(Image: Springer)
“YOUNG man, I am afraid you are wasting your time – if there were any more planets they would have been found long before this,” Clyde Tombaugh was told in 1929. This was both right and wrong: a year later Tombaugh discovered Pluto but, famously, it was demoted to “dwarf planet” status in 2006.
The story of the discovery of Pluto and its fellow Kuiper belt objects is told here by science writer and New Scientist contributor Govert Schilling. He travelled the world to interview all the surviving protagonists, including Venetia Burney – the 11-year-old who suggested…
