They were a cautious bunch, V.M. Slipher especially. Years of association with Percival Lowell’s brand of lunacy can leave you a little gun-shy.
But the “object” they’ve found is “one apparently fulfilling Lowell’s theoretical findings”. In other words, this strange, tiny body is just where it’s supposed to be — going by Percival Lowell’s decades of residual calculations. And it’s definitely “trans-Neptunian” — that is, it’s out past Neptune, and it’s retrograding. And the only thing that retrogrades is something in orbit around the sun.
So what is it, if not a planet?
April 4, 2010 at 8:18 am
[…] a “planet”. Notice that while the cautious astronomers at Lowell Observatory hadn’t declared the object a planet themselves, the public did it for […]
May 1, 2010 at 8:53 pm
[…] of the object, hoping to solve their conundrum. They never did. And in the end, of course, they didn’t call it Planet X when they finally announced it. They just called it a “solar […]
May 12, 2010 at 11:18 am
[…] has been writing about the Planet X story lately; in his most recent post, Darin points out that in the initial announcement in 1930, V.M. Slipher went out of his way to credit Percival Lowell for leading the way to the […]