How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [47]
After Quaoar, I learned an important lesson. Names should be pronounceable. In the end, when it was time for a real name for Dutch, I settled on Sedna. Sedna is simple and easily pronounced, and has a serene sound to it.
The name Sedna comes from Inuit mythology. Since Dutch was so far away from the sun and was the coldest object anyone had ever seen in the solar system, I was looking for a name from an appropriately cold region. I quickly settled on Inuit as the closest polar mythology to my home in Pasadena. Sedna is the goddess of the sea. She lives in an ice cave at the bottom of the ocean, which seemed pretty cold to me. Plus the name has only two vowels—and they are not in a row. She does not, however, have a pleasant backstory.
In Inuit mythology, Sedna was a young girl who refused to marry any of her many suitors. Her father finally forced her to marry a mysterious stranger who couldn’t be seen beneath his cloak. The stranger was a raven, who took the girl back to his nest. Her father finally heard his daughter’s screams and, filled with remorse, crossed the sea in his kayak to rescue her. As he was paddling her away, the raven appeared and caused a great storm.
A typical story line in mythology goes as follows: The father sees the error of his ways and saves his daughter; the evil suitor attempts to take her back; the father vanquishes the suitor. In the Inuit myth, however, things go slightly differently.
The father, fearing for his own life, throws his daughter overboard into the storm and back to the raven. The girl begins to sink. She grabs the side of the boat to hang on to. The father takes out his knife and cuts off her fingers to keep her from climbing aboard. The girl sinks and becomes the goddess of the sea. Her fingers and thumbs become the seals and whales of the ocean. She is angry much of the time—understandably so—and causes storms to thwart the hunters. But she is soothed when a shaman swims to the bottom of the ocean and brushes her hair (having no fingers, she can’t hold a brush), and then she relents and lets hunters safely venture again. I hope Sedna is happier now, at the bottom of the ocean, and, especially, up in the sky, than she was with her creepy father or raven husband.
Contemporary Inuits make fantastical carvings of their mythological figures. The weekend before the press conference at which I was going to reveal Sedna to an unsuspecting world, I signed on to eBay and found that Sedna carvings could be had for a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. To celebrate the discovery, I bought what to me was a particularly nice—and particularly affordable—carving in which Sedna has the body of a seal, the arms of a woman, hands with no fingers, and a mermaidlike face. The Sedna carving sits in the center of my desk to this day, surrounded by other mementos of planetary discovery. The eBay bidding on the Sedna carving closed on Sunday night. The press conference was on Monday. By the end of the day on Monday, I checked and saw that prices of Sedna carvings had gone up by a factor of two. Yes! Maybe I had a future in Wall Street insider trading when discoveries in the solar system finally came to an end.
The name was a hit. I was surprised to discover that a good name with an interesting story behind it could lead people to have an emotional connection with an unseen object in space, though perhaps it shouldn’t have been such a revelation to me, given people’s attachment to Pluto. Quaoar never really caught on, but Sedna struck a nerve. Newspaper headlines proclaimed, “Welcome Sedna!” My mailbox began to be flooded with drawings from schoolkids who crayoned in nice red Sedna in the solar system right after Pluto. Astrologers quickly hit on the story of Sedna to declare that Sedna would herald a new feminine influence over environmental stewardship. Or awareness