How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [48]
The only problem with the name was that I had jumped the gun and broken the astronomical naming rules.
This was not the first time I had broken the rules. When I announced the discovery and name of Quaoar, it turned out that I had not sought approval through the proper channels in the International Astronomical Union. I didn’t realize that I was supposed to have tracked down the Committee on Small Body Nomenclature of the International Astronomical Union and proposed the name, allowing the august committee to deliberate and declare whether or not my name was appropriate. Luckily, the name Quaoar was perfectly appropriate, so the CSBN of the IAU promptly approved the name without my having gone through the channels, though eventually it did make me fill out the official form.
No harm done, and it seemed to me that nobody cared much. At least, that’s what I thought.
Unknown to me there was a group who cared a lot. Somewhere in the far corner of the Internet was a chat group composed of astronomy enthusiasts who had appointed themselves the celestial police. I didn’t know they existed until one day a student of mine pointed me to their chat site with the comment “Wow, they really hate you, don’t they?” And it did seem as if they hated me, or at least felt that antagonistic indignation that can be pulled off particularly well on the Internet.
They were angry because with Sedna, I had not only broken the rules, I had done so on purpose. At the time of the announcement of Sedna’s existence, we didn’t quite have enough data for Sedna to officially qualify for a name—it would take us another few months to have what we needed. The rules on when an object qualifies for a name are obscure, uninteresting, and designed to keep names from being given to insignificant asteroids that are seen a few times, then never again. Nonetheless, they are the rules, and to the zealous enthusiasts, they must be followed at all cost to prevent astronomical chaos from breaking out.
I admit that in the week before the announcement, even I worried a bit about breaking the rules. I am, by nature, a rule follower. But I really wanted Dutch to be Sedna in time for the announcement. I thought it mattered—and, it turned out, based on those crayon drawings, it did. Finally I decided I would buck the rules, though politely. I called Brian Marsden, an astronomer at Harvard University who was, in my opinion, the gatekeeper of the solar system. He was the person to whom you sent the very first announcements of discoveries. He checked that your calculations were right. He put your discovery on the official list. And he was always the first to be amazed and say, “Wow! What a great discovery.” Brian was also the secretary of the Committee on Small Body Nomenclature. I told him what I was planning to do. He asked if he could tell the chair of the committee ahead of time. Of course, I said. Everyone agreed that a name was a good thing and that Sedna was a good name.
To the chat group, though, I was a rule breaker in need of punishment. One particularly agitated enthusiast tried very hard to prevent me from officially naming Sedna Sedna. Before Sedna was quite eligible for an official name, he proposed, through the official channels, that an unremarkable, hitherto anonymous asteroid—which was nonetheless eligible for a name—be named Sedna, after the Inuit goddess of the sea. No two things in the solar system can have the same name, so my Sedna would have had to get a different name.
“Rejected,” declared Brian Marsden. Names of important mythological figures would be used only for important astronomical objects.
The enthusiast next proposed to name the unremarkable asteroid after Kathy Sedna, a Canadian singer.
“Clever,” responded Brian Marsden, who, being in charge also of when things are eligible for names, quickly realized that my Sedna was now eligible and made sure the name became official.
I found all of this pretty amusing at