A NEW PLANET

Hokitika Guardian, 19 March 1930, Page 7

A NEW PLANET

The discovery of a planet belong ing to the solar system, having it. orbit far beyond that of Neptune, i

as romantic as it is unoxpecte there is still plenty of work for t

astronomers to do in oonnectioi with the solar system, because wi known very little of it beyond it general structure, but we bad sup posed that the tale of the inembei of the system was complete, excop possibly, for the discovery of smai satellites and a planetoid or two Vet there has now come from th, Lowell Observatory the positive assertion that away in space, be yotul the little speck of light that i Neptune—the third of the planets ii magnitude—still another globe lik

onrs, and apparently eompiirabk with ours in size, makes its pieces: round the sun through the ages. The discovery is to the credit of tin observatory established in 1894 a* flagstaff, in the clear air of Arizona seven thousand feet above sea level Professor Lowell’s object in estab lishing this post was primarily P make a telescopic study of the plant l Mars, but the work of the observa tory lias gone far beyond the first plan. It may seem strange to the. uninformed that a major inembc

of the solar system could remain s f long hidden from view and even un suspected, but if we recall the ro •nance of the discoverey of Neptum the fact that a distant planet re m nined undiscovered is not so as tor,

isliing. The earth is roughly 93 million m>.o from the sun. Saturn, the most distan of the planets known to the ancients is nearly ten times as far from Mi centre, ami its brilliance is due parti; to the fact that it is nearly ten time as big as the earth and partly to it remarkable system of rings, se t be voml Saturn is Uranus, more 'bar. fom times as big as'the earth, but be anise it is .twenty times as far from

the sun it appears as a mere spec of light and remained undiscovered indeed, until 1781.

Beyond Uranus, again, is Neptune nearly four times the size of the earth but thirty times as from from’the sun Now Neptune would perhaps have remained unidentified if tfie astronom ers had not been puzzled by their fail ure to predict the orbit of Uranus. Thai planet refused to behave according to the laws obeyed by all the othe; olnnets, and the astronomers were forced to the conclusion that it was

being pulled out of its proper pat-1, by some considerable heavenly body whose existence bad not been suspected. Almost simultaneously, J. C. Adams a Cambridge student, and Leverrier, a French astronomer, worked out the elements of this unknown body, and calculations led soon to the discovery of the planet called Neptune. S little fight from it reaches the earth that it was classed as a star of tlw

"iglitli magnitude. It moves around the sun once in 165 years, which means that a single Neptune summer, if there is such a season, lasts forty yea rs.

Now if there is indeed a planet beyond Neptune it must be at least lour Thousand million miles away and the light of the sun, which reaches us in about eight minutes, tabes an hour to reach it. Its yea* is likely to bo three hundred oif our vears. Tt is relatively so small and it is so far away that it could no+

have been discovered by any but modern methods, and when the story is published we shall probably find 'bat its discovery was due to the patient examination and comparison of the photographic charts of tlm heavens on which the great observatories of the world have been cooperating in recent years.