How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [65]
I had figured out a way to make it all right.
I sent e-mails to Chad and David telling them the details. I sent an e-mail to the NASA official with whom I had promised to confidentially share the position of Santa, saying that there was no longer any need for secrecy. And I started answering inquiries from the press who had seen the announcement and were already starting to take notice. They wanted comments from the guy who usually found these large objects out in the Kuiper belt, and they wanted to know how someone had beaten me to it.
Diane woke up and came in the room, and I told her what had happened. She protested that Santa had been my discovery, and I explained to her that no one owns the sky. If someone points a telescope at something, sees it, and announces it for the first time, it is that person’s discovery, even if I knew about it earlier. In science, the first to announce takes the prize. The Spanish astronomers had announced Santa first, therefore they were the discoverers. Not only was there no argument that we could use to say otherwise, I didn’t want to argue otherwise. I think the system is a pretty good one, even when it means I get scooped.
Perhaps this was even a good thing, I explained to Diane. In a few months we would be announcing Xena and Easterbunny—both even bigger than Santa—and having an earlier announcement of a large object from a different group in a different country on a different continent added a bit to the excitement of it all. I could not have come up with a better plan myself.
Diane, without the benefit of the adrenaline that had been pumping through my system for the previous hour, stared at me as if I were a lunatic. But as lunatics go, I was not too crazy. With the question of who discovered Santa now settled, we might as well make something good out of it.
Diane went back to sleep, while I went back to my e-mail.
The astronomical-media grapevine had picked up on the fact that K40506A—the object that Chad and David had included in the titles of their talks at the conference in September—was the same as the new object just announced (which now had yet another name: 2003 EL61, based on the fact that the astronomers who had discovered it found it by looking through old images from 2003, much as I had been looking through old images myself when I found it). A headline from the BBC blared: “Conflicting Claims in Planetary Discovery.” The article breathlessly exclaimed how astronomers were already passionately arguing about whose claim was legitimate and how the dispute was bound to reach the highest levels of the International Astronomical Union. And that the object could well be twice the size of Pluto.
Twice the size of Pluto? We knew, of course, that 2003 EL61 or Santa or K40506A or, later, Haumea was only about a third the mass of Pluto. We had followed the orbit of Rudolph, the tiny moon going around Santa, and had accurately determined the mass in the process. But the new discoverers didn’t know anything about the moon. They had discovered Santa/2003 EL61 only a few days earlier and hadn’t taken the time to do anything but make the announcement. Nobody knew about the little moon, because I had never quite finished the paper announcing its discovery.
I suddenly acquired a new worry. If the press started gushing about something potentially bigger than Pluto that turned out to be only a third the size of Pluto, what would happen in a few months when we announced the existence of something that really was bigger than Pluto? Would people simply say, “Oh yeah, we heard about that one already”?
With the perspective of the years that followed, and with the help of a reasonable amount of sleep, it is now clear to me that my worry was misplaced. Things that are real, that are important, will go into textbooks, into documentaries; they will become part of our culture. Everything else will fade.