Latest news with #ClydeTombaugh
Yahoo
14-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Historic AZ landmark just got 2 national accolades. Here's why people love it
Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff — the historic research center where Pluto was discovered — has made national headlines lately, earning back-to-back accolades from two major publications. On Thursday, March 13, TIME named Lowell Observatory one of the World's Greatest Places of 2025, highlighting its open-air planetarium and ongoing contributions to space education. That came just after the March 6 announcement that Lowell ranked No. 1 in Newsweek's readers choice list of 10 best science museums in the United States. That recognition emphasized Lowell's commitment to research and public engagement, showcasing its ability to make complex astronomical concepts accessible to visitors. The observatory's blend of history, hands-on exhibits, and modern advancements helped it earn the top spot in this category, according to Newsweek. TIME's list of the world's great places gave special attention to new and exciting experiences. Lowell Observatory stood out for its new Marley Foundation Astronomy Discovery Center, whose open-air planetarium offering live sky viewing and commentary with heated seating provides an immersive experience for visitors. TIME also noted the observatory's rich history, including its role in the discovery of Pluto. 'We are honored to be named as one of the world's greatest places,' Lowell Observatory Executive Director Amanda Bosh said in a press release. 'We think of Lowell Observatory as a portal between our world and other places in our solar system, galaxy and universe. Our research brings space closer to us through our understanding of it, and we invite the public to join us in exploring the wonders of our universe as well.' Lowell Observatory is where researcher Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930. It was Flagstaff's first permanent scientific institution, paving the way for the city to become a hub for astronomical research and education. Today, Lowell Observatory anchors a thriving scientific community that includes Northern Arizona University, the U.S. Geological Survey Flagstaff Science Campus, the Naval Observatory Flagstaff Station and Coconino Community College, as well as the Flagstaff Dark Sky Coalition. When: Noon-10 p.m. Wednesdays-Mondays; closed on Tuesdays. Where: 1400 W. Mars Hill Road, Flagstaff. Admission: $35 for ages 18-54; $30 for college students, military members and age 55 and older with ID; $20 for ages 6-17; free for age 5 and younger. There are discounts for local residents and Arizona Native Americans. Details: 928-774-3358, Got a story you want to share? Reach out at Follow @tiffsario on Instagram. Support local journalism and subscribe to This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Newsweek, Time love Lowell Observatory in AZ. Here's why
Yahoo
19-02-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Is Pluto a planet or not? Who cares! Our love for the King of the Kuiper Belt is stronger than ever 95 years later
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Clyde Tombaugh didn't set out to discover Pluto when he sent his sketches of the night sky to Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona in 1929. More than anything, he just wanted to get off the farm in Kansas where he spent his days working the earth. At just 23 years old, Tombaugh sent his drawings, unsolicited, to several institutions and observatories around the United States, hoping someone — anyone — would give him some feedback on what he'd produced. The response from Lowell Observatory, then, must have been a shock when it hit his mailbox. It was more than a critique of his drawings from professional astronomers. Instead, it was a job offer (from the head of the Observatory, no less), and one that within two years would put Tombaugh in an elite and narrow pantheon of stargazers who could claim what only the ancients could boast: the discovery of a new planet. The search for Pluto did not begin with Clyde Tombaugh, to be fair. That distinction belongs to the visionary astronomer Percival Lowell. In 1894, Lowell founded Lowell Observatory in the Arizona territory (Arizona wouldn't become a state until 1912). Originally a scion of an elite Boston family, Lowell became fascinated with the study of Mars and its purported canals. With family wealth to back