How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [42]
Well. Okay. No. I really didn’t.
“Then why exactly do you want to quit?”
Because it was going to be hard work. Because I didn’t have help anymore. Because I wasn’t certain I’d be able to pull it off alone. Because I had been working on it for a couple of weeks and had hit what felt like insurmountable roadblocks.
Looking back from a perspective of more than half a decade later, I think of this conversation as being as momentous as the moment when Diane walked through the door of the 200-inch Hale Telescope that first time that I saw her and my life irrevocably changed. A decade of floundering had ended that moment. This time the floundering had been for only a few months, but I had been floundering nonetheless. I can now even identify what the problem was, though I couldn’t have done so at the time. My biggest problem was not that the camera had specks or that the software was not up to the task. My biggest problem was that I had let myself become a normal person instead of an astronomer. I was believing what most people thought, because “most people” now included me.
When I hired Chad and set him to work, he was so good at it that I had spent most of the previous year or so enjoying my life. Most nights I even left work at an almost reasonable hour and went home and made dinner for Diane—and the nights I didn’t were usually because she was working late, not me. In the year before the new camera had been connected, Diane and I had married, gone on a monthlong honeymoon to South America, been on vacations, fixed up our little house. In short, we were behaving like normal people. I had never quite behaved like a normal person before.
I could do all of this because Chad was hard at work every night scanning the skies. And he periodically let me know how it was going. But, really, I didn’t know much about the details of what he was doing.
Now Chad had moved on to a new job, and I was left with a big complicated system that was suddenly mine alone. And a major component of the system had just changed, and everything needed to be fixed, and no one knew how to do it.
Antonin and I were still drinking our coffee. “Keep looking,” Antonin said. “How could there be nothing left to find?”
I had used that same argument myself. How could there be nothing left to find? How could this really be the end of the solar system?
I drank more coffee. I stared into space. How would I do it? There was no way I could get someone up to speed quickly enough to keep going. We were still scanning the skies every single night. I didn’t have the time to wait months or years for someone new to come on board to get things going. I needed someone right now.
And then I thought of someone who was actually pretty good at this sort of thing and even knew a bit about it already. Me. It would mean an end to being normal, to going home most nights and cooking dinner, but it would mean that the solar system didn’t have to end.
I finished my coffee, and Antonin and I headed back toward campus, but I took a quick detour to Diane’s office. She was between meetings. I told her about the problems and the 37,000 objects and about the solar system that I didn’t want to end and how the only solution was to start doing all the work myself. She looked at me, smiled, and said, “Go find a planet.”
In the end, the solution to what to do with 37,000 objects in one night turned out to be deceptively simple: I let it go. After a few more nights of collecting data and finding 33,000, 50,000, 20,000, and 42,000 objects, patterns began to emerge. Almost all of the camera junk turned out to be in a few places on the images. If I just threw some parts of the pictures away, ignoring what was there, then everything else was suddenly manageable. That meant, of course, that if something real was there I had to throw it away, too. But it was a price I was willing to pay. I finally settled on throwing away about 10 percent of the sky to get rid of 99.7 percent of the camera junk. For the first night’s worth of data, I went from 37,000 potential objects to look at to about