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By Root 165 0

don’t work on hunches. We work on hypotheses and observations and plenty of evidence. Hunches don’t get you research funding, tenure at your university, or access to the world’s largest telescopes. But a hunch was all I had. No one had systematically looked across the sky for a new planet since the 1930s, when Pluto itself was found, and even though astronomers knew of almost five hundred bodies in the Kuiper belt, the searches had been, of necessity, piecemeal, and no one had yet mounted a careful search like the one that had uncovered Pluto. Now, seventy years after the discovery of Pluto, telescopes were bigger and better, computers made searches vastly more powerful, and astronomers simply knew more about what they were looking for. How could it be that if someone went and looked again for a new planet they wouldn’t find something that had been just beyond the reach of the telescopes in the 1930s? There had to be a tenth planet. The possibility that Pluto was a unique planetary oddball out at the edge of the solar system seemed absurd to me.

“I don’t have any evidence,” I told Sabine. “I don’t have any proof. I don’t have anything other than this deep feeling that another planet past Pluto makes sense. And I’m willing to bet that there’s one there.”

Scientists don’t bet much. We are supposed to deal in quantifiable levels of certainty and in statements that can be backed up with experiments and observations. Bets are simple assertions that you think you are right and that you believe what you are saying enough to risk something valuable if you’re wrong. There is nothing scientific about a bet at all; in fact, it is almost the opposite of science. In earlier years many scientists would have bet the farm against the big bang, evolution, and quantum mechanics, and the farm would be gone.

But still, there’s something appealing about betting. I had no solid evidence to go on, but bits and pieces of different facts and discoveries had, somehow, shaken together in my mind to form a hunch. Though I couldn’t prove it to a scientist, I was all but certain that I was correct. I couldn’t prove it, but I could definitely bet on it.

Sabine took the wager. The bet was that someone would find a new planet by December 31, 2004. The winner of the bet would receive five bottles of champagne, to be drunk in celebration of new planetary frontiers or in mourning for the sad limitations of our solar system.

We sat for a few minutes staring up at the telescope, thinking about planets.

“We’ve got one problem. We’ll never know if someone wins the bet,” I said.

“What?” she asked. “How could we not know whether or not someone finds a planet? Surely the entire world will hear about it. It’ll be pretty obvious.”

“Well, okay,” I said, “then I have one question for you: What is a planet?”

I needed to know the answer, because I wanted to find one myself.

• • •

Like most everyone else, I’ve known what a planet is since I was four or five years old, which for me would have been about 1970. I knew the moon even earlier. I grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, a thoroughly dedicated rocket town. The father of everyone I knew—mine included—was some sort of engineer working to build the Apollo rockets to send men to the moon. For a while as a child, I thought that when you grew up you became a rocket engineer if you were a boy and you married a rocket engineer if you were a girl; few other options in the world appeared to exist. When Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, I was pretty sure that that was exactly what I was going to be doing eventually, too. I drew picture books of rockets blasting off, of command capsules in orbit about the moon, of lunar modules landing next to giant lunar craters, and of parachutes deployed in the moments before splashdown.

By second grade I had learned enough about the moon to know that those giant craters I had been drawing earlier had been formed by meteors slamming into the moon’s surface. I figured out that if I went to the backyard and soaked the deep red dirt with a hose, I could throw rocks from above and make