Planet P?

Far out on the sea of space sluggish Uranus, wallowing along on the track that takes it 84 years to circumnavigate the sun, rocked in its sidereal course. Uranus was too distant from its sister planet Neptune to have been affected at the time by Neptune's gravitational influence. This circumstance suggested that, unseen by human eye but suspected by a few human brains, some great unknown heavenly body was making its attraction felt. One of the human brains belonged to the late Percival Lowell, another to William Henry Pickering, both Harvard astronomers. In January 1930, true to Lowell calculations, a new planet beyond outermost Neptune and 3,680,000,000 mi. from the sun picked its way across a photographic plate in the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, Ariz. It was subsequently called Pluto--the first two letters of the name being the initials of Percival Lowell.

But Uranus continued "perturbed." From this perturbation, last week, came the prognostication of yet another planet, a vast, unseen but potent presence in the outer heavens. Astronomers are cautious about premature predictions but at Mandeville, Jamaica, goat-bearded Professor Pickering, 73, felt sure that he had isolated still another member of the solar system.

Twenty-two years ago Professor Pickering first became aware of an immense heavenly body beyond the known superior planets. He knew that the object of his search was huge, thought he would call the planet Pluto when he was sure of its existence. When Lowell's Planet X came along and got that name, the putative Pickering planet was then called Planet P.

Some account of Planet P was made known in 1928. Now, however, Professor Pickering has estimated not only its orbit (an ellipse whose distance from the sun varies between 5,000 and 9,000 million mi.) but its diameter (44,000 mi.). It is twice as far from the sun as far-flung Pluto, is the third most massive of the sun's family, exceeded only by Jupiter and ringed Saturn. Its sidereal period: 656 years.

Planet P is not the only celestial body up Professor Pickering's sleeve. In 1924, the year he resigned from Harvard to work at his private Jamaican observatory, susceptible Uranus was again notably perturbed. He ascribes this activity to possible Planets S or T.

Boston-born, William Henry Pickering was graduated from M. I. T. in 1879. He taught there and at Harvard, where in 1890 he was made assistant professor of astronomy at Harvard. In 1891 he located the Harvard observatory at Arequipa, Peru, spent the following two years measuring the big Peruvian mountains. He built the Flagstaff station and the one at which he now works in Jamaica. Only one astral unit is definitely his discovery (Phoebe, the ninth satellite of Saturn), but he has a claim on the as yet unrecognized tenth satellite Themis.

Not above startling laymen from time to time, several years ago Professor Pickering guessed that on some parts of the moon crops grew twice a day. He also suggested that the moon was flung into space from the present site of the Pacific Ocean; that if that had not happened, the earth would now be peopled exclusively by deep sea fish. If anyone has $10,000,000 to spare, Professor Pickering offers to show him how to signal Mars.

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