How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [25]
Chapter Four
THE SECOND-BEST THING
In June of 2002, Chad Trujillo walked into my office and announced, “We just found something bigger than Pluto.” It turned out to be the second-best thing that happened to me that week, and it wasn’t even true.
Chad had recently moved from Hawaii to California to work with me on a brand-new project: using the 48-inch Schmidt Telescope at Palomar Observatory to find planets. Yes, the project sounds familiar, and yes, I had spent three years using exactly the same telescope to find exactly the same planets, and I had thoroughly failed to find anything. Yes, I had even been strongly advised by people who were concerned with my career and who had influence over whether I, a young assistant professor, stayed at Caltech or not, to quit this planet searching altogether and do something more respectable. But really, how could I just stop? Sure, we had looked at a lot of the sky—more than anyone else since Clyde Tombaugh had discovered Pluto seventy years earlier—but we hadn’t looked at the whole sky. So how do you know that you’ve done enough? If there is only one or two or even just three new planets out there waiting to be found, what are the chances that you just didn’t look in quite the right spot? And how could you really convince yourself that there was nothing there unless you looked in every single corner where things might be hiding? Maybe the whales really had just slipped through the net.
In the two years after I finally declared my initial search unsuccessful, every once in a while I would get a phone call or an e-mail from a friend who remembered that I had spent a long time talking about searching for planets, and the friend would invariably say something like “Hey, I just read in the newspaper that someone found a new planet, did you hear about it?” My breathing would stop while my pulse doubled as I tried to casually use my now-shaky fingers to quickly search my computer for the news of the day. “Oh, no, I haven’t heard, so, really, probably it’s nothing. Nothing at all.” At least I hoped. After all these years, the idea that someday someone would call me up and casually tell me that someone else had found a planet that I had missed still haunted me. Each time it happened, I would search the news and find, to the sudden restarting of my breath and calming of my pulse, that yes, indeed, a new planet had been found, but it was not a tenth planet orbiting around our sun, it was a planet orbiting a distant star far removed from our solar system. And I could then quickly tell the person how exciting it was that all of these new planets were being discovered around other stars and about how much we were learning, and how, oh, no, this was not the sort of planet I had been looking for at all. No one else was looking for planets out at the edge of our own solar system—at least that’s what I thought. What I hoped.
Though my first search had come to nothing scientifically, planets were still never far from my mind. I still wanted to find one. I just needed a new way to do it.
Less than a year after the first failure, I was back to work on the sky, and this time I was determined to do the job right. It was 2001, and though perhaps Arthur C. Clarke’s predictions of space tourism and obelisks on satellites of Jupiter had not come true, it was finally time to get rid of the hundred-year-old technology of the photographic plates. To some, it was a sad day when the photographic plate handling system at the 48-inch telescope was dismantled, though