him, he founded an observatory in the western dark-sky desert of the U.S. and hoped to unlock the mystery of the Red Planet. He soon became fascinated by another cosmic mystery, however, and one that would be far more consequential. Uranus and Neptune, the most recently discovered planets in the solar system at the time, seemed out of sorts. Their orbits didn't add up mathematically, and Lowell was convinced there was an undiscovered planet in the far reaches of the solar system that was knocking them off-kilter. "Lowell wanted to learn more about the planets and started coming under the belief that there might be a ninth planet out there,' Kevin Schindler, Lowell Observatory's Public Information Officer, told "That was based on some irregular motions, or apparent irregular motions, of [Uranus and Neptune]." He called this hypothetical world "Planet X." "In some ways, Pluto's more of a planet than some of the other established planets, like Mercury." Lowell dedicated years to predicting the location of this elusive planet. He and his team at the observatory came up with calculations for the world's path and location, but by the time of his death in 1916, the planet (like most other hypothetical worlds), failed to materialize. With many in the scientific community convinced that there were no more planets to discover, the search for Planet X was abandoned soon after Lowell's death. Clyde Tombaugh's journey to planetary discovery is one of the most remarkable in the history of astronomy. Born in 1906 in Illinois and raised on a farm in Burnett, Kansas, Tombaugh had a deep fascination with the night sky. With little formal training, he built his own telescopes and meticulously sketched astronomical observations out in Kansas's dark-sky country. "Tombaugh sent some of his drawings off to different places, including Lowell Observatory, and he got this letter back from the director saying, 'We're just recommencing the search for a ninth planet, and we need somebody to help with it. It looks like you know what you're talking about, so why don't you come work for us?'" Schindler said. "He got a one-way bus ticket, hoping that he wouldn't have to go back home in a short time, and started working at the observatory." Tombaugh arrived in 1929 hoping to prove himself, but his job was painstaking compared to sketching the night sky in Kansas. Using a technique called "blink comparison," Tombaugh searched through countless, and nearly identical, photographic plates for the elusive planet. Blink comparison involves looking at photographs of the same portion of the sky on different nights and then rapidly switching between the two images to spot any moving objects. Because far-off stars would be static over successive nights, nearer, moving objects would stand out against the backdrop — but, for an object as distant as Pluto, the motion would be barely perceptible. It took months of tedious work, flipping back and forth between effectively identical photographic plates, but on February 18, 1930, Tombaugh finally found what he was looking for: a tiny moving speck against the starry background, roughly where Lowell had predicted it would be. A ninth planet, Pluto, had been discovered. One of the most fascinating aspects of Pluto's discovery is that it was, in part, a cosmic coincidence. "Pluto was found really close to where Lowell thought a planet should be, but it's also a great example of serendipity in science," Schindler said. "When Lowell was doing his work, there was an estimate of what Uranus' and Neptune's masses were, but they weren't very accurate. Today, we have much more accurate estimates and we know that the irregular motions [that led to the prediction of a Planet X] actually don't exist. If you know the true value of the masses of Uranus and Neptune, everything's accounted for.' In other words, Pluto showing up in Tombaugh's photos where it did wasn't the result of careful calculation, but rather a good bit of dumb luck. "Clyde Tombaugh was looking for a phantom," Schindler said, "but he found a planet. It was just coincidence that it was right where Lowell thought it should be." Lucky find or not, the discovery of Pluto came at a crucial moment in history, particularly for the U.S. By 1930, the Great Depression had left much of the world in economic ruin, and scientific breakthroughs provided a much-needed source of inspiration. "It had such a cultural impact because we were in the Depression, and there