How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [66]
First, to quickly answer all of the e-mail questions I was getting from reporters, I made a website describing 2003 EL61 and what we knew about it. I put a picture of Santa and its moon Rudolph on the site, showed the orbit, and explained how we knew that Santa was only a third the mass of Pluto. I described how we had found it back during the previous December and were preparing a paper describing the discovery. And then I wrote extensively about why I thought that the accepted scientific practice of assigning discovery rights to the first person to announce was the right thing to do.
Why was it the right thing to do? It is the only way I can think of to strike the right balance between the desire of the broad community to have all information be public immediately and the desire of the individual to keep a discovery secret for years while slowly studying all of the implications and making all of the important findings before anyone else gets a crack at it. Both of these are natural desires. Neither of these is a particularly good idea. Instant disclosure leads to unvetted science being thrust into the community (such as the claim that 2003 EL61 was twice the size of Pluto), and it leads to a lowering of the incentives to make the discoveries in the first place. On the other hand, keeping discoveries secret prevents the broader scientific community from learning even more about the discoveries.
It took science a while to settle on the present system. In 1610, while watching Venus with his new telescope, Galileo noticed that it went through phases identical to those of the moon. He knew that his discovery was big, and he wanted to make sure everyone knew he had found it first, but he also knew that the discovery would be even better if he could wait just a few more months for Venus to come around to the other side of the sun and show the opposite phases. I understand how he must have felt, waiting for his planet to emerge from behind the sun; Xena still had another month to go before I could finally see it with the Keck telescope. To prove that he had already discovered the phases of Venus, Galileo wrote to Kepler, “Haec immatura a me iam frustra leguntur oy,” which translates as something like “This was already tried by me in vain too early.” In case anyone else later claimed to have been the first to discover the phases of Venus, Galileo would be able to point out that his note to Kepler was really an anagram for “Cynthiae figuras aemulatur mater amorum,” or “The mother of love imitates the shape of Cynthia”: The mother of love—Venus—imitates the shape of Cynthia, the moon. The fact that Venus goes through phases just like the moon instantly proves that Venus goes around the sun, not the earth. Two millennia of understanding of the universe around us had to be thrown out the door at that moment.
These days anagrams don’t count. You have not officially discovered something until the moment of a scientific announcement.
I explained all of this on the website I put up overnight. Even so, I was tempted to add an anagram of my own: “The neat white elