Our resident astronomy expert Col Maybury, of Boolaroo, holds a fascination for Pluto.
"It is the only planet [well, dwarf planet] that had many of its secrets exposed in living memory," Col said.
To Col, Pluto is no dwarf. It will always be a planet and a giant of human history.
So sit back, imagine you're in a planetarium of the mind and enjoy Col's account of the mysterious planetary object that makes us think of pluto pups and Pluto the dog.
Over to you, Col: Where in the name of hell [see below] is mankind headed? From the African plains of 250,000 years ago to the outer reaches of our solar system. We Homo sapiens, the intelligent ape with dexterous hands, surges forward into the unknown.
The story of Pluto is like a great odyssey, straight out of Greek mythology. It is an illustration of the incredible speed at which our technological world is changing.
It began when an intrepid, self-taught and skillful Kansas farm boy, 24-year-old Clyde Tombaugh, journeyed by train to Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona with his homemade telescope, whose mirror he had ground with control gears from his father's milking machine. The year was 1930.
He presented it to Percival Lowell, who was so impressed he hired Clyde for little to no pay to search for the suspected Planet X.
Perturbations or minuscule motions in the orbit of Neptune had alerted Lowell to its presence. Taking astrophotos at night and using a click comparator by day, Tombaugh discovered the elusive and tiny body far out in the distant cold.
The claim is that the telescope director at his desk heard the click comparator stop and said to his visitor: "I hope young Tombaugh is not goofing off".
Then came the sound of running feet. Tombaugh burst through the door shouting: "I have found Planet X".
This made earth-shattering news. An English school girl suggested the name Pluto, after the Roman god of the underworld [also known as hell].
It was only a dot in even the largest telescopes. Later discoveries revealed it had a moon, named Charon, and that Pluto had a thin and tenuous atmosphere.
Through the lens, Pluto passed in front of a distant star. The star's light dimmed and then disappeared. Then it reappeared dimly before brilliantly returning to normal. Pluto, it turned out, had an atmosphere.
Sadly it was decided in 2006 that Pluto could no longer be designated a planet. It was relegated to dwarf planet status and removed from the listing of solar planets to the chagrin and protests of millions across the world.
Finally NASA sent a spacecraft, called New Horizons, on a survey trip to pass by, photograph and analyse this supposed icy hunk of rock way out there in the netherworld. What a shock they got.
After a nine-year flight, New Horizons took crystal clear pictures of a planet that was not at all a cold hunk of icy rock but a living, changing entity.
PIuto had a huge heart-shaped glacier filling a giant surface hollow. It was called Tombaugh Regio after Clyde Tombaugh, the king of Pluto.
The hollow was filled with nitrogen ice but heated from below. The heat created an ever-evolving surface that smoothed out meteorite- and asteroid-impact craters that peppered the exposed rock nearby.
Its ice mountains rose 3500 metres - higher than Mount Kosciuszko. The atmosphere of methane surrounding Pluto is striated and layered.
It has five moons, the largest being Charon which was probably formed from a huge asteroid impact eons ago.
The debris from the impact made a gigantic crater that filled with nitrogen ice. This glacial debris congealed into Charon, named after the boatman who ferries lost souls to hell.
All told, this lovely miniature planet shows all the signs of scientific wonder, equal to or exceeding the present well known planets of our solar system.
Pluto is a scientific treasure trove of planetary evolution that elicits much more research and study. It sheds light on existence - a life unknown to us earthlings. It's a jewel of a mini-planet, way out there.
Distant Worlds
Clyde Tombaugh died in 1997. His ashes were placed in an aluminum capsule in the New Horizons spacecraft before its departure in 2006.
New Horizons came within 7500 miles of Pluto in 2015 and is now more than four billion miles away from Earth - making this the longest post-mortem flight ever recorded.
New Horizons, among the fastest machines ever created by man, sped on at 60,000 km/h, further out into the Kuiper Belt and the dim dark cold.
It still travels on and we wait for further discoveries of worlds beyond our comprehension.
The story of Pluto goes from a 24-year-old Kansas farm boy to a speeding craft of analytical brilliance in less than 100 years.
- topics@newcastleherald.com.au
