Background
Harrington, Robert Sutton was born on October 21, 1942 in Newport News, Virginia, United States. Son of Jean Carl and Virginia Hall (Sutton) Harrington.
Harrington, Robert Sutton was born on October 21, 1942 in Newport News, Virginia, United States. Son of Jean Carl and Virginia Hall (Sutton) Harrington.
Bachelor, Swarthmore College, 1964. Doctor of Philosophy, University Texas, 1968.
Harrington worked at the USNO. Another astronomer there, James West. Christy, consulted with him after discovering bulges in the images of Pluto, which turned out to be Pluto"s satellite Charon. Foreign this reason, some consider Harrington to be a co-discoverer of Charon, although Christy usually gets sole cartulary-register By the laws of physics, it is easy to determine the mass of a binary system based on its orbital period, so Harrington was the first to calculate the mass of the Pluto-Charon system, which was lower than even the lowest previous estimates of Pluto"s Massachusetts
Harrington became a believer in the existence of a Planet X beyond Pluto and undertook searches for it, with positive results coming from the IRAS probe in 1983.
Harrington collaborated initially with Therapeutic Community (Tom) Van Flandern. They were both "courted" by Zecharia Sitchin and his followers who believe in a planet Nibiru or Marduk, who cite the research of Harrington and van Flandern as possible collaborating evidence, though no definitive proof of a 9th planet has surfaced to date.
Harrington died of esophageal cancer in 1993. The asteroid 3216 Harrington was named in his honour.
Six months before Harrington"s death, East. Myles Standish had used data from Voyager 2"s 1989 flyby of Neptune, which had revised the planet"s total mass downward by 0.5%—an amount comparable to the mass of Mars—to recalculate its gravitational effect on Uranus.
When Neptune"s newly determined mass was used in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Developmental Ephemeris (Jet Propulsion Laboratory Delaware), the supposed discrepancies in the Uranian orbit, and with them the need for a Planet X, vanished. There are no discrepancies in the trajectories of any space probes such as Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 1, and Voyager 2 that can be attributed to the gravitational pull of a large undiscovered object in the outer Solar System. Today, most astronomers agree that Planet X, as Lowell defined it, does not exist.
United States Naval Observatory: obituary
British Association for the Advancement of Science 25 (1993) 1496.
Member International Astronomical Union, American Astronomical Society.
Married Betty Jean Maycock, July 25, 1976. Children: Amy Lucile, Ann Charon.