March 13th 1930 Pluto discovered

 On March 13^th 1930 the announcement of a new planet was made, Pluto became the ninth planet of the solar system.

The search for the planet stared after the discovery of the planet Neptune in 1846. After about 40 years it appeared as if something was gravitationally pulling or slightly tugging on Neptune hence the search.

It was discovered at Flagstaff observatory I America which had been constructed in 1896 by Percival Lowell to look for this new planet. Lowell would die in 1916 so would not see the discovery. The search continued after his death and in 1925 another smaller observatory was built at Flagstaff. Today this is known as the Pluto discovery observatory.

In 1929 a young astronomer called Clyde Tombaugh was tasked with looking for this new planet. On January 23^rd and 29^th 1930 photographs were taken that suggested that something had been discovered. It was not until March 13^th 1930 that the discovery was confirmed. At the time of its discovery Pluto was in the constellation of Gemini the Twins.

The name for the new planet was suggested not by an astronomer but by an 11 year old girl from England, Venetia Burney. She thought that Pluto was a good name as the planet was so far from the Sun and that Pluto was the god of darkness, it seemed very apt.

Since its discovery Pluto had set astronomers with many problems, it is very small and even Clyde Tombaugh was not convinced it was a planet. When looking for this new planet it appears that Pluto just happened to be in the right place but was not the object astronomers were looking for.

Pluto, is so from the Sun that it takes over 247 years to orbit the Sun once. It is so small that not even the Hubble Space Telescope could tell astronomers much about this distant world.

In 2003 an object called Eris was discovered which was also a very long way from the Sun. Eris was roughly the same size as Pluto and was classified as a dwarf planet. This meant that in 2006 astronomers decided that Pluto should be downgraded from a planet to a dwarf planet.

In 2015 the New Horizons space craft flew by Pluto and revealed a very amazing and bizarre world. It was nothing like what astronomers had imagined.

Is there a planet 9 waiting to be discovered out there somewhere far beyond Pluto? Some astronomers suspect there is.

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