wasn't much good news in the newspaper," Schindler said. "It was a good news story in a time of otherwise pretty lousy news." Pluto's discovery was widely celebrated, especially in the U.S. After all, it was the first planet discovered in the new world, and America needed the win in 1930. "I think because it was discovered by the United States and also discovered in the 20th century with mass media, it has a lot of fascination," Schindler said. "For decades, Pluto was seen as the ninth planet of the solar system, an underdog among its much larger planetary siblings of the inner planets and the gas giants beyond the asteroid belt." However, as scientific understanding evolved, so did Pluto's classification — though not without controversy. In 2006, Pluto's planetary status was re-evaluated by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), leading to its reclassification as a "dwarf planet." The change was based on new criteria for defining planets. According to the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a planet must: 1. Orbit the sun 2. Be massive to achieve hydrostatic equilibrium (i.e., be a spheroid under the force of its own gravity) 3. Clear its orbit of other debris Pluto fails the third criterion because its orbit overlaps with objects in the Kuiper Belt, a region of icy bodies beyond Neptune. So, a new class of celestial object — the dwarf planet — came into being, with Pluto at its head. This decision sparked widespread debate, both among the public and among many astronomers. "There's this perception that Pluto got dumped," Schindler said. "So many people took that personally, and we would have guests come to the [Lowell] Observatory saying things like, 'Are you guys okay?'" Part of the problem with the reclassification, pioneered by Caltech astronomer Michael Brown and supported by other prominent astronomers like the Hayden Planetarium's Neil deGrasse Tyson, is that until the reclassification of Pluto as a dwarf planet, no one had really bothered to define what a planet actually was. "I think [the 2006 reclassification] was a starting point," Schindler said. "It's not a bad thing to have a definition of what a planet is, but it's not really the best definition. It has problems. I think one of the issues [fueling the controversy] is, if scientists are confused about the definition, what's the rest of the public supposed to do? How are we supposed to understand what a planet is, if scientists can't even agree on it?' With Pluto's "demotion" to dwarf planet status, it's understandable that the IAU faced criticism from the public for redefining a "planet" in such a way that seemed almost tailored to exclude Pluto, along with bodies like Eris, Ceres and Pallas. "I don't want to cast aspersions on the IAU," Schindler said, "it may be a legitimate definition, but it's interesting to think about the fact we didn't have one beforehand. We don't really have a clear definition of what a planet is; I guess you can say we do now, but it still needs help." After all, what does it mean for a planet to "clear its orbit of other debris," which is the single criterion that Pluto fails? Do Jupiter's Trojan asteroids qualify as cleared? Earth has plenty of asteroids and other debris in its orbital vicinity, as well. Why do Earth and Jupiter meet this criteria, but Pluto doesn't? "At some point, the International Astronomical Union will probably revisit it," Schindler said, "but I think in some ways, nobody wants to touch it because it's become sort of an embarrassment. In trying to get to an agreement, not only on what to call a planet but how to decide on what qualifies as a planet, well, the first step was kind of embarrassing. So nobody is in a hurry to revisit it right now." Before Pluto was demoted to dwarf planet status, it was really nothing more than a tiny dot in telescopes; barely a few blurry pixels in an image, and that's if you were lucky. Even the Hubble Space Telescope, despite all its might, revealed little about the enigmatic object lurking beyond Neptune — but in 2015, NASA's New Horizons probe gave us our first detailed look at the distant world. What most people were arguing about in 2006 through 2014 was mostly academic and sentimental. If you grew up learning that Pluto was a planet, chances are you were sticking to that, no matter what the IAU said. After all, it's not like anyone had truly seen Pluto before New Horizons performed its 2015 fly-by. And sure enough, afterward, there