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Accidental, said Yale's Brown, was the finding of X in the part of the sky predicted by Harvard's Lowell. A few years ago it would not have tallied with calculations. In 1900, X would have been 40° from the predicted path, in 1875 90° away. Basis for the Lowell calculations was the fact that the path of Uranus was being warped by some outside influence which was attributed to the predicted planet. X, said Dr. Brown, is too small to exert such a pressure. Siding with Dr. Brown in the doubting column are: Dr. William Duncan MacMillan of University of Chicago, who maintains that X's path is hyperbolic, not elliptical; Professor H. E. Wood, astronomer for the South African Union, who gives X a size 1/30th that of Earth; Fernand Baldet, associate astronomer at the government observatory at Meudon, France; Professor Harold Lee Alden of Yale's South African Station, who sides with Dr. Brown, claims X is too small to influence Uranus; Dr. Frank Schlesinger, Director of Yale Observatory; Dr. Armin Otto Leuschner, astronomy professor at University of California. Chief among X supporters is Dr. Vesto Melvin Slipher, director of Lowell Observatory, whose brother. Astronomer Earl Carl Slipher, last fortnight gave out the following calculations on X :
Distance from Earth: 3,813,000,000 mi.
Size: about that of Earth. Length of X's year: about 3,200 times Earth's.
Orbit: elliptical, with long diameter ap proximately 144; billion miles.
Other X supporters: Dr. John Jackson of Greenwich (England) Observatory. who at first was a doubter; Dr. John Anthony Miller of Sproul Observatory, Swarthmore College.