News-Record.com

Few people ever get to meet a "discover," a person who find objects or theories that change the way humans view life and the universe.

In 1989, a group of Wake Forest University students met and listened to Clyde Tombaugh, then 83.

Fifty-nine years earlier, Tombaugh discovered the planet Pluto, the smallest and ninth planet in the solar system.

The Wake Forest lecture visit came to mind last week when NASA sent the New Horizons spacecraft speeding 36,000 miles-an-hour on a 9-year voyage to Pluto, which is 5.9 billion miles from the Sun (compared to 93 million between the Sun and Earth).

Tombaugh discovered Pluto as a 24-year-old astronomer who had not yet earned a college degree. He was working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz.

"It's kind of brutal, I tell you," Tombaugh said in an interview at Wake Forest, recalling those cold desert nights at Lowell photographing 15 million objects in sky. "You work in a cold, unheated dome. You are sitting still... You are not not exercising. You can get cold very fast."

But the uncomfort paid off on the night of Feb. 13, 1930. He spotted a speck of light amid millions of other objects. Tombaugh's photos showed the speck was moving while the other objects - stars - stayed still.

That tipped Tombaugh that he had found the elusive "Planet X" that scientists had long believed existed. The tiny speck was rotating around the Sun. Pluto takes 248 years to complete the rotation)

"In one second I knew I had gone from an obscure country farm boy to a famous world astronemer," he said in Winston-Salem, laughing.

Lowell Observatory astronomers voted to name Tombaugh's discovery Pluto.

No,Tombaugh said the honoree wasn't the Walt Disney cartoon dog, Pluto. By coincidence, the dog made his screen debut in 1930. The staff was saluting the mythological brother of Jupiter and Neptune, for whom planets had already been named.

According to his biographiers, Tombaugh was one of those gifted youth in a pre-TV age who at 12 developed a fierce interest in outer space. He explored the skies outside his parents farm in Kansas using a Sear Roebuck telescope. He later built a more powerful scope using parts from his father's 1910 Buick, from a lawn mower and a straw spreader.''

He made drawings of what he saw through the scope and sent them to the Lowell Observatory. The staff was so impressed they hired him.

After his Pluto discovery, he went on to earn degrees from the University of Kansas and a Ph.D. from Northern Arizona Univeristy. He worked at Lowell until World War II. After the war, he spent the rest of his career teaching at New Mexico State University, where he founded the astronomy program.

Tombaugh continued probing the skies and discovered a comet and other objects. In 1992, some scientists challenged his discovery of Pluto, arguing it might be a comet or some other space object instead of a planet. But International Astronomical Union ruled that Pluto was a planet.

Tombaugh said he still had the telescope he made with car and lawn mower parts and "use it a quiet a good deal" in his back yard.

He died Jan. 17, 1997 at 90. At last week's New Horizons launch to Pluto, his widow, Patricia Tombaugh, was present. The spacecraft also carried some of Tombaugh's ashes.

If he thought it was cold in Arizona in 1930, wait till he arrives in spirit near Pluto in 2015. The days there are long - one day equals six earth days and 9 hours - and temperatures average 382 degrees below freezing.