineteen one edition of the World Book Encyclopedia to fill out one of my pamphlets. And I couldn't just keep tracing the circle over and over. You know what, if we had been on the fence about about bringing you to work with us, which we were not on a fence, but if we had been, this story would have been the cell Um. I also went through a phase where I did those on animals. I was really into publishing my own pamphlets as a kid. I don't know what that was about. You're also on track, Yeah, kind of, I said. I didn't become an astronomer except us, you know, an amateur that just enjoys it. Uh. But Pluto was always tricky because we never knew as much about it because of its distance, and it's relatively newer to humans in terms of it existing and being than other things, so we don't have as much research on it. We haven't known more now than certainly we did then even so, Yeah, but having not known that it was there until relatively recently, we haven't had as much time to gather information. Uh. There will be hopefully a lot more really soon. But so Pluto was discovered on February eighteenth and nineteen thirty, but of course it existed for a long time before then, and port Pluto was a planet, and then it was demoted and it was actually the only planet to have ever been discovered by an American. Just kind of an interesting point of note. I think it's also the only time that an astronomical announcement his drawn fury Well, yes, I can't think of any other fury inducing announcements about astronomy, you know, except for except for in the very very early days of astronomy, when you know, things like planets revolve around the Sun. Where yeah, well, I there have actually been a lot because any big discovery in astronomy often kind of shakes the sound of what came before it. So there there's been some outcry. We just didn't have as much media to cover it before. But it does make you wonder, how do we even think to look away out on the edge of our Solar system for this tiny little object that would have been very difficult to find, and how did scientists and researchers find it. So it starts with suspicion, Yes, yes, started thinking that it might be there, right Perceval Lowell, who was born in eighteen fifty five, it gets the credit for being the first person to suspect that Pluto was out there, passed the eight planets that were known to exist in the Solar System at that time, but he was never able to find conclusive evidence. And Lowell was a really interesting character. He had actually worked as a travel writer specializing in Asia, and as a foreign secretary before turning to astronomy. He had studied mathematics in college. He came from a very good family. Uh, and he's actually probably more famous for his belief that Mars was uh once inhabited by an alien species that had established agriculture and irrigation on the red planet. And those assertions may sound a little bit nutty to our ears today, but uh, the important thing is that Lowell's passion for astronomy and astronomical study actually led him to found the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. And he was not only interested in Mars. Decades before Lowell's interest in astronomy, other astronomers had noted an irregularity in the orbit of Uranus, which led them to the discovery of Neptune. So you're trying to imagine how this works. As planets are orbiting, the Sun's gravity is pulling on them the gravity of other planetary bodies. They're also on each other. So because of the way that Uranus was orbiting, they were pretty sure there was something else out there, but even figuring Neptune's influence into all the orbital equations for your and us that there were still discrepancies between the mathematical predictions of the orbit and the actual observed orbit that you could see. This led to the theory that there was yet another planet in the Solar System beyond your Iness and Neptune, and Lowell became obsessed with finding it. Lowell performed his own mathematical calculations in an effort to pinpoint the likely location of what was being called at the time, planet X, and in nineteen o five he really just kind of developed a concerted effort and he and the staff of his observatory began an extensive search for this planet X. Lowell published his book Memoir on a trans Neptunian Planet in nineteen fifteen, and you can actually read that online. We'll have the link in our show notes. Love reading things on on me too. And Lowell actually died in November of nineteen sixteen. He was sixty one at the time and he had not yet found his missing planet, but he left behind a large monetary legacy to continue the search. His widow initially disputed the endowment, but the search went on. The funding had been depleted by the legal battle, but it still was enough to keep this uh search for planet X going. And that's where we get to Clyde Tombaugh, who was a very important figure in all of this. Tomba was born on February four six and Street, or Illinois, and he became interested in astronomy after he got a telescope as a gift from his uncle. He became so interested in the telescope that after high school, when he couldn't afford college, he studied optics on his own and in n he built himself a homemade telescope. He made more telescopes after that first one, even grinding the lenses and mirrors for them himself, which is pretty impressive in my book, Like that, I can't afford a college education, I'm going to study and kind of give myself one. To the point that he could grind his own lenses for telescopes, it's pretty impressive. It was a delicate It's delicate work. Yeah, uh. And