How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [107]
Oddly, though, for an object that no one discovered, it does have place of discovery listed. While the name of the object is Hawaiian, based on a proposal by astronomers from California, Haumea was officially discovered at a small telescope in Spain. By nobody.
What does any of this mean, officially? Mostly, I think, that the IAU didn’t try too hard to figure anything out. Probably the majority of whatever committee was voting thought my version of the story was the most plausible, but there were enough dissenters that a decision was made to soften the pronouncement by listing no discoverer and by backhandedly acknowledging the Spanish claim.
I am disappointed that they made no real effort to figure out what happened, at least as far as I can tell. No one ever asked me anything or requested extra information from me. I suspect the same is true of the Spanish side. In the end, this is as good as it will get. I will never know for sure what actually took place in those two days before the Spanish astronomers announced their discovery.
• • •
I still haven’t drunk the celebratory champagne. The friend with whom I made the five-year bet on the foggy night at Palomar Observatory had generously given me a five-day extension, and Eris fit all of the characteristics that she and I had decided a planet must meet. She happily delivered the champagne the next time she was in town. In the end, though, Eris was not the tenth planet; it was instead the killer of the ninth. Champagne doesn’t make a good funeral drink.
Those five champagne bottles sit on my shelf still. I look at them every once in a while and wonder if the time will ever come to pop the corks. I’m still looking for planets, but the bar is now much higher. Anything new that wants to be called a planet needs to be a significant presence in our solar system, and I am not certain that there are any more hiding in the sky. But I keep going. Someday, I hope, I’ll be sitting in my office looking at pictures of the sky from the night before, and there on the screen will be something farther away than I’ve ever seen before, something big, maybe the size of Mars, maybe the size of the earth—something significant. And I’ll know. And, as I did years earlier, I’ll immediately pick up the phone and call Diane. “Guess what?” I’ll say. “I just found the ninth planet.” And—once again—the solar system will never be the same.
Epilogue
JUPITER MOVES
It takes some time for a kid to figure out that her parents have a separate existence that takes place when she’s not around. By the time she was about three, whenever I was gone for a few days Lilah began getting immensely curious about where I was. That place would become a fabled land that she invoked when playing with stuffed animals or making up stories. Taiwan, to which I went one week during her third year and which she can now pick out on any globe, remains perhaps her favorite spot in the world. At one point during her third summer, she had named all of the corners of the swimming pool after different places, and she would cling to my back and direct me where to go next.
“Daddy, I want to go to Chicago.”
Swim, swim, swim.
“Daddy, Daddy, Berlin!”
Stroke, stroke, stroke.
“Boston.”
Glide, glide, glide.
“Daddy, Daddy, I want to go all the way to Taiwan!”
Taiwan, which she knew to be an island, required momentarily going underwater before emerging on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.
“Now back to Pasadena, California!” which was code for “Let’s get out and see if Mommy will bring out some snacks.”
Eventually she started figuring out why I would periodically disappear.
“Are you going to go talk about planets?”
And the answer, invariably, was yes.
Lilah loves planets. Other than the occasional dwarf-dog joke, I have never particularly pushed planets on her, at least not any harder than I push them on everyone else. Yes, I point out planets in the sky to her every time we go outside at night, but I do that to everyone. Beginning in that summer of her third birthday, Lilah had been particularly mesmerized