was definitely a shift — in Pluto's favor. The images New Horizons sent back were breathtaking, revealing an active, complex planet with mountains, valleys and a now-iconic heart-shaped feature known as Tombaugh Regio. "New Horizons essentially turned Pluto from a dot to a world where you can see mountains and craters and valleys, all this stuff up close," Schindler said. "We never saw anything close to that on Pluto before." The mission confirmed that Pluto is far from a lifeless rock — it has a dynamic surface, an atmosphere, and potential geological activity, and this only reinforced opinions that Pluto was indeed a planet and had gotten a bad deal from the IAU. "There's this perception that Pluto got dumped." "In some ways, Pluto's more of a planet than some of the other established planets, like Mercury," Schindler said. "Pluto has several moons orbiting around it and it has an atmosphere. Mercury doesn't have an atmosphere and it has no moons. Venus doesn't have a moon, either. Sometimes, if we think traditionally about what a planet is, people will say 'Well, it's round, maybe it has some moons, maybe it has an atmosphere.' "Well, Pluto has them all." Despite its "demotion," humanity's fascination with Pluto hasn't waned. Every year, the Lowell Observatory hosts the I Heart Pluto Festival to celebrate the discovery and significance of the King of the Kuiper Belt. This event brings together scientists, space enthusiasts and even members of Clyde Tombaugh's family to honor Pluto's place in history. "We started this festival as a way to celebrate Pluto's discovery and the cultural connections it has," Schindler said. "It's about Pluto, but it's also about the inspiration of space and science." This year's festival theme, "Boldly Go Beyond New Horizons," brings together figures from science and pop culture, including astronomers, Star Trek actor Leonard Nimoy's son Adam Nimoy, and others, emphasizing Pluto's role in both scientific discovery and human imagination. "I heart Pluto because of its connections," Schindler said. "I've worked at Lowell for almost 30 years, and through that time, I've gotten to know so many scientists and others that have a connection to Pluto. I never met Clyde Tombaugh, but I know his children very well, and the scientists at Lowell's laboratories are good friends that I work with, like Jim Christie, who discovered [Pluto's moon] Charon in the 1970s. "For me, it's definitely the community around Pluto. Yes, I work at the place where it was discovered, but every day I walk past the office where Tombaugh made his discovery, and go past the telescope dome where he huddled himself in the cold and winter to take these pictures. It's really easy to recreate that day of discovery, and kind of follow his footsteps a little bit, and feel what he was feeling." Pluto's story is one of perseverance, curiosity and the evolving nature of scientific knowledge. From Percival Lowell's ambitious search to Clyde Tombaugh's groundbreaking discovery to the stunning revelations of New Horizons, Pluto continues to captivate us, despite the semantics around its classification. "I personally think Pluto is a planet and it has nothing to do with the fact that it was discovered where I work," Schindler said. "Ultimately, Pluto is the prototype of a third zone of the solar system. You have the inner terrestrial planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, then you have the gas giants, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. And then, you have this third zone of icy dwarf planets, icy small bodies in the Kuiper Belt — and Pluto's the big one, the king of those. Related Stories: — Star Trek scion Adam Nimoy talks our favorite (dwarf) planet for 'I Heart Pluto' festival — 2nd Kuiper Belt? Our solar system may be much larger than thought — 'What exactly is a planet?' Astronomers want to amend the definition "In some ways, what we call it doesn't matter," Schindler said. "By naming it a planet or not, it trains us to understand what it is and how it was formed, and that's the kind of classification that science tries to achieve by seeing similar patterns or differences in the universe." Wherever the debate about Pluto's status goes, one thing is for certain: Pluto's place in history — and in our hearts — is undeniable. Certainly, the more we learn about it, the more this enigmatic body will inspire us to discover more about the outer frontiers of our stellar neighborhood.
