How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [64]
I checked online and sure enough, the titles had been posted a day or two earlier, and people were already poring over them to see what we—and everyone else—were up to in advance of the actual meeting.
In the late afternoon, I wrote back to the NASA official and the distant colleague and said that we planned an official announcement of K40506A at the meeting in September, but that if it would be helpful for their research (and they could keep a secret), I would be happy to share the coordinates of the object earlier. I tried to be smooth and wrote:
We weren’t planning on making much of a big deal about this one. The mass is 32% that of Pluto, based on an orbital solution of its satellite. But we figure people are tired of hearing “almost as big as Pluto.” We’re waiting now for “bigger than Pluto.”
Waiting, indeed. We were still months away from the planned announcement of Xena and Easterbunny, but the wait would be much shorter than I imagined.
I spent the next forty-five minutes cooking dinner, washing dishes, and putting real laundry detergent in the washing machine. Lilah woke up from her nap. Diane fed her. Lilah went back to sleep. I fed Diane. Diane went back to sleep. I fed myself. I was about to go back to sleep but instead checked my e-mail again.
An even stranger e-mail this time, from a colleague with whom we had already shared information about Santa so that he could help us with some of our ongoing studies. All he wrote was:
Mike, is this one of yours?
What then followed was a list of dates and positions in the sky of the location of an object discovered a day or two earlier by—by whom?—a name I didn’t recognize, at a telescope I had never heard of.
My brain clicked in a little as I scanned the sky coordinates on the list. I’m not the type of guy to memorize coordinates of everything in the sky, but I knew that Santa was high in the midnight sky in about the April time frame. So were the coordinates on the list. I knew how bright Santa was; the brightness of the object on the list agreed closely.
My sluggish brain was now trying to accelerate to full speed for the first time in nineteen days. I did some quick calculations to get the precise coordinates of Santa on the days on the list, and I compared. Perfect fit. Santa had been found.
I remember this moment as a sharp pain in my stomach. We had been scooped. After discovering Santa six months earlier, and working hard to do a thorough job and write a scientific paper on the discovery (and failing, by one day, because of Lilah being born just a bit earlier than I had expected), someone had come out of nowhere and kicked us in the gut.
Who were these people, and what right did they have to take my objects? My objects! Santa had been my baby for six months already. I looked up the culprits. I had never heard of them. They were at a small Spanish university, and they had never discovered anything previously. How could this have happened?
Chad sent an e-mail; someone had told him, too. He wrote:
Someone found Santa and beat us to the discovery!
There must be a way to make this all go away, I remember thinking. Maybe we could explain that we knew about it first. Or that our talk title was our announcement, our proof that we had been there first. Maybe there was still some way to salvage our discovery. There had to be a way. I was exhausted, but I knew that, with some sleep, I could find a way.
I heard Lilah cry. Diane was still trying to take a little post-dinner nap, so I let her sleep and went in to check on Lilah. I put on some music and danced with her for a while in her room. Just a few days earlier she had started making real