Cultural Aspect: The discovery of the ninth planet

In the XX century a new telescope was made, but people didn’t know that this telescope was going to serve us find a new planet, the ninth one.

In 1906, Percival Lowell, a wealthy Bostonian started an extensive project in search of a possible ninth planet, which he termed "Planet X".  Lowell and his observatory conducted his search until his death in 1916, but to no avail. Unknown to Lowell, on March 19, 1915, his observatory had captured two faint images of Pluto, but did not recognize them for what they were.

On the year 1929 Clyde Tombaugh Flagstaff  and spent ten months photographing the sky and carefully viewing the resulting plates. If a planet was captured, it would show a slight displacement of position between two plates photographed a week apart. Percival Lowell had started out inspecting his plates with a magnifying glass, but Tombaugh used a blink comparator, which allowed him to view two plates simultaneously and look for any movement that would betray the existence of a planet.

By September, Tombaugh decided that Lowell's predictions had little use, and that he would conduct a thorough search of the sky. In January, he exposed two plates of an area in the constellation Gemini. It was a few weeks before he could check them, and on February 18, 1930, Tombaugh was comparing the two plates when he saw a star shifting position. It was fainter than expected, but he knew he had finally found Planet X.

The observatory followed the object for a few weeks to confirm it was Lowell's planet. The discovery of the ninth planet was then officially announced on March 13, 1930

Mrs. Constance Lowell suggested Zeus for the name of this new planet, but then decided that "the gods of the past are worn out." She tried Percival, after her husband, then Constance, after herself, but these were politely turned down, or ignored altogether. Many others suggested Percival or Lowell, but the astronomers at the observatory were in favor of a classical name.

The name Pluto was first suggested by Venetia Burney, an 11-year-old schoolgirl in Oxford, England. She had been studying Greek and Roman mythology in school, and felt that the planet, being far from the Sun in its own dark world, should be named after the Greek god of the underworld. The observatory officially proposed the name Pluto on May 1, 1930, with the symbol being PL, the first two letters of Pluto and coincidentally the initials of Percival Lowell.