How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [15]
I had spent most of the six years of my Ph.D. studying Jupiter and its volcanic moon, but it was time to start something new, and here was my chance. Go forth! I thought. Okay. But where? Sure, I knew how to use the telescopes and the instruments and how to point them at the region of the sky in which I was interested, and I knew how to collect and analyze the data. But figuring out where to point the telescopes in the first place and why you’re doing it is much harder. I was thoroughly overwhelmed. But I would not last long as an assistant professor if I didn’t discover something big soon. I took out the list of all of the telescopes with all their capabilities and thought and stared.
It had been five years since that afternoon when Jane Luu had first told me about the Kuiper belt, and by this point almost a hundred small bodies were known in distant orbits beyond Neptune. It was becoming increasingly clear that the study of these very distant, very faint objects was going to be a major new field in astronomy. Big telescopes are particularly good for studying very distant, very faint objects, and I suddenly had big telescopes at my disposal. Go forth! I thought.
I didn’t quite boldly go forth; instead I took a tiny step. I set out to test one of the hypotheses that was floating around in the scientific community at that time: that the objects in the Kuiper belt have mottled surfaces owing to the effects of craters formed by giant impacts, just like those that I could see on the moon. Proving or disproving this hypothesis would not be considered by anyone to be a major scientific advancement, but it was a start, and I needed a start. To test the hypothesis, I was going to spend three nights at the 200-inch Hale Telescope carefully studying a few objects out in the Kuiper belt to see if their surfaces were indeed mottled. The three nights I was scheduled to be at the telescope happened to fall over Thanksgiving, a fate that often befalls the youngest astronomer on the block. But the three nights were dark time. There would be no moon to disturb my view.
A day before Thanksgiving, I took the three-hour drive south from Pasadena, across the farmland (now housing developments) of the Chino Hills, through the dusty Pala reservation (now a multistory casino), and into the forested road (now a road through burned stumps) leading to Mount Palomar. The drive gives ample opportunity to stare at the sky and fret about occasional clouds and potential bad weather. This day there were no occasional clouds or potential bad weather: There was total cloud cover and continuous bad weather. The forecast was bleak. Astronomy is not always about bad weather at telescopes, but when you are young and eager for discovery or even just a few small steps, the nights of bad weather are the ones that seem to stick most in the mind.
The fog settled in thickly around the mountain as I arrived at the top and drove to the ornate old two-story heavy stucco dining and sleeping area known as the Monastery (which was an appropriate image for the earlier days of astronomy, when women were not allowed to stay). I went to the telescope to set up the instruments for the night of work; I spent hours in the windowless dome testing and calibrating and double-checking all of the settings I was going to use. As I finally stepped outside to walk to dinner, a light snow began to fall. After dinner the snow stopped, but a dense fog remained for the night. I stayed awake the whole time, hoping that somehow the fog would lift and I could