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ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) - The widow of the astronomer who discovered Pluto 76 years ago said Thursday she was frustrated by the decision to strip it of its planetary status, but she added that Clyde Tombaugh would have understood.
"I'm not heartbroken. I'm just shook up," Patricia Tombaugh, 93, said in a telephone interview from her home in Las Cruces.
Clyde Tombaugh was 24 when he discovered Pluto while working at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., in 1930. He spent months meticulously examining images of the sky, looking for a planet observatory founder Percival Lowell theorized was affecting the orbit of Uranus. Lowell was wrong — Pluto is too small to affect giant Neptune's orbit — but Tombaugh found it anyway.
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