Tomba's story goes almost like wonderfully fairy tale wish fulfillment here. So using these telescopes, he had built. He studied the night sky, and he had made drawings of Mars and Jupiter as seen through those telescopes, and he sent them to the Lowell Observatory more for like feedback on you know, if he was on the right track, if he was seeing the right things, etcetera. But instead of getting feedback, they were so impressed with his work that they actually offered him a job in astronomy, which he had never formally studied. So that speaks a lot to his sort of scientific mind on its own that he could just magically procure a job in atronomy without an advanced dedication. He was hired in to help with searching for a planet, the mysterious planet X, which Perceval Lowell had suspected was out beyond Neptune. Tomba used a blank comparator, which is an instrument that optically superimposes photographic plates so it's like they're blinked from one to another and researchers can see tiny differences between the two. And he did this in an attempt to track down Lewel's planet X. And the blank comparitor is really amazing, like it's kind of these tube photographic plates and you look through what's almost like a microscope eye piece, and you literally just flip back and forth. And we're talking about a photograph taken through a telescope with like thousands of tiny dots on it that are all heavenly bodies, and someone with a very keen eye tries to see any variance between the two because they're taking you know, aimed at the same place, but a little time distance apart. And it's I mean, if you just think about staring at a sheet of dots on like a piece of paper and trying to see which ones are different on two, you can get a sense of how yeah, so just monotonous this could potentially be. And attention to detail you have to have, right, It's like looking at the differences between two cells of a hand drawn animated filmy, but instead of looking at a nice pretty picture, you're looking at a field of stars, just dots on a page. Uh. However, tom Baugh obviously keen on attention to details, since he had self educated to the point that he could do some pretty impressive things. Uh, he managed to find what they were looking for. His work paid off pretty quickly, and it was the following year that he found what was called at the time the ninth planet. Uh. He pinpointed Pluto on February eighth, nineteen thirty and he was only twenty four at the time. It was a pretty early age to be making a very large, significant scientific discovery, again with no formal training. I just I keep coming back to that because he did so many impressive things without having gone to graduate school to get a PhD in astronomy. Yeah, well that happened later, but yes, So the payoff for all this, apart from the fact that he discovered a planet, is that he received the Jackson Guilt metal in gift from the Royal Astronomical Society. But even more importantly, he got a scholarship to the University of Kansas. He earned his bachelor's and continued to work at Lowell both during and after his studies. He also earned his master's in nineteen thirty nine. Tombau worked at Lowell for fourteen years altogether, and he discovered numerous heavenly bodies while doing his research there, including star clusters, comets, and galaxies. But back to Pluto, because I feel like tombos story is another one that could be another podcast on its own. He had a very interesting life. But the month after the discovery was made, they announced that they had found this heavenly body to the public on March thirteenth of nineteen thirty, which was also Percival Lowell's birthday, uh and on my onet of that year, after the public had submitted suggestions for the naming of this new heavenly body, the name was chosen, and it was allegedly submitted by an eleven year old girl from England, and it was Pluto. And Pluto is of course the Roman name for the Greek god of the underworld. But one of the significant things about choosing Pluto is that the symbol for Pluto includes representations of the letter P and the letter L, which were the initials for Percival Lowell. So it's kind of a nice way to name it on his behalf without naming it directly after him. So let's talk a little bit about this body that they found. It is extremely farrowing five point nine billion kilometers, which is three point seven billion miles from the Sun, and its diameter is two thousand, three d forty kilometers, which is uh one thousand, four hundred and fifty four miles, So it's less than one fifth the size of Earth, and it's actually smaller than our moon. It's also extremely cold. The surface temperature is around minus three seventy five degrees fahrenheit, which is minus to see us. Pluto solar year, which is the time it takes to travel around the Sun, takes the equivalent of two hundred and forty eight Earth years. It's circumference at the equator is four thousand, four hundred thirty seven point seven miles, which is seven thousand, two hundred thirty one point nine kilometers. And then we get to the moons, which are actually pretty interesting. So Pluto has five moons that we know of so far, Sharon Nick's Hydra P four and P five, and Sharon was discovered in It's about half the size of Pluto. And over the years a lot of astronomers have theorized that Pluto Sharon is actually a binary system, so Sharon doesn't revolve around Pluto. They're actually revolving around each other with a gravity gravitational point fixed between them. Uh. Just an interesting thing, and that is why there is a Jonathan Coulton song called Year