The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [140]
(NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith [STScI], and the Hubble Heritage
Team [STScI/AURA])
Besides his beloved Mars, Percival Lowell had another passion: searching for “Planet X” beyond Neptune. Analyzing discrepancies in the motions of Uranus and Neptune, he had come up with a predicted location for the missing planet, in the farthest realm of the comets some four billion miles from the Sun. The observatory's new director, Vesto M. Slipher, continued to administer the search. In 1930 a newly hired staff member, twenty-four-year-old Clyde Tombaugh, at last made the discovery. The new planet was named Pluto. The first two letters—PL —honored the man who initiated the planetary hunt. In 2006 Pluto, always considered an oddball because of its small size and eccentric orbit, was demoted to dwarf planet (a type of solar system body now called a plutoid), no longer one of the pantheon of classical planets.
Though detecting the swift speeds of the spiral nebulae was his most heralded accomplishment, Slipher made other notable discoveries during his long career. He played an important role in finding that interstellar space was not pristine but rather littered with faint wisps of gas and dust; connected certain features of auroras with solar activity; and accurately determined a number of planetary rotations. Slipher served as the Lowell Observatory's director for thirty-eight years. Esteemed by the townspeople, he prospered financially by shrewdly investing in ranch property, helping establish Flagstaff's community hotel, and running a retail furniture store at one point. His retirement in 1954 made the front page of the Arizona Daily Sun. He died in Flagstaff in 1969, three days before his ninety-fourth birthday.
After Lowell's death, the Lowell Observatory was often strapped for cash but survived, largely due to the astute administration (and added donations) of trustee Roger Lowell Putnam, Lowell's brother-in-law. Even then, the complex was surely headed for closure at the end of World War II, until the influx of federal funds into U.S. scientific research suddenly revived its resources. Today it continues its mission as a private, nonprofit education and research organization, carrying out studies on the solar system, comets, extrasolar planets, solar activity, and stars.
If Heber Curtis had stayed at the Lick Observatory, he might have had a chance of gathering the decisive proof that the spirals were island universes. But it's questionable that he would have extended his research to proving the cosmos was expanding. He was uncomfortable with Einstein's theory and participated in solar-eclipse tests hoping to prove general relativity wrong. In the 1930s he told Harlow Shapley that he wasn't keen on where the research on spiral nebulae was going: “I have so little confidence in the theories of Lemaître, Eddington, et al. in this field that I shall follow the safe if not sane course of just sitting tight.” After spending ten years as director of the Allegheny Observatory, Curtis came full circle and finished up his career in the 1930s at the University of Michigan, where he had begun his undergraduate studies in the classics. He had hopes for erecting a big reflector for Michigan's use but the Depression intervened, dashing his plans. Curtis died in 1942. He always considered his work on the nebulae as his greatest contribution to astronomy.
The Lick Observatory continues to be owned and operated by the University of California. More than twenty families currently reside on the mountain, with the town maintaining its own police department and post office. While the Crossley reflector remains in operation for professional research, the Lick 36-inch refractor is primarily a popular attraction, used at scheduled times for public viewing. Since the 1920s, the observatory grounds have expanded to include nine research-grade telescopes, the largest being the 3-meter (120-inch) Shane Reflector.
George Ellery Hale died at the age of sixty-nine in 1938, a decade after he launched an endeavor