Widow of Pluto discoverer 'shaken'

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Albuquerque (New Mexico): The widow of the astronomer who discovered Pluto 76 years ago says she is frustrated by the decision to strip it of its planetary status, but she adds that Clyde Tombaugh would have understood.

"I'm not heartbroken. I'm just shaken," Patricia Tombaugh, 93, said in a telephone interview on Thursday from her home in Las Cruces.

Clyde Tombaugh was 24 when he discovered Pluto while working at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, in 1930.

He spent month's meticulously examining images of the sky, looking for a planet observatory founder Percival Lowell theorised was affecting the orbit of Uranus.

Lowell was wrong - Pluto is too small to affect giant Neptune's orbit - but Tombaugh found it anyway.

Tombaugh, who died in 1997, was the only person in the Western Hemisphere to have discovered a planet in our solar system until Thursday, when the International Astronomical Union separated it from the eight "classical planets" and lumped it in with two similarly sized "dwarf planets".

Tombaugh had fought off other attempts to relegate Pluto, but his widow said this time he probably would have endorsed the change, now that other planetary objects have been discovered in the Kuiper Belt, the belt of comets on the edge of the solar system where Pluto resides.

"He was a scientist. He would understand they had a real problem when they start finding several of these things flying around the place," Patricia Tombaugh said.

She added that her husband had been resigned to the change.