My Moon that is about that very thing. Nick's and Hydra were discovered in two thousand five. P four was discovered in two thousand one, and P five was discovered in two thousand twelve. Scientists believe that the moons of Pluto were formed when the dwarf planet collided with another planet sized object. According to Mark show Walter, who is of the Seti Institute in Mountain View, California, he has this great quote, which is the Moon's form a series of neatly nested orbits, a bit like Russian dolls. Just a lovely image. Pluto's elongated orbit is also tilted in relation to the other planets. It actually passes inside the orbit of Neptune as it makes its way around the Sun. And then we get to the controversy. Uh, it's kind of sad. Pluto is the only celestial body ever to lose its status as a planet, so it's the only one that's ever been demoted, which is also a theme in the Jonathan Colton. In two thousand six, Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet and given the number designation of one thirty four DASH three forty. Because they're continued to be discoveries of heavenly bodies at the edge of the Solar System, and some of them were actually bigger than Pluto. It became clear that they needed to take another look at Pluto's status as a planet, so the International Astronomical Union created a definition of the word planet in two thousand six involving three criteria. UH. One, it has to be an object in space that orbits the Sun too, and this is obviously for planets in our Solar System. To it has to be a nearly round, rigid body. And three, it needs to clear the neighborhood around its orbit. But because Pluto orbits along the inner edge of the Kuiper Belt, UH, it doesn't meet the third criteria. Astronomers have discovered and identified more than one thousand other items in the Kuiper Belt that are really similar to Pluto and sometimes come near it, so it doesn't really meet that third criterion. Uh. The only rule, however, for dwarf planets is that they have to be round, so Pluto can be classified that way. And it's all kind of started because of a display that was going on that Neil de grass Tyson often gets the heat for at the Hayden Planetarium, where they just kind of quietly changed it up in their displays. I think in the year two thousand and then it kind of started getting a little bit of groundswell of discussion, and then this officially happened, and so Nil dess Tyson is often kind of labeled as the man who devoted Pluto, but he really wasn't. There was this whole other vote and discussion going on amongst other astronomers. It's just not through Neil de grass Tyson under a bus. That's just I don't want to throw any scientists under the bus. I don't want to throw anybody ever under a bup. Never they're doing they're doing work that's a lot of us don't have the the knowledge to do. And it's important to those of us that thought we wanted to be astronomers but didn't end up there. So in night, Clyde Tombaugh was inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame at the New Mexico Museum of Space History for his discovery of Pluto and other heavenly bodies. He died at his Los Cruces, New Mexico home, at the age of ninety, so he did not live to see his discovery bumped down to the list of dwarf planets UH. We are getting very close to what we hope will yield some really exciting information about Pluto UH. In July, of NASA's New Horizons probe is expected to fly by the dwarf planet UH, and so this will undoubtedly lead to new knowledge about Pluto, which still remains pretty mysterious to us compared to other parts of our Solar system because it is so far away. That will be the furthest out that we have sent this probe. Oh, I can't wait. I'm going to be that dufus that's like up at all hours of the night looking data to come in. I've been up at all hours of the night for a number of astronomical things for sure, Like oh, when the Mars were over landed, I was awake. I was texting my best friend like a fiend and kind of crying a little bit because I was I was up for the Mars rover. And then the next night was abe your shower. There's there's definitely been. That's one of the things that I think has just been awesome about the Internet is making it possible for just the people on the ground to get all the same things at the same time as the people in Michigan droll. Yeah, we had very little delay from the GPL people getting info to it being broadcast on television and the internet. If you have the the mission coverage channel is part of your cable package, which I'm lucky enough to have right well. And also now thanks to the Internet, when there is uh like a solar eclipse on the other side of the planet, you can watch it from your desk and though it not naytime where you are, with no risk to your eyesight. I just remember that being such a cautionary tale as a kid. There's gonna be an eclipse. Don't look, don't look at the sun. Uh. Astronomy it's the best thing. I would love to do more and more things on astronomy history because it's so wonderful and I just love science in general. So yeah, we'll see what the future holds for Pluto. Its history has been kind of interesting and unique in several ways in terms of our knowledge of it. Uh. And we'll see, maybe it will get reclassified yet again. Once the probe goes by, it go new horizons, find something new, Uh, then we'll discover it as some fabulous thing on it life now probably not it's not at least as we classify life so far, but we never knew. Hey, guess what what. I also have a couple of pieces of so. The first one is from our listener Tim, and Tim has a very