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By Root 166 0

one o’clock position (again, you precision freaks, put that dot precisely 2⅜ of an inch from the sun). You’re forgiven if, at this point, you would like to now draw an oval around the sun by coming into the Kuiper belt before going back out to your one o’clock position. But don’t do it. Dutch never gets much closer to the sun than where you drew it. Instead, take your pencil and draw an oval around the sun that starts and ends at the position of Dutch; but at its most distant point, at the seven o’clock position, the oval needs to be farther away. How much farther? Almost 33 inches—three times the full length of your 8½-by-11-inch paper! Dutch never touches the Kuiper belt. It never comes close to Neptune. And it spends most of the time so far away from the comparatively tiny region that is the Kuiper belt that from Dutch, the sun would be just an extrabright star in the sky. There is nothing else like Dutch.

Now take your paper and put it in a safe place for later study. It will be on the final exam.

Even though nothing like Dutch had ever been seen before, I had an idea about what it was immediately.

One of the benefits and joys of teaching a comprehensive class on something like The Formation and Evolution of Planetary Systems is that you learn an awful lot about the formation and evolution of planetary systems. Much of my day (and late nights and early mornings) is spent with the concepts that I want to teach spinning in my mind. I see and continuously rearrange the outline for whatever is my next lecture as I am lying in bed or driving home or cooking dinner or eating breakfast. I mentally go through all of the connections and logic and calculations to make sure they make sense.

On the very day I realized that Dutch was unlike anything else known in the universe, I was mulling over my next class lecture, which was about the origin of comets. Dutch had an orbit almost like that of a comet. Comets are tiny balls of dirty ice that come from far out in the solar system, quickly swing by the sun, and return again. Dutch did the same, but it never came nearly as close to the sun as a comet, nor did it go nearly as far away from the sun as a comet. Comets acquire their distinct orbits through a complicated dance with giant planets and passing stars, and—I quickly calculated—Dutch never comes close enough to any of the planets to be a partner in any such dance. But while working on my lecture for the day, I quickly realized that Dutch could have acquired its odd orbit if, when the sun was born 4.5 billion years ago, the sun was not an only child but, rather, simply one in a litter of many stars. Before all the other stars went their own ways, they could have pushed Dutch around and put it exactly where it is now. Astronomers had speculated about such things for decades and had argued back and forth about whether it was true, and I had just found the thing that was going to answer all of those questions for good.

Discovery is exciting, no matter how big or small or close or distant. But in the end, even better is discovering something that is capable of transforming our entire view of the sun and the solar system. Dutch was not just a chunk of ice and rock at the edge of the solar system. It was a fossil left over from the birth of the sun. And as surely as a paleontologist can take a fossilized bone of a T. rex and learn what the earth was like 70 million years ago, I was pretty sure that we could examine this fossil in space—this object that could have been put in place only near the very moment of the sun’s birth—and learn more about the sun’s earliest childhood than ever before.

That class was the most astounding I have ever taught. I carefully explained the steps and the calculations that show why comets are where they are and why something like Dutch—which they still didn’t know about—could not possibly exist, at least given the standard picture of the formation of the solar system. And then I showed them Dutch. Finally, I went through the same calculations but now with different conditions 4.5 billion years ago