Yahoo
18-02-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
What Makes Pluto So Intriguing
Pluto, with its heart-shaped glacier, as captured by the New Horizons spacecraft Credit - JPL/NASA Pluto will mark a birthday of sorts on March 23, 2178. No one is likely to be there to celebrate it, of course. Even if humanity is a multi-planet species by then, it would be a decided challenge to visit the tiny, distant world, which measures just 1,477 miles in diameter—or little more than half the coast-to-coast distance of the continental U.S.—lies up to 4.67 billion miles from Earth, and features a surface temperature as low as -400°F. Still that date will be one to circle on cosmic calendars. It takes Pluto slightly over 248 Earth years to orbit the sun, which means that on March 23, 2178, one Plutonian year will have elapsed since the dwarf planet was first spotted, on Feb. 18, 1930. 'NINTH PLANET DISCOVERED ON EDGE OF SOLAR SYSTEM; FIRST FOUND IN 84 YEARS,' the New York Times announced in a front-page, all-caps headline in its March 14, 1930 edition, the day after the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., announced its big find. 'In the little cluster of orbs which scampers across the sidereal abyss under the name of the solar system,' the Times went on, 'there are, be it known, nine, instead of a mere eight worlds.' This Feb. 18 marks 95 years since the Lowell Observatory hit paydirt, an achievement made not by one of the observatory's professional astronomers, but by amateur Clyde Tombaugh, who at the time was just 24 years old. Not long before coming to work at the observatory, Tombaugh had built his own telescope with which he had conducted observations of Mars and Jupiter. He made drawings of the two planets—drawings he sent to the Lowell Observatory, hoping the astronomers there would offer comment and critique. Vesto Slipher, the director of the observatory, did Tombaugh one better, offering the eager stargazer a job. His assignment would be equal parts tedious and transformative: scanning hundreds upon hundreds of images of the skies, looking for the elusive world known at that point only as Planet X. Percival Lowell, the astronomer and businessman who built the observatory, had long theorized that a ninth planet existed somewhere out in the cosmic void, reckoning that it accounted for wobbles that astronomers had observed in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. He searched for Planet X from 1905 until his death in 1916, without luck. It would take another generation before the observatory, aided by the patient Tombaugh, would at last have success. The 95 years since then have been ones of changing fortune for little Pluto. For decades after the first eight planets were barnstormed, orbited, and landed upon by spacecraft from Earth, Pluto remained the only one of the solar system's major worlds that never received a visit—a slight that was not rectified until the New Horizons spacecraft flew by it in 2015. In 2006, after New Horizons was launched but before it could complete its nine-plus year journey, Pluto suffered the indignity of being demoted from planet to dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). And it's as a dwarf planet that Pluto is taught to students today. But Pluto has in many ways only grown in astronomers' estimations. It is now known to be part of an entire system of objects, gravitationally anchoring a cluster of five moons; it has a surface marked by mountains and craters and valleys and plains; it is home to abundant quantities of water ice and may even harbor a liquid ocean beneath its surface, making it an improbable—but not impossible—home for extraterrestrial life. 'New Horizons shattered a major paradigm of planetary science,' says Alan Stern, the mission's principal investigator. 'Pluto turns out to have as much complexity as Mars or Earth, so much so that I know planetary scientists who call Pluto 'the other Red Planet.'' None of the new discoveries about Pluto would have been made, of course, had the little world not been spotted in the first place—an achievement that took sublime attention to detail. Tombaugh performed his cosmic sleuthing thanks to a telescope with a 13-in. mirror. He used it to gather images of parts of the night sky about as large as a fist held at arm's length, all in a large area in which the late Lowell had predicted Planet X would be found. Tombaugh captured two images of each spot of sky on photographic plates. The second image of every pair was typically taken several days after the first. Over that relatively short period, background stars would not have moved at all, but a foreground object like a planet would have detectably shifted its position. During the days, when stargazing was impossible, Tombaugh would analyze the photographic plates with an optical device known as a blink comparator. Beams of light from two microscopes in the instrument would shine through both plates in each pair, and Tombaugh would turn a dial, flipping the focus of the comparator first to one plate and then to the other, looking for a single point from among the spangle of points on each image that had moved. He discovered multiple objects this way—but they were too small and moved too fast to be a planet, and instead had to be asteroids. Finally, on two plates taken on Jan. 23 and Jan. 30, 1930, he found the right-sized point in the right patch of sky moving the right amount for a distant planet. The point shifted its position by just 3 millimeters on the plates, which factored out to a world approximately 43 times farther from the sun than the Earth is. Pluto had been found. 