How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [39]
What, indeed? Even as more and more objects in the Kuiper belt were being found, Pluto still stood out as being significantly larger than any of the rest—but it was larger than Quaoar by only a factor of two. Was that enough to doom Pluto? In many ways, the answer was clearly yes. If after only nine months of looking, we could find something half the size of Pluto, how much longer would it take to find something the size of Pluto? We figured it was only a matter of months. For the confirmed Pluto fans, finding something smaller than Pluto meant nothing; Pluto was still the biggest, and thus they could go on calling it a planet. Yet it seemed that perhaps Pluto, while not yet dead, was on its deathbed. As The Birmingham News quoted me as saying later that day, Quaoar was a big icy nail in the coffin of Pluto as a planet.
The week after we returned from Birmingham, Caltech threw a black-tie dinner to announce the kickoff of an ambitious fund-raising campaign. Many of the people at the dinner were donors who had been with Diane on one of her many Caltech travel-study trips around the world. Having just been in the newspapers a week earlier for the discovery of Quaoar, I was a minor celebrity at the party. Being engaged to Diane, though, made me a major celebrity.
I spent the evening in a conversational loop: “You’re the person who discovered that thing out past Pluto?”
Yes, indeed.
“I want to introduce you to my friend—hey, do you know Mike Brown? He’s the guy who discovered the thing past Pluto.”
“Sure, I know Mike; he’s the guy who is engaged to Diane Binney. Hey Mike, I want to introduce you to my friend—hey, do you know Mike Brown? He’s the guy who is engaged to Diane Binney.”
“Sure, I know Mike Brown—he’s the guy who discovered that thing out past Pluto. Let me introduce you to a friend who is really interested in planets.…”
Chapter Six
THE END OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM
Even today I spend much of my time exploring the outer edges of the solar system, looking for little worlds that have never before been seen, wondering what else is out there on the outskirts of our solar system. Someday I will have looked everywhere that the telescopes I have are capable of seeing, and then I guess I will have to declare that my days of exploring are finished.
It will be nice to finally stop fretting every night when I see a few clouds in the sky as the sun goes down, or when the moon is nearing full and I know that the section of sky we wanted to cover this month is not quite done. It might be nice to wake up in the morning and see red-tinged cumulus clouds beautifully strewn across the L.A. basin and not have to wonder what we missed last night. And even though the computer does most of the hard work of looking at all of the data and finding the things that move, something always goes a bit wrong and I am always fixing a little bit of computer code or making slight improvements. The computer even sends me text messages on my cell phone when something goes really wrong. More often than not, it seems, trouble occurs on Saturday mornings while I am sitting drinking my coffee.
Still, the fact that on any morning I might walk into my office and see something moving across the sky that no one has ever seen before, something bigger than anything found in perhaps a hundred years, adds an element of excitement to my life. I will be sad to be done, and what will I do after that?
I did almost quit once, a little more than a year after the announcement of Quaoar. I thought, at the time, that we had reached the end of the solar system.
Chad had moved back to Hawaii by then, eventually to marry, buy a house on the rainy, steamy, jungly northeast side of the Big Island, and work on telescopes. He and I (though, really, mostly he) had spent two long years staring at the sky night after night, and by the end of the two years we had covered 12 percent