cool job. He just British history at the Sorbonne in Paris. So Tim, I'll be visiting soon. I wish. Uh, yeah, that sounds dreamy to me. And he is writing to us about our podcasts on the Irish potato famine, and he says, where I grew up in the west of Ireland, the countryside is dotted with thousands of abandoned villages from this time, which were like cooperative farm hamlets of maybe ten or twelve dwellings. Often these have been totally reclaimed by the undergrowth and have no modern road connections. But if you tramp out into the field sometimes you notice that there's a cobbled path hidden in the grass beneath your feet, and then under the nearby brambles are old gateways and the remains of fireplaces and front doors. In old maps they have names and streets and village squares, and on new maps there's simply nothing. They're vanished. It really is quite sad to think of people who lived and loved here, perhaps dying in these houses or leaving on mass for their village to disappear from history. Sadder still is the fields around the villages U are invariably surrounded by a network of rigid, parallel lines in the landscape, the outlines of quote lazy bead potato fields where once the people of these villages pulled their rotting harvest out from the ground in devastation. I thought you might like that little personal detail that not many people notice. Uh, he's absolutely right, that's it's one of those things I never would have thought about. Uh. And not having you know, immediate access to that area it who would not have done something that I would have seen? And Pete manages it is interesting the way there are reclaims history on its own. Yeah. So I'm glad he pointed that out because people should know those were still there well and in a much less uh much less tragic sense. It reminds me that were there were train tracks that went near my house when I was a kid, and as shipping things by train became fallen out of favor, they were completely removed and within a couple of years you couldn't really tell unless you knew that they're been train tracks there. Yeah. I also have another piece of listener mail from our listener and and uh, it just made me so happy to read it that I wanted to share it. And Anne says, Hi, everybody at the podcast past and present, just wanted to thank you for being such a good company when I'm out walking. So far this year, we have logged three hundred and seventy five miles together, and you have helped me lose grace with this because it's serious. One pounds since last April. I haven't caught up on the present yet and I hope to never run out of podcast to sweat to Thanks again and keep up the great work. And you are awesome. That was why I just wanted to say that. Yeah, that was pretty cool. Uh, that's pretty inspiring. So thank you Anne for sharing that, because that's a really cool thing. Yeah, you should be lauded and jeered at all points. I love the idea of people listening to us while they're making healthy changes. Yeah, thoughtsome, do you listen to podcasts while you run? Never? I I have a hard time listening to podcast that's while I run. I do too. I can while I walk, for sure. I can absolutely while I'm walking or if I'm on the elliptical. Yeah, but when I around I need like running is my need. Yeah, there has to be music when I'm running. I do listen to a lot of podcasts when I'm traveling a long way, when I'm waiting for things. I have a confession to make, which is that I have self imposed a restriction where I'm not allowed to listen to podcasts while I'm driving because I get so absorbed in what is being discussed. I maybe don't make safe driving choices. I can't behind the wheel. Yeah, I do the opposite, where I get distracted by the fact that I'm driving mist I miss important things and I kind of go eat, what are you? What are they talking about? Now? So and you aren't awesome Again, I'll say it many times over. I'm thinking it constantly. If you want to share any historical info with us or your personal triumphs like AUNT, you can do so at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. Can also connect with us on Twitter at missed in History and at Facebook dot com slash history class stuff. We're on tumbler at missed in History dot tumbler dot com, and we're on Pinterest. If you would like to learn a little something more about what we talked about today, you can't. Go to our website and just type in Pluto in the search bar and you will get several different entries, one of which is why is Pluto no longer a planet? Which will go into a little bit greater detail about what we talked about today. If you want to research almost anything else you can think about, you can do that on our website, which is how stuff Works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com. Netflix streams TV shows and movies directly to your home, saving you time, money, and hassle. As a Netflix member, you can instantly watch TV episodes and movies streaming directly to your PC, Mac, or right to your TV with your Xbox three, sixty P S three or Nintendo we console, plus Apple devices, Kindle and Nook. Get a free thirty day trial membership. Go to www dot Netflix dot com and sign up now.

Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. And I'm wis. So when you were a kid, did you know what you wanted to be when you grew up. I wanted to be a millionaire and live in a mansion, okay, so, and then after that I wanted to be an author. So you're kind of on track. No, well, not for being a millionaire and an author. That's really hard to do. Um. I really thought for a long time as a child that I wanted to be an astronomer. Like I really thought that, uh. And I was obsessed with our World Book Encyclopedias and all of the various entries on the Solar System, and I would trace them and I would make these trifled pamphlets out of notepaper for each planet. But in the making of all of these pamphlets, which I published to my family, I would always get frustrated with Pluto because we just didn't have enough facts in the nineteen one edition of the World Book Encyclopedia to fill out one of my pamphlets. And I couldn't just keep tracing the circle over and over. You know what, if we had been on the fence about about bringing you to work with us, which we were not on a fence, but if we had been, this story would have been the cell Um. I also went through a phase where I did those on animals. I was really into publishing my own pamphlets as a kid. I don't know what that was about. You're also on track, Yeah, kind of, I said. I didn't become an astronomer except us, you know, an amateur that just enjoys it. Uh. But Pluto was always tricky because we never knew as much about it because of its distance, and it's relatively newer to humans in terms of it existing and being than other things, so we don't have as much research on it. We haven't known more now than certainly we did then even so, Yeah, but having not known that it was there until relatively recently, we haven't had as much time to gather information. Uh. There will be hopefully a lot more really soon. But so Pluto was discovered on February eighteenth and nineteen thirty, but of course it existed for a long time before then, and port Pluto was a planet, and then it was demoted and it was actually the only planet to have ever been discovered by an American. Just kind of an interesting point of note. I think it's also the only time that an astronomical announcement his drawn fury Well, yes, I can't think of any other fury inducing announcements about astronomy, you know, except for except for in the very very early days of astronomy, when you know, things like planets revolve around the Sun. Where yeah, well, I there have actually been a lot because any big discovery in astronomy often kind of shakes the sound of what came before it. So there there's been some outcry. We just didn't have as much media to cover it before. But it does make you wonder, how do we even think to look away out on the edge of our Solar system for this tiny little object that would have been very difficult to find, and how did scientists and researchers find it. So it starts with suspicion, Yes, yes, started thinking that it might be there, right Perceval Lowell, who was born in eighteen fifty five, it gets the credit for being the first person to suspect that Pluto was out there, passed the eight planets that were known to exist in the Solar System at that time, but he was never able to find conclusive evidence. And Lowell was a really interesting character. He had actually worked as a travel writer specializing in Asia, and as a foreign secretary before turning to astronomy. He had studied mathematics in college. He came from a very good family. Uh, and he's actually probably more famous for his belief that Mars was uh once inhabited by an alien species that had established agriculture and irrigation on the red planet. And those assertions may sound a little bit nutty to our ears today, but uh, the important thing is that Lowell's passion for astronomy and astronomical study actually led him to found the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. And he was not only interested in Mars. Decades before Lowell's interest in astronomy, other astronomers had noted an irregularity in the orbit of Uranus, which led them to the discovery of Neptune. So you're trying to imagine how this works. As planets are orbiting, the Sun's gravity is pulling on them the gravity of other planetary bodies. They're also on each other. So because of the way that Uranus was orbiting, they were pretty sure there was something else out there, but even figuring Neptune's influence into all the orbital equations for your and us that there were still discrepancies between the mathematical predictions of the orbit and the actual observed orbit that you could see. This led to the theory that there was yet another planet in the Solar System beyond your Iness and Neptune, and Lowell became obsessed with finding it. Lowell performed his own mathematical calculations in an effort to pinpoint the likely location of what was being called at the time, planet X, and in nineteen o five he really just kind of developed a concerted effort and he and the staff of his observatory began an extensive search for this planet X. Lowell published his book Memoir on a trans Neptunian Planet in nineteen fifteen, and you can actually read that online. We'll have the link in our show notes. Love reading things on on me too. And Lowell actually died in November of nineteen sixteen. He was sixty one at the time and he had not yet found his missing planet, but he left behind a large monetary legacy to continue the search. His widow initially disputed the endowment, but the search went on. The funding had been depleted by the legal battle, but it still was enough to keep this uh search for planet X going. And that's where we get to Clyde Tombaugh, who was a very important figure in all of this. Tomba was born on February four six and Street, or Illinois, and he became interested in astronomy after he got a telescope as a gift from his uncle. He became so interested in the telescope that after high school, when he couldn't afford college, he studied optics on his