How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [51]
That night, as the clock struck twelve, my five-year bet came to an end. I lost the bet, but I didn’t feel so bad. Instead of seeing the end of the solar system, I saw that everything was just beginning.
Chapter Seven
RAINING = POURING
The next morning, January 1, 2005, my whole household woke up early to walk down to the Rose Parade, which winds its way through Pasadena every New Year’s Day. In the still-dark early morning I was awake in time to find Jupiter bright in the sky before the sun came up. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. That was it: the end of the planets.
Maybe.
Unbeknownst to anyone—well, except for Diane, to whom I told everything, and my parents, who were visiting, and all of my students, and a few friends here and there—two days after Christmas I had discovered the brightest thing I had yet seen. I didn’t know for sure how big it was, so I was not in time to win my bet, but something that bright might well be a planet. In honor of the season when it was discovered, I called it Santa.
A few years earlier, my first reaction to the discovery of Santa would have been: I bet it’s bigger than Pluto! I’ve finally found the tenth planet! By now, though, I was a bit more skeptical. Quaoar and Sedna had both fooled me with their anomalously frosty surfaces, which made them appear much brighter than I expected. But even if Santa’s surface was as anomalously frosty as Sedna’s, it would still mean that Santa was the size of Pluto. But what if Santa were even frostier? What if Santa was covered in, say, pure ice, which would make it even shinier and brighter than Sedna? I wasn’t going to get my hopes up too much.
I sent e-mails to Chad and David telling them what we had found. I was careful not to definitively declare the discovery as bigger than Pluto, but I did mention that if it had a dark surface—as we had long assumed most objects in the Kuiper belt did—it would have to be almost as big as Mercury.
Over the next week, Chad, David, and I raced to see who could find old pictures of Santa to figure out what kind of orbit around the sun it had. Chad won and declared the orbit thoroughly normal. “Normal” in the case of the Kuiper belt means elliptical and tilted, but still within the swarm of all of the other Kuiper belt objects. After the oddness of Sedna, this normal orbit was almost a relief. At least something about the Kuiper belt was making sense.
Today I know Santa by its official name, chosen by David: Haumea. The mythological Haumea is the Hawaiian goddess of childbirth. Her many children, which compose a large subset of the population of Hawaiian deities, were broken off from different parts of her body. The astronomical Haumea has been equally prolific. In the years since its discovery, we have found many other objects in the outer solar system that we can now trace back to having originally been part of the surface of this object. We think that at one moment early in the history of the solar system, a much larger Haumea was smashed by another icy object in the Kuiper belt traveling at something like ten thousand miles per hour. Luckily for Haumea and for astronomers today, the impact was only a glancing blow. Had it been more head-on, Haumea would have thoroughly shattered and dispersed to the ends of the solar system. Instead, the glancing blow left the center of Haumea mostly intact, but large chunks of the surface went flying into space, while Haumea itself was left spinning faster than almost anything else in the solar system. Some of the chunks that were blasted off the surface didn’t go far; at least two are now in orbit around Haumea as small moons (when we first discovered these we called them Rudolph and Blitzen, but now they are named after children of Haumea: Hi’iaka, the patron of the Big Island of Hawaii and the goddess of hula, and Namaka, a sea spirit). Many more of the chunks were blasted so hard that they escaped Haumea entirely