How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [109]
The tight-packed group of lights low in the early evening sky was the sort of sight that makes even non–night sky watchers suddenly look up and wonder. A few people would even think to look the next night, I suspected, to see if the sight was still there. They would notice that the moon had already moved farther east and gotten a little bigger, and they would see that the two other bright lights—Jupiter and Venus—were in slightly different spots than just one night earlier. Maybe then a person or two would be hooked. Maybe they would follow the moon’s movement for the next week as it grew to full, watching as Jupiter appeared lower night after night, eventually leaving Venus alone in the sky. It would be a show worth following. I knew Lilah and I would watch it. Even when we were continents apart, we’d always be looking for the things that moved in the sky.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would never have been possible without the contributions of many people involved in the research and events described here. I would like to especially thank Jean Mueller and Kevin Rykoski for their early encouragement of and help with the search for large objects in the outer solar system, and Chad Trujillo and David Rabinowitz for many years of hard work and foresight into what might be out there and how to find it. Brian Marsden was always a voice of wisdom and kindness in the otherwise arcane world of solar system politics. My students throughout this period, Antonin Bouchez, Adam Burgasser, Lindsey Malcolm, Kris Barkume, Emily Schaller, Darin Ragozzine, and Meg Schwamb—now Drs. Bouchez, Burgasser, Malcolm, Barkume, Schaller, Ragozzine, and Schwamb—all provided fresh eyes and minds that aided many of the scientific insights described here.
While the research and discoveries were key, the book itself might not have ever been begun without encouragement from Heather Schroder on an early abortive version, and then a jump start from my agents, Caroline Greeven and Marc Gerard, who finally set me to work. Cindy Spiegel took the initial manuscript and found a way to make small changes with big impacts and graciously laughed at me when I told her I was nervous to meet real writers. Brad Abernethy provided wonderful editorial advice and encouragement on an early draft, and explained to me that words mean what we think they mean when you say them. Emily Schaller, though mentioned above in her doctoral capacity, also deserves my deepest gratitude for reading every version of every chapter and always providing exactly the right combination of advice, criticism, and encouragement.
I regret that my father, Tom Brown, didn’t live to see most of the time period written about here, but he was nonetheless instrumental in instilling in me my love for space, science, and living on boats. My mother, Barbara Staggs, has always been my biggest fan, no matter what the arena, and my stepfather, Willie Staggs, my brother, Andy Brown, and my sister, Cammy Thornton, have always kindly tolerated this fact and provided balance, for which I am grateful.
Finally, I have to thank Diane and Lilah, who are the reason for the book and also the ones who allowed it to happen, by letting me mentally slip away on nights and on weekends to write the stories of us, and who continuously allow those stories to go on.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MIKE BROWN is the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, where he teaches classes from introductory geology to the formation of the solar system. He is a native of Huntsville, Alabama, where he grew up listening to the tests of the Saturn rockets preparing to go to the moon, and he received his undergraduate degree in physics from Princeton University and his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley. He and his research group spend their time searching for and studying the most distant objects in the solar system and drinking coffee.