own and in n he built himself a homemade telescope. He made more telescopes after that first one, even grinding the lenses and mirrors for them himself, which is pretty impressive in my book, Like that, I can't afford a college education, I'm going to study and kind of give myself one. To the point that he could grind his own lenses for telescopes, it's pretty impressive. It was a delicate It's delicate work. Yeah, uh. And Tomba's story goes almost like wonderfully fairy tale wish fulfillment here. So using these telescopes, he had built. He studied the night sky, and he had made drawings of Mars and Jupiter as seen through those telescopes, and he sent them to the Lowell Observatory more for like feedback on you know, if he was on the right track, if he was seeing the right things, etcetera. But instead of getting feedback, they were so impressed with his work that they actually offered him a job in astronomy, which he had never formally studied. So that speaks a lot to his sort of scientific mind on its own that he could just magically procure a job in atronomy without an advanced dedication. He was hired in to help with searching for a planet, the mysterious planet X, which Perceval Lowell had suspected was out beyond Neptune. Tomba used a blank comparator, which is an instrument that optically superimposes photographic plates so it's like they're blinked from one to another and researchers can see tiny differences between the two. And he did this in an attempt to track down Lewel's planet X. And the blank comparitor is really amazing, like it's kind of these tube photographic plates and you look through what's almost like a microscope eye piece, and you literally just flip back and forth. And we're talking about a photograph taken through a telescope with like thousands of tiny dots on it that are all heavenly bodies, and someone with a very keen eye tries to see any variance between the two because they're taking you know, aimed at the same place, but a little time distance apart. And it's I mean, if you just think about staring at a sheet of dots on like a piece of paper and trying to see which ones are different on two, you can get a sense of how yeah, so just monotonous this could potentially be. And attention to detail you have to have, right, It's like looking at the differences between two cells of a hand drawn animated filmy, but instead of looking at a nice pretty picture, you're looking at a field of stars, just dots on a page. Uh. However, tom Baugh obviously keen on attention to details, since he had self educated to the point that he could do some pretty impressive things. Uh, he managed to find what they were looking for. His work paid off pretty quickly, and it was the following year that he found what was called at the time the ninth planet. Uh. He pinpointed Pluto on February eighth, nineteen thirty and he was only twenty four at the time. It was a pretty early age to be making a very large, significant scientific discovery, again with no formal training. I just I keep coming back to that because he did so many impressive things without having gone to graduate school to get a PhD in astronomy. Yeah, well that happened later, but yes, So the payoff for all this, apart from the fact that he discovered a planet, is that he received the Jackson Guilt metal in gift from the Royal Astronomical Society. But even more importantly, he got a scholarship to the University of Kansas. He earned his bachelor's and continued to work at Lowell both during and after his studies. He also earned his master's in nineteen thirty nine. Tombau worked at Lowell for fourteen years altogether, and he discovered numerous heavenly bodies while doing his research there, including star clusters, comets, and galaxies. But back to Pluto, because I feel like tombos story is another one that could be another podcast on its own. He had a very interesting life. But the month after the discovery was made, they announced that they had found this heavenly body to the public on March thirteenth of nineteen thirty, which was also Percival Lowell's birthday, uh and on my onet of that year, after the public had submitted suggestions for the naming of this new heavenly body, the name was chosen, and it was allegedly submitted by an eleven year old girl from England, and it was Pluto. And Pluto is of course the Roman name for the Greek god of the underworld. But one of the significant things about choosing Pluto is that the symbol for Pluto includes representations of the letter P and the letter L, which were the initials for Percival Lowell. So it's kind of a nice way to name it on his behalf without naming it directly after him. So let's talk a little bit about this body that they found. It is extremely farrowing five point nine billion kilometers, which is three point seven billion miles from the Sun, and its diameter is two thousand, three d forty kilometers, which is uh one thousand, four hundred and fifty four miles, So it's less than one fifth the size of Earth, and it's actually smaller than our moon. It's also extremely cold. The surface temperature is around minus three seventy five degrees fahrenheit, which is minus to see us. Pluto solar year, which is the time it takes to travel around the Sun, takes the equivalent of two hundred and forty eight Earth years. It's circumference at the equator is four thousand, four hundred thirty seven point seven miles, which is seven thousand, two hundred thirty one point nine kilometers. And then we get to the moons, which are actually pretty interesting. So Pluto has five moons that we know of so far, Sharon Nick's