On the front page on March 14, 1930, The New York Times announced, with a flourish, the discovery of Pluto: “In the little cluster of orbs which scampers across the sidereal abyss under the name of the solar system there are, be it known, nine instead of a mere eight, worlds.”

Inside the paper, another article suggested that the planet was “possibly larger than Jupiter and four billion miles away.” As we now know, Pluto’s distance from Earth ranges from 2.6 to 4.6 billion miles, and Jupiter is roughly 63 times as wide.

It was originally known only as Planet X, but The Times called it Pluto for the first time on May 25, 1930, when the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., made the official announcement of the new name.

Many astronomers were involved in theorizing about the new planet, but it was a low-level assistant at the observatory, Clyde W. Tombaugh, who actually found it on a photographic plate.