How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [36]
Object X was going to rise above the horizon at about 8:00 p.m. I had finished setting everything up and was waiting anxiously to get started for the night. The crew arrived at the summit around 5:00 p.m., and we chatted over the video about the plans for the evening. When the sun went down, the big dome swung open and the thirty-six little hexagonal mirrors pointed together to begin collecting the light from my first target in the sky.
My first job was to do a very quick check of all of the systems. We swung to a nice bright star, focused the telescope, and put the light from the bright star down through the prism to see if everything worked. After a few minutes, the spectrum appeared on one of the computer screens in front of me. I typed a few commands to take a quick look; the spectrum of the star looked just as it was supposed to. I stored the data away to later compare it to Object X. Finally, it was time to find Object X. We turned the telescope in the right direction and took a picture to see what was there, and the picture that appeared a minute later on my screen showed that there were twenty stars more or less where I expected Object X to be. Which one was it? I knew how to find out: It would be the one that moved. We did a little more calibration, and then twenty minutes later we took another picture. At first glance, the picture looked precisely the same, but I lined up the two pictures on the computer screen and blinked back and forth between them. Nineteen of the twenty stars reappeared in exactly the same place. One of the stars had shifted slightly. It wasn’t a star. It was Object X.
Though we had been studying it and tracking it for more than a month now, my first view of Object X through the giant Keck telescope—or at least on the computer screen twelve thousand feet below the giant Keck telescope—still amazed me. I was about to get the first peek at the composition of something that might be bigger than Pluto, something that only a handful of people on the planet even knew existed. I shifted the telescope slightly to direct the light of Object X into the prism, and we were ready. Though Object X was the brightest thing beyond Pluto that had ever been seen, it was still faint. Even with the biggest telescope in the world, we had to collect a large amount of light before we had enough to be able to make a sensible analysis. We stared at Object X all night long, stopping every once in a while to be sure that the light was indeed going into the prism. I watched the data come in and obsessively checked the weather reports. Everything went perfectly. No clouds, no fog, no telescope malfunctions. Everything went so perfectly that it was, to be honest, an incredibly tedious night. I occupied myself with loud music, junk food, double-triple-quadruple-checking that everything was going perfectly, and speculating about what I might find.
The sky began to brighten with the rising sun at around 5:30 a.m., and I finally made my way back to my little room. I slept until almost 11:00 a.m., went back to the control room, and again began preparing for the night. The second night was almost exactly like the first. I went to sleep around 6:00 a.m., got up the next day at 10:30 a.m., and was on a flight back to LAX by 1:00 p.m., confident that I had collected exactly the data I needed.
Two nights at the Keck telescope will provide weeks’ or even months’ worth of data to pore over. Though totally exhausted, I got started on the five-hour airplane ride back home, trying to use all of the pictures and data to create one coherent view of what we had seen. First, I had to carefully remove any effects that were caused by the telescope or the prism or the earth’s atmosphere rather than by Object X itself; second, I had to figure out what we were seeing; and third, I had to figure out what it all meant.
It quickly became clear that we were seeing dirty ice. Perhaps that should not have