The planet that never was

摘要

It is not often that people assert they have committed a capital crime. The confessed 'felon in this case is astronomer Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technol-ogy in Pasadena. In How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming, he describes how his discovery of another icy body challenged Pluto's status as a planet. The first seed of Pluto's undoing was sown on 13 March 1930, the day its discovery was announced by the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. Clyde Tombaugh, a Kan-sas farm-boy-turned-astronomer, claimed to have found the mythical Planet X predicted by his predecessor Percival Lowell. Or had he?