Hydra P four and P five, and Sharon was discovered in It's about half the size of Pluto. And over the years a lot of astronomers have theorized that Pluto Sharon is actually a binary system, so Sharon doesn't revolve around Pluto. They're actually revolving around each other with a gravity gravitational point fixed between them. Uh. Just an interesting thing, and that is why there is a Jonathan Coulton song called Year My Moon that is about that very thing. Nick's and Hydra were discovered in two thousand five. P four was discovered in two thousand one, and P five was discovered in two thousand twelve. Scientists believe that the moons of Pluto were formed when the dwarf planet collided with another planet sized object. According to Mark show Walter, who is of the Seti Institute in Mountain View, California, he has this great quote, which is the Moon's form a series of neatly nested orbits, a bit like Russian dolls. Just a lovely image. Pluto's elongated orbit is also tilted in relation to the other planets. It actually passes inside the orbit of Neptune as it makes its way around the Sun. And then we get to the controversy. Uh, it's kind of sad. Pluto is the only celestial body ever to lose its status as a planet, so it's the only one that's ever been demoted, which is also a theme in the Jonathan Colton. In two thousand six, Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet and given the number designation of one thirty four DASH three forty. Because they're continued to be discoveries of heavenly bodies at the edge of the Solar System, and some of them were actually bigger than Pluto. It became clear that they needed to take another look at Pluto's status as a planet, so the International Astronomical Union created a definition of the word planet in two thousand six involving three criteria. UH. One, it has to be an object in space that orbits the Sun too, and this is obviously for planets in our Solar System. To it has to be a nearly round, rigid body. And three, it needs to clear the neighborhood around its orbit. But because Pluto orbits along the inner edge of the Kuiper Belt, UH, it doesn't meet the third criteria. Astronomers have discovered and identified more than one thousand other items in the Kuiper Belt that are really similar to Pluto and sometimes come near it, so it doesn't really meet that third criterion. Uh. The only rule, however, for dwarf planets is that they have to be round, so Pluto can be classified that way. And it's all kind of started because of a display that was going on that Neil de grass Tyson often gets the heat for at the Hayden Planetarium, where they just kind of quietly changed it up in their displays. I think in the year two thousand and then it kind of started getting a little bit of groundswell of discussion, and then this officially happened, and so Nil dess Tyson is often kind of labeled as the man who devoted Pluto, but he really wasn't. There was this whole other vote and discussion going on amongst other astronomers. It's just not through Neil de grass Tyson under a bus. That's just I don't want to throw any scientists under the bus. I don't want to throw anybody ever under a bup. Never they're doing they're doing work that's a lot of us don't have the the knowledge to do. And it's important to those of us that thought we wanted to be astronomers but didn't end up there. So in night, Clyde Tombaugh was inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame at the New Mexico Museum of Space History for his discovery of Pluto and other heavenly bodies. He died at his Los Cruces, New Mexico home, at the age of ninety, so he did not live to see his discovery bumped down to the list of dwarf planets UH. We are getting very close to what we hope will yield some really exciting information about Pluto UH. In July, of NASA's New Horizons probe is expected to fly by the dwarf planet UH, and so this will undoubtedly lead to new knowledge about Pluto, which still remains pretty mysterious to us compared to other parts of our Solar system because it is so far away. That will be the furthest out that we have sent this probe. Oh, I can't wait. I'm going to be that dufus that's like up at all hours of the night looking data to come in. I've been up at all hours of the night for a number of astronomical things for sure, Like oh, when the Mars were over landed, I was awake. I was texting my best friend like a fiend and kind of crying a little bit because I was I was up for the Mars rover. And then the next night was abe your shower. There's there's definitely been. That's one of the things that I think has just been awesome about the Internet is making it possible for just the people on the ground to get all the same things at the same time as the people in Michigan droll. Yeah, we had very little delay from the GPL people getting info to it being broadcast on television and the internet. If you have the the mission coverage channel is part of your cable package, which I'm lucky enough to have right well. And also now thanks to the Internet, when there is uh like a solar eclipse on the other side of the planet, you can watch it from your desk and though it not naytime where you are, with no risk to your eyesight. I just remember that being such a cautionary tale as a kid. There's gonna be an eclipse. Don't look, don't look at the sun. Uh. Astronomy it's the best thing. I would love to do more and more things on astronomy history because it's so wonderful and I just love science in general. So yeah, we'll see what the future holds for Pluto. Its history has been kind of interesting and unique in several