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By Root 182 0

X was going and predicted where it should have been on a particular date a few months earlier. I then searched the archive for images at that position. Not surprisingly, there were none taken on the particular date I was looking for, but there were some taken a few weeks earlier. I went back and calculated the position of Object X for a few weeks earlier, and luckily, the position was right on that image. I downloaded the image from the archive and displayed it on my computer. The picture was full of indistinguishable stars. How could I know which was Object X? The only way to distinguish our discovery from the many, many stars in the sky was to see it move. But there was only one picture from that night, so there was no way to see it move. I could, however, go back to the archive and find a picture of that part of the sky taken a year earlier. Object X was moving, so a year earlier it would have been somewhere else entirely. I compared the pictures from the night when Object X was supposed to be there to the earlier pictures. It’s easy on the computer; you just line the pictures up, press a few buttons, and the two pictures blink back and forth like a very short and repetitive movie. The two pictures were nearly identical. The stars and the galaxies had not changed at all over the year. But there, in the middle of the more recent picture, was a new starlike object that hadn’t been there the year before.

That was what I was looking for; I still couldn’t tell for sure that it was an object that was moving, but it certainly was one that hadn’t been visible a year earlier. There are many things in the sky that can appear where they weren’t seen before—stars that get brighter, stars that explode—so I didn’t know for sure if this was our Object X or not. But if I assumed it was, I could calculate a little better where the object was going. With this more refined calculation, I could figure out where Object X should have been yet another full year earlier. I then restarted the whole process. Look for a picture in the right place; realize it is not quite the right time; revise the time; find the place; find an earlier comparison; look for something new. There it was! Right where I had predicted! I ran across the hall to tell Chad I had found Object X from a year earlier. He had found it a few minutes before me and was already looking for pictures from two years earlier. We were racing down the right trail.

We quickly followed Object X back for about three years, which was the limit of the data we could find online in the archive. While we were sitting in my office pondering what we might do next, Chad wondered aloud if perhaps Object X might be found on Charlie Kowal’s plates. Ah yes. Charlie Kowal’s plates.

Most of us have a blind spot, something we can’t see even though it is right in front of us. Charlie Kowal’s plates were directly in my blind spot. I knew about them but preferred not to think about them. Why? Kowal had, years earlier, proved that there were no planets out past Pluto. Since this information did not fit well into my view of the solar system, I chose not to think about it.

Charlie Kowal was an astronomer who had worked at Palomar Observatory in the 1970s and 1980s. He had decided to do something that no one had ever tried before: use the Palomar 48-inch Schmidt Telescope to find a planet beyond Pluto. At the time, Planet X was generally expected to exist (this was the 1970s, before the alleged evidence for the influence of Planet X on the outer planets had been thoroughly discredited), the 48-inch Schmidt was designed to cover large areas of the sky, and no one had mounted a serious search since Clyde Tombaugh. Thirty years later I would tell other astronomers about my search for planets, and they would frequently look at me critically and say, “Charlie Kowal did that thirty years ago, and he showed there was nothing there.”

I had reasons for ignoring the critical astronomers. Kowal had, indeed, done almost exactly the same thing, but thirty years earlier he hadn’t had computers around to do all of the searching