The American astronomer who put Pluto on the solar system map would have accepted its demotion to non-planet status because he was a good scientist, his widow said on Thursday.

“Clyde said, ‘Well, it’s there. You can do what you want with it,’” Patricia Tombaugh, 94, said from her home in Las Cruces, New Mexico, after the International Astronomical Union downgraded husband Clyde Tombaugh’s crowning achievement.

Tombaugh was 24 years old and working at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona in 1930 when he discovered Pluto, which was then considered the ninth planet in the solar system and the one most distant from the sun.

CNN.com