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Percival Lowell was born on March 13, 1855, [1] [2] [3] in Boston, Massachusetts, the first son of Augustus Lowell and Katherine Bigelow Lowell. A member of the Brahmin Lowell family, his siblings included the poet Amy Lowell, the educator and legal scholar Abbott Lawrence Lowell, and Elizabeth Lowell Putnam, an early activist for prenatal care.
The decision to name the object Pluto was intended in part to honour Percival Lowell, as his initials made up the word's first two letters. [30] After discovering Pluto, Tombaugh continued to search the ecliptic for other distant objects. He found hundreds of variable stars and asteroids, as well as two comets, but no further planets. [31]
Lowell Regio / ˈ l oʊ ə l ˈ r iː dʒ i oʊ / is a region on the dwarf planet Pluto. It was discovered by the New Horizons spacecraft in 2015. The region corresponds to the Plutonian northern polar cap. It is named after Percival Lowell who established the observatory where Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto. [1]
It was at the Lowell Observatory that the dwarf planet Pluto was discovered in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh. The observatory was founded by astronomer Percival Lowell of Boston's Lowell family and is overseen by a sole trustee, a position historically handed down
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The choice was further helped by the fact that the first two letters of Pluto were the initials of Percival Lowell; indeed, 'Percival' had been one of the more popular suggestions for a name for the new planet. [24] [30] Pluto's planetary symbol was then created as a monogram of the letters "PL". [31]
Direct visual observation became rare in astronomy. By 1965, Robert S. Richardson called Tombaugh one of two great living experienced visual observers as talented as Percival Lowell or Giovanni Schiaparelli. [45] In 1980, Tombaugh and Patrick Moore wrote a book Out of the Darkness: The Planet Pluto. [46]
Clyde Tombaugh liked the proposal because it started with the initials of Percival Lowell, who had predicted the existence of Planet X, which they thought was Pluto because it was coincidentally in that position in space. On 1 May 1930, the name Pluto was formally adopted for the new celestial body. [3]