2 WELCOME TO THE SOLAR SYSTEMAS
tRONOMERS t amazing truck a matc tiniest tant starster and even potential ability of planets mucooremote to be seen—planets so distant t it ake us o get telescopes ture ion so preposterouslyfaint t total amount of energy collected from outside tem by all of togeting began (in 1951) is “less triking the words of Carl Sagan.
In s, t a great deal t goes on in t astronomers can’t findo reflect t until 1978no one iced t Pluto year, a youngastronomer named James Cy at tory in Flagstaff, Arizona, ine examination of pograpo ain but definitely oto. Consulting acolleague named Robert on, w was a moon.
And it just any moon. Relative to t, it moon in tem.
tually someto Pluto’s status as a planet, anyo to be one and t meant t Pluto was mucem, including our own, are larger.
Noural question is ook so long for anyone to find a moon in our oem. t it is partly a matter of trumentsand partly a matter of ruments are designed to detect, and partly it’s just Pluto.
Mostly it’s ruments. In tronomer ClarkC people t astronomers get out at nigories and scan t’s not true. Almost all telescopes very tiny little pieces of tance to see a quasar or for black a distant galaxy. telescopes t scans t by tary.”
e ists’ renderings into imagining a clarity of resolution tdoesn’t exist in actual astronomy. Pluto in Cy’s pograp and fuzzy—a piece ofcosmic lint—and its moon is not tically backlit, crisply delineated companion orbyou in a National Geograping, bu