How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [59]
The universe speaks to me in strange ways. One day when I was in graduate school, two of my best friends who didn’t know each other separately told me that they were each expecting their first child. Strange, I thought, when the second friend told me. What could this mean? What is the universe telling me? I thought about it for a while and came to the conclusion that, clearly, this meant that my sister, who had been married for several years by this point, must be pregnant. What else could the universe be trying to say? I talked to my mother that very night.
“I think Cammy is pregnant.”
“What?” my mother replied. “Have you just talked to her?”
“No, the universe told me.”
My mother never quite knows how seriously to take me.
When my sister called my mother the very next day and said, “Mom, guess what?” my mother said, “You’re pregnant.” My sister was extra flabbergasted when the answer to “How did you know that?” was “Mike told me.”
When my sister called me, she asked, “Are you studying astronomy or astrology?”
Apparently my communication with the universe is not always so reliable—I just missed the signs this time. Petunia was growing. Rudolph was revolving around Santa. Xena—mighty Xena!—was swinging toward the night sky. The universe was presumably trying to warn me what I didn’t learn until April 3. While sorting through pictures from a few nights earlier I saw the brightest thing on my screen ever. Brighter than Xena. Brighter than Santa.
“Here we go again,” I thought.
The subject line of the e-mail that I sent to Chad and Dave was:
raining = pouring
It was raining so hard that I was in danger of drowning.
We named this new object, found two days after Easter, Easterbunny.
Easterbunny was so bright that it was probably bigger than Pluto, too, or maybe the same size. We quickly took a look at it with the Keck telescope and realized that, like Xena, Easterbunny had a surface that looked like Pluto’s. The solar system had gone from one to two to three Pluto-like objects in just three months.
I almost felt bad. This was too much! How was I going to give everything the attention that it deserved? I needed a plan, now.
Our goal was to follow good scientific practice and announce the existence of these objects to the world with a full scientific account in a scientific journal. But full scientific accounts take time. We had done well with our previous discoveries. Quaoar had taken about four months from discovery to scientific paper. Sedna had taken about the same. We were pretty proud of our speed. But even if we could keep up the fast rate, we suddenly had Santa and Xena and now even Easterbunny to write papers about.
David and Chad and I made a plan. Santa had been discovered first, and we knew the most about it already. We would each write papers on different aspects of it. Whenever the first paper was finished, we would have a low-fanfare announcement. We knew that Santa was smaller than Pluto, and we didn’t yet know all of the details of Santa’s massive collision and debris field, so we thought there would not be too much interest in it for the public. My goal was to get a paper on Santa finished before the birth of Petunia, since I still had a little free time. Her due date was now only three months away.
We would then save the big excitement for Xena and Easterbunny, which were sure to cause a stir. We were scheduled to be at the Keck telescope in September to get a first really good look at Xena. With some intense work we could have a scientific paper ready a month after that (the delusions of first-time parents astound me to this day) and make the announcement around the beginning of October. I liked this back-to-school timing, as I thought having the announcement of one or two new objects bigger than Pluto would be the sort of thing that schoolkids would think was cool to talk about in class.
The plan required writing perhaps the three most important scientific papers of my life in under six months