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By Root 197 0

a shit.” She continued processing the days, the conversations about rings, the fact that she’d thought I was hopeless. She wanted to know when I had gotten the ring (on the street right outside the hotel, perhaps?), who else knew (my mother, of course), why it fit perfectly (I had surreptitiously tried on her rings, and they all fit perfectly on my pinky, which I then had measured), how I had managed to pick one she liked so much (I modeled it somewhat after her grandmother’s wedding band, to which I knew she was much attached). Finally I had to remind her that I had actually proposed and she had not, in fact, given me an answer. She looked up and said, “YES!”

• • •

The week back on campus was filled with people congratulating me. In the middle of the week, the chair of my department stuck his head in my office and invited me out for a walk. He had known Diane years longer than I had, so I was expecting some sort of congratulations followed by a lecture on how to treat her. “Congratulations,” he started, but surprised me instead with “you now have tenure.”

“Oh,” I remember saying. “Um. Thanks.”

“Thanks? Usually people are a bit more excited to hear this news.”

“Well, it’s only the second-most-exciting news of the week.”

Remarkably, receiving tenure at Caltech turned out to be only the third-most-exciting thing that happened that week. A day after my conversation with the chair of my department, Chad stuck his head in my office, looking no less relaxed than ever (perhaps having just come from surfing across town at Malibu), and said, “We just found something bigger than Pluto in the pictures from last night.”

Bigger than Pluto! This one I remember. Not as calm as Chad, I rushed across the hallway to see the pictures on the computer screen. The night before, the telescope had photographed an anonymous patch of the sky near the Milky Way galaxy, and there amid the thousands of stars was one tiny dot slowly inching across the sky. Chad had determined how far away it was (almost 50 percent farther from us than Pluto), and from that and from the brightness had guessed that the object was probably bigger than Pluto itself. It was certainly the largest new thing that anyone had found in the solar system for more than seventy years. This is what we had been hoping for. Only a dozen people in human history had ever discovered anything bigger going around the sun. It was the second-best thing that had happened to me that week.

Chapter Five

AN ICY NAIL

There is a critical tension in science between the very human desire to announce discoveries immediately (both because you are excited about them and because you don’t want to be scooped by someone else) and the very important need to carefully and systematically check and document your results. In some cases this documentation can take additional years of work. In the case of the new discovery that Chad had told me about, we were quite worried that someone else might stumble upon it in months or even weeks, so we put together a plan to try to learn everything we could about it in as short a time as possible, and we set ourselves a deadline of only four months to make an announcement, complete with a full scientific account of the discovery and anything else we could learn. For me, those months of trying not to tell anyone about our discovery was harder, even, than not telling Diane that I had had a ring in my pocket all along.

During this time, we decided that rather than repeating “the object that we just discovered,” we should give it a temporary name. We settled on Object X. “X” was for Planet X, for unknown, and, perhaps, for tenth planet.

As scientists, we were eager to know everything about Object X, but the first question on our minds, the one that would put everything else into context, was: What sort of orbit did Object X have? Did it go in a circle around the sun like the planets, or did it have an elongated orbit like Pluto and the other objects in the Kuiper belt? To answer this, we would have to track the object through its orbit and learn where it went.