Re: Likeliness of Pluto discovery

From: Dan Drake (dd_at_dandrake.com)
Date: 02/27/05 

Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2005 00:29:34 GMT

On Sat, 26 Feb 2005 16:58:28 UTC, "doktorf" <doktorf@tiac.net> wrote:

> Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto by tusing a blink microscope to examine
> photographic plates. The discovery was not only probable, but
> inevitable with the only variable being the date. 1930 is a pretty
> early date to find a tiny KBO, but it was bound to be spotted sooner or
> later.
> There are a couple of things about Pluto. The original estimates of
> its size were hugely magnified. If you look in older text books , it is
> generally given a mass around that of Mars.

The story they told us about the discovery of Pluto when I was a kid was
that it was found in a deliberate search for the next planet (hence the
use of the blink microscope), based on the same kind of orbital-deviation
calculations that had led to the official discovery of Neptune.

Perhaps if those Pluto-finding calculations were re-run today, in cold
blood and with suitable error bars, it would turn out that they had no
validity like 0 significant figures, and the discovery might as well have
been by pure luck. Does anybody *know* of such an analysis? Or was the
story that was current 20-30 years after the discovery just BS?
(Apparently Neptune's orbit is still less clearly known than one would
like; hence the interest in Galileo's apparent extremely early data
point.)

Anyway, if they *thought* they'd found Pluto by gravitational effects, it
would be natural to assume that it was big enough to have some effect.
And assumptions die embarrassingly hard in science (see also Millikan). 

-- 
dd@dandrake.com
http://www.dandrake.com/

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