'All observations indicate the object to be the one which Lowell saw mathematically,' said the observatory in a statement. The new world got its name not long after, thanks to 11-year-old Venetia Burney, of Oxford, England. Over breakfast on the day after the announcement was made, Venetia's grandfather was reading the account of the new planet aloud from the paper and the young girl straightaway recommended the name Pluto, the ruler of the underworld. Her grandfather mentioned the idea to an astronomer he knew who in turn cabled it to the Lowell Observatory, where it was quickly approved. 'I don't quite know why I suggested it,' Venetia said in a 2006 interview with NASA. 'My grandfather read out at breakfast the great news and said he wondered what it would be called. For some reason, after a short pause, I said, 'Why not call it Pluto?' I did know, I was fairly familiar with Greek and Roman legends from various children's books that I had read, and of course, I did know about the solar system and the names the other planets have. And so I suppose I just thought that this was a name that hadn't been used. And there it was. The rest was entirely my grandfather's work.' Lonely Pluto would eventually turn out to be not so lonely after all. In 1978, astronomers at the U.S. Naval Observatory discovered a bulge in their images of Pluto—one that moved around the planet once every 6.4 days. The 1,477-mile wide world had a 751-mile wide moon—the largest moon relative to the size of its parent body in the solar system. The newly discovered satellite was dubbed Charon, and astronomers would ultimately find that the two bodies were gravitational co-equals, with Charon not orbiting a stationary Pluto, but with both worlds orbiting each other in a loop-de-loop pas de deux. From 2005 to 2012, the Hubble Space Telescope would ultimately discover four more smaller moons—dubbed Nix, Hydra, Kerberos, and Styx. The complexity of the Plutonian system is reflected in the complexity of Pluto itself. New Horizons discovered that Pluto is home to the largest glacier in the solar system, one measuring more than 386,000 square miles, or larger than Texas and Oklahoma combined. What's more, the glacier is pristine, with no craters, meaning that it is regularly being resurfaced. 'The glacier was born yesterday, geologically,' says Stern. 'We find examples all over the planet of young terrains, middle-aged terrains, and ancient terrains. Pluto has been active for four and a half billion years.' The secret to all of that activity is Pluto's probable underground ocean. The water ice on the surface of the world suggests that there should be more water hidden below ground. Over the course of the past 4.5 billion years, that water has been slowly freezing, a process that is likely still underway. That provides the world with energy. 'It's physics 101 that as water freezes it releases latent heat,' says Stern. 'That is probably a part of the energy source that's powering Pluto's geology. The ocean will continue to freeze for the next one or two billion years, and Pluto will continue to be active.' The question for planetary scientists and exobiologists is whether Pluto's ancient ocean may have been able to cook up life. The solar system's 293 moons include several believed to harbor oceans, including Saturn's Enceladus, Jupiter's Europa, and Neptune's Triton. Enceladus regularly emits frosty water geysers, produced when the gravity of Saturn flexes the much smaller moon. The Cassini spacecraft flew through the plumes in 2015 and detected organic compounds that could be precursors of life. 'I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say we might find biology in some of these ocean worlds,' says Stern. 'And who knows? Pluto could be one of them.' For all of this promise, Pluto struggles for respect, with the 'dwarf planet' label continuing to rankle Pluto partisans. The IAU defends the definition based on Pluto's orbit. Unlike other planets that have a more or less circular, equatorial orbit around the sun, Pluto's is sharply inclined and highly elliptical, with a perihelion, or close approach to the sun, of roughly 2.7 billion miles, and an apehelion, or furthest remove from the sun, of 4.67 billion miles. That, plus Pluto's small size—smaller than our moon—suggested that the world did not accrete in its current orbit from the primordial gas and dust that gave rise to the sun and the planets, but rather formed farther out, in the Kuiper Belt, a vast band of icy, rocky bodies that surrounds the solar system. From there, it broke free and entered its screwy orbit. Allow little Pluto to keep its planetary status and you would have to confer the same honor on Eris, a Kuiper Belt object of about the same size, as well as any other, similar worlds that might be discovered—raising the prospect of a solar system with an uncounted number of planets. Stern thinks the dwarf planet distinction is nonsensical—an arbitrary parsing of cosmic definitions. 