ways in terms of our knowledge of it. Uh. And we'll see, maybe it will get reclassified yet again. Once the probe goes by, it go new horizons, find something new, Uh, then we'll discover it as some fabulous thing on it life now probably not it's not at least as we classify life so far, but we never knew. Hey, guess what what. I also have a couple of pieces of so. The first one is from our listener Tim, and Tim has a very cool job. He just British history at the Sorbonne in Paris. So Tim, I'll be visiting soon. I wish. Uh, yeah, that sounds dreamy to me. And he is writing to us about our podcasts on the Irish potato famine, and he says, where I grew up in the west of Ireland, the countryside is dotted with thousands of abandoned villages from this time, which were like cooperative farm hamlets of maybe ten or twelve dwellings. Often these have been totally reclaimed by the undergrowth and have no modern road connections. But if you tramp out into the field sometimes you notice that there's a cobbled path hidden in the grass beneath your feet, and then under the nearby brambles are old gateways and the remains of fireplaces and front doors. In old maps they have names and streets and village squares, and on new maps there's simply nothing. They're vanished. It really is quite sad to think of people who lived and loved here, perhaps dying in these houses or leaving on mass for their village to disappear from history. Sadder still is the fields around the villages U are invariably surrounded by a network of rigid, parallel lines in the landscape, the outlines of quote lazy bead potato fields where once the people of these villages pulled their rotting harvest out from the ground in devastation. I thought you might like that little personal detail that not many people notice. Uh, he's absolutely right, that's it's one of those things I never would have thought about. Uh. And not having you know, immediate access to that area it who would not have done something that I would have seen? And Pete manages it is interesting the way there are reclaims history on its own. Yeah. So I'm glad he pointed that out because people should know those were still there well and in a much less uh much less tragic sense. It reminds me that were there were train tracks that went near my house when I was a kid, and as shipping things by train became fallen out of favor, they were completely removed and within a couple of years you couldn't really tell unless you knew that they're been train tracks there. Yeah. I also have another piece of listener mail from our listener and and uh, it just made me so happy to read it that I wanted to share it. And Anne says, Hi, everybody at the podcast past and present, just wanted to thank you for being such a good company when I'm out walking. So far this year, we have logged three hundred and seventy five miles together, and you have helped me lose grace with this because it's serious. One pounds since last April. I haven't caught up on the present yet and I hope to never run out of podcast to sweat to Thanks again and keep up the great work. And you are awesome. That was why I just wanted to say that. Yeah, that was pretty cool. Uh, that's pretty inspiring. So thank you Anne for sharing that, because that's a really cool thing. Yeah, you should be lauded and jeered at all points. I love the idea of people listening to us while they're making healthy changes. Yeah, thoughtsome, do you listen to podcasts while you run? Never? I I have a hard time listening to podcast that's while I run. I do too. I can while I walk, for sure. I can absolutely while I'm walking or if I'm on the elliptical. Yeah, but when I around I need like running is my need. Yeah, there has to be music when I'm running. I do listen to a lot of podcasts when I'm traveling a long way, when I'm waiting for things. I have a confession to make, which is that I have self imposed a restriction where I'm not allowed to listen to podcasts while I'm driving because I get so absorbed in what is being discussed. I maybe don't make safe driving choices. I can't behind the wheel. Yeah, I do the opposite, where I get distracted by the fact that I'm driving mist I miss important things and I kind of go eat, what are you? What are they talking about? Now? So and you aren't awesome Again, I'll say it many times over. I'm thinking it constantly. If you want to share any historical info with us or your personal triumphs like AUNT, you can do so at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. Can also connect with us on Twitter at missed in History and at Facebook dot com slash history class stuff. We're on tumbler at missed in History dot tumbler dot com, and we're on Pinterest. If you would like to learn a little something more about what we talked about today, you can't. Go to our website and just type in Pluto in the search bar and you will get several different entries, one of which is why is Pluto no longer a planet? Which will go into a little bit greater detail about what we talked about today. If you want to research almost anything else you can think about, you can do that on our website, which is how stuff Works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com. Netflix streams TV shows and movies directly to your home, saving you time, money, and hassle. As a Netflix member, you can instantly watch TV episodes and movies streaming directly to your PC, Mac, or right to your TV with your Xbox three, sixty P S three or Nintendo we console, plus Apple devices, Kindle and Nook. Get a free thirty day trial membership. Go to www dot Netflix dot com and sign up now.