How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [0]
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Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brown, Mike.
How I killed Pluto and why it had it coming / Mike Brown.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-385-53109-2
1. Pluto (Dwarf planet). 2. Planets. 3. Solar system. 4. Discoveries in science—
Anecdotes. I. Title.
QB701.B77 2010
523.49′2—dc22 2010015074
www.spiegelandgrau.com
v3.1
For Diane and Lilah
Prologue
PLUTO DIES
As an astronomer, I have long had a professional aversion to waking up before dawn, preferring instead to see sunrise not as an early-morning treat, but as the signal that the end of a long night of work has come and it is finally time for overdue sleep. But in the predawn of August 25, 2006, I awoke early and was up sneaking out the door, trying not to wake my wife, Diane, or our one-year-old daughter, Lilah. I wasn’t quite quiet enough. As I was closing the front door behind me, Diane called out, “Good luck, sweetie!”
I made the short drive downhill through the dark empty streets of Pasadena to the Caltech campus, where I found myself at 4:30 a.m., freshly showered, partially awake, and uncharacteristically nicely dressed, unlocking my office building to let in news crews that had been waiting outside. All of the local news affiliates were there, as well as representatives of most of the national networks. Outside, a Japanese-speaking crew was pointing a TV camera up at the sky, the beams of the flood lamps disappearing into space.
Today was the last day of the International Astronomical Union meeting in Prague, and the final item on the agenda at the end of two weeks’ worth of discussion was a vote on what to do with Pluto. Everyone’s favorite ice ball was in imminent danger of being cast out of the pantheon of planets by the vote of astronomers assembled half a world away, and whatever happened would be big news around the globe.
I like planets, but I didn’t care enough about Pluto to get up at 4:30 a.m. But this Pluto vote mattered enough for me to drag myself out of bed that morning. For me that vote had nothing to do with the ninth planet; it was all about the tenth. And I cared a lot about that tenth planet, because eighteen months earlier, I had discovered it, a ball of ice and rock slightly larger than Pluto circling the sun every 580 years. I had been scanning the skies night after night looking for such a thing for most of a decade, and then, one morning, there it finally was.
At the time of the Pluto vote, my discovery was still officially called only by its license plate number of 2003 UB313, but to many it was known by the tongue-in-cheek nickname of Xena, and to even more it was known simply as the tenth planet. Or maybe, after today, not the tenth planet. Xena had precipitated the past year of intensive arguments about Pluto, but it was clear that Xena would share whatever fate was dealt to Pluto. If Pluto was to be a planet, then so too Xena. If Pluto was to be kicked out, Xena would get the same boot. It was worth waking up early to find out the answer.
The previous two weeks in Prague had been perhaps the most contentious gathering in modern astronomical history. Usually the International Astronomical Union meeting is nothing but a once-every-three-years chance for astronomers to advertise their latest discovery or newest idea while spending some time in a nice international destination, having dinners with old friends and catching up on their celestial gossip. On the final day of each meeting, in a session attended by almost no one, resolutions are passed, usually all but unanimously, on such pressing topics as the precise definition, to the millisecond, of Barycentric Dynamical Time (I have no idea what this actually even means).
This year was different. The usually placid astronomers had spent their time in Prague arguing and bickering day and