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It also turned out that I was right not to get my hopes up about the size of Santa/Haumea. We learned that Haumea is covered in pure ice, and it is smaller than Pluto.

None of this was obvious when Santa/Haumea was first discovered. It just looked like a normal, albeit extra-bright, object in the Kuiper belt. David was the first to notice something strange: It got brighter and fainter every two hours, a fact that he quickly surmised was due to the fact that Haumea was oblong and tumbling end over end every four hours.

Huh, we all said.

Next we discovered two moons.

Weird, we all thought.

It wasn’t until eighteen months after the discovery that the final pieces of the puzzle came together. It was around midnight at a beach hotel on the island of Sicily. Kris Barkume, another graduate student of mine, was going to give a presentation the next morning at an international conference on the subject of her Ph.D. thesis, which was a study of the many moderately bright objects that had been discovered by Chad, David, and me. One subset of these objects appeared unusually icy compared to everything else out there. I had asked her to concentrate on trying to understand what might be going on with those objects. By the midnight before her talk she had learned much, but she still didn’t really have an explanation. We sat down on the sofa in the lobby of the hotel so that she could go over her talk with me.

We kept looking at the data on the odd icy objects, and still no obvious explanation came to mind. Finally she said, “Oh, and you know what’s funny? Their orbits around the sun are almost identical.”

They are?

“Yeah, look. And you know what else is funny? Santa has almost the same orbit.”

In my scientific life, most of the discoveries come as the result of seeing something for the first time. A picture appears on my screen and I suddenly know something big is out there. I know no one has ever seen it before, and I feel that little charge. This time it was different. There was no obvious picture on the screen. We were just sitting on the sofa. But instead of a little charge, I felt a full jolt of instant understanding. It all suddenly made sense. Santa’s spin, Santa’s moons, the little icy objects flying around it: They were all caused by that one glancing blow millennia ago; the moons and the strange little icy pieces flying around were all the debris blasted off the surface in what we now know to be the largest impact in the outer part of the solar system. Ah ha!

Kris gave her talk the next day, skillfully laying out all of the pieces of the puzzle that we had just discussed the night before and reassembling them to tell the story of one of the most dramatic events in the known history of the outer solar system. Everyone gasped.

It took us years after the initial discovery of Haumea to find out all of these details. Even today we’re still studying Haumea and learning more and more. In the days following the discovery, back when Haumea was just Santa, I knew little more than that there was a big bright object out there waiting for me to study it in detail at the start of the year.

In addition to studying Santa, I had other things on my mind that New Year. Though I had pushed hard to finish looking at all of the old pictures to find really distant objects before the end of the year, I had not only run out of time, I’d run into distraction. I admit that I spent less time thinking about the science of the outer solar system than I did worrying about the science of embryonic growth and early childhood development. Hours that could have been spent staring at pictures of the night sky were spent, instead, reading about statistics of timing of childbirth and first smiles. I was still obsessed; I had just changed the main object of my obsession.

• • •

I had been at work on January 5 for only a few hours when I decided to get up and take a walk. I needed to walk down the street and get some lunch. I had some things to think about. Lunch that day was the same as lunch most