Dear PT5
How are you doing? I would have written soon but I’ve been hunting planet hunters hunting Planet X. Let me explain.
The way you find planets is by looking where they aren’t. The orbits of other, smaller objects nearby will be altered by a larger body passing by. Like wakes on a boat, or an asteroid popping by for a partial orbit of the Earth.
This process has always tickled my artistic brain in a way math(s) never does. I like the elegance of it, the whimsy. It’s a bit ‘do or do not, there is try, also look at that planet it’s a bit wobbly let’s investigate further!’ You have to respect that. You also, if you’re me, have to look at that pattern and see how well it works with both horror fiction and history. True horror, as the man once said, is seeing something approach. True history is made of tiny lives and choices, each illuminated as something bigger brushes past them.
This one’s a bit epic, PT5, so today, in Part 1, we’re going to talk about the canals on Mars and what happened when they were un-discovered.
Lowell and Schiaparelli’s Canals
Percival Lowell is one of the patron saints of second chances. An American businessman, author, mathematician and astronomer at a time where all those professions were spelt ‘Adventurer’ or ‘Spy’ and almost none of them could be spelt ‘Criminal’. Lowell wasn’t without blame, he ran a cotton mill and I’ve spent enough time in Yorkshire to know what conditions tended to be like in those places. But he was, unusually for his time, something of a polyglot. He studied math(s) at Harvard and graduated with distinction, he spent a decade traveling extensively in Asia. He wrote multiple well-regarded books, was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and on moving back to the US in 1893, decided to pursue a career in astronomy. He was particular inspired by the work of Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli who had recorded multiple ‘canals’ on Mars and by La planète Mars by Camille Flammarion which, wonderfully, you can still get. He was also, purportedly, inspired to pick up the baton of Martian study by the news that Schiaparelli’s eyesight was failing.
Percival Lowell
It’s very compelling to view Lowell as an ‘adventurer’ in the same way Indiana Jones is an archaeologist. He wrote a lot of books, travelled aboard for a decade and advised at least one diplomatic mission to the US before retiring to set up his own observatory. The fact he did this is impressive enough. The fact he purportedly did this when he found Schiaparelli’s eyesight was failing? That takes my breath away. The baton of history passed along. Percival Lowell, the man in the right place at the right time with the right money and the right idea.
The canals on Mars as drawn by Lowell. Image from WikiCommons
He established the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona Territory and observed Mars for fifteen years. He made countless complex, detailed drawings of the surface. He published three books, Mars, Mars and Its Canals and Mars as the Abode of Life. He detailed ‘oases’, ‘canals’, ‘non-natural features’ of the world. He was a passionate believer in Mars as a living world and the canals as artificial structures, as proof of Life. It’s a beautiful idea and it’s born in a mistake.
The Italian word ‘canali’ translates as ‘Channels’ which is still exciting but not quite as Jeff Wayne levels of exciting. While Lowell was a passionate advocate for Schiaparelli’s beliefs, other scientists were more sceptical. The structures Lowell observed couldn’t be replicated and in 1909, outstanding new photos were taken of the surface that showed the canals just weren’t there. At the same time, science caught up to art and in short order the Martian surface was found to be colder than Lowell estimated, the pressure too low for liquid water and water to be absent from the atmosphere entirely. Lowell had been systematically discredited. Schiaparelli’s canali were just optical illusions. No water flowed on Mars. Lowell was wrong.
Elizabeth Langdon Williams calls the shot, Clyde Tombaugh Hits The Spot
Clyde Tombaugh
In 1924, Clyde Tombaugh dug a pit so he could see the sky better. 24 feet long, 8 feet deep, 7 feet wide. Constant air temperature, no currents and, conveniently, a root cellar and emergency shelter for the Tombaugh family. He seated his telescopes in the pit, and sent his drawings of Jupiter and Mars to the Lowell Observatory. They offered him a job. Clyde would work there for over a decade. He’d find a planet there too.
Planet X was the planet believed to exist beyond Neptune. Lowell, using rock solid science, deduced that the orbits of Uranus and Neptune were slightly displaced in a manner that suggested a large body was exerting a gravitational pull on them. He did the most sensible, enlightened thing he could: hired a team of people more skilled than her was to do the work. Lowell placed MIT graduate Elizabeth Langdon Williams in charge.
Elizabeth Langdon Williams
One of MIT’s earliest female graduates, Williams and her team calculated the regions of the sky that Planet X could be in. Clyde Tombaugh then took photographs of the same section of sky several nights apart and checked them using a blink comparator to see whether anything had moved. Blink comparators were the astronomical equivalent of the goggles at the opticians where they keep putting lenses in until you can’t see the fourth ‘E’ down anymore. The idea was very simple and very effective: if something moved it was nearby. On February 18th 1930, Tombaugh found something that moved on two of the January plates. Here it is:
They made the call: Planet X had been found.
At least, that’s what it looked like.
Next time, a planet rises! A planet falls! A planet rises! Probably! And why ‘the man who killed Pluto’ might be instrumental in finding Planet X
References
Percival Lowell
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percival_Lowell
- https://lowell.edu/
- https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=percival+lowell&submit_search=Go%21
Giovanni Schiaparelli
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Schiaparelli
- https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1997JBAA..107…11S
Camille Flamarrion
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camille_Flammarion
- https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/8763
Elizabeth Langdon Williams
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Langdon_Williams
- https://collectionslowellobservatory.omeka.net/exhibits/show/women-in-astronomy/elizabeth-langdon-williams
Clyde Tombaugh
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clyde_Tombaugh
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Clyde-Tombaugh
The Slide
- https://slideplayer.com/slide/4943296/