'Small planets are planets too,' he says. 'Just because the sun is a small star we don't call it a dwarf star. We're not afraid of large numbers of planets; we're not afraid of schoolchildren having to learn all their names. After all, kids don't have to memorize every element in the periodic table.' Further exploration of Pluto is not likely anytime soon. New Horizons has long since soared billions of miles into deep space and no other Plutonian missions are currently planned. Still, the oddball world at the edge of our solar system will continue to intrigue astronomers. 'My little saying in public talks is that Pluto defies all of the textbooks,' says Stern. 'What that proves is that Pluto doesn't read the textbooks.' Write to Jeffrey Kluger at
Yahoo
18-02-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
On This Day, Feb. 18: Snow falls in Sahara for 1st known time
Feb. 18 (UPI) -- On this date in history: In 1841, the first filibuster in the U.S. Senate began. It ended March 11. In 1865, after a long Civil War siege, Union naval forces captured Charleston, S.C. In 1930, dwarf planet Pluto was discovered by astronomer Clyde Tombaugh. In 1954, the Church of Scientology was established in Los Angeles. L. Ron Hubbard, who founded the church based on his book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, died in 1986. In 1967, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the "father of the atomic bomb," died in Princeton, N.J., at the age of 62. In 1979, snow fell in the Sahara Desert in southern Algeria for the first known time. It fell a second time in 2016 and a third time in 2018. In 2001, Dale Earnhardt Sr., stock-car racing's top driver, was killed in a crash in the final turn of the final lap of the Daytona 500. He was 49. In 2003, nearly 200 people died and scores were injured in a South Korea subway fire set by a man authorities said apparently was upset at his doctors. In 2004, 40 chemical and fuel-laden runaway rail cars derailed near Nishapur in northeastern Iran, producing an explosion that killed at least 300 people and injured hundreds of others. In 2006, 16 people died in rioting in Nigeria over published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that enraged Muslims around the world. In 2008, two of four masterpieces stolen from the Zurich museum a week earlier, a Monet and a van Gogh, were found in perfect condition in the back seat of an unlocked car in Zurich. In 2013, eight men disguised as police disabled a security fence, drove two vehicles onto a Brussels airport tarmac and stole diamonds worth $50 million. In 2014, violence erupted between protesters and security forces in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, eventually resulting in 98 dead with an estimated 15,000 injured and 100 believed missing. In 2021, NASA's Mars rover Perseverance made a robotic landing on Mars, starting a high-tech mission to hunt for signs of life in an ancient lakebed. In 2024, Fifty-five people died following an ambush in Papua New Guinea's remote Highlands region amid a years-long series of clashes among warring tribes.
Boston Globe
18-02-2025
- Boston Globe
Today in History: February 18, Dale Earnhardt Sr. dies in Daytona crash
In 1930, the dwarf planet Pluto was discovered by American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh. In 1970, the 'Chicago Seven' defendants were found not guilty of conspiring to incite riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention; five were convicted of violating the Anti-Riot Act of 1968 (those convictions were later reversed). In 1983, 13 people were shot to death at a gambling club in Seattle's Chinatown in what became known as the Wah Mee Massacre. (Two men were convicted of the killings and were sentenced to life in prison; a third was found guilty of robbery and assault.) Advertisement In 1994, in the final race of his Olympic career at the Winter Olympic Games in Lillehammer, Norway, US speedskater Dan Jansen broke the world record in the 1,000 meters, winning the gold medal. In 2001, veteran FBI agent Robert Philip Hanssen was arrested, accused of spying for Russia. (Hanssen later pleaded guilty to espionage and attempted espionage and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.) Also in 2001, auto racing star Dale Earnhardt Sr. died in a crash in the final lap of the Daytona 500; he was 49. In 2003, an arson attack involving two South Korean subway trains in the city of Daegu claimed nearly 200 lives. In 2021, the rover Perseverance successfully landed on Mars, where it continues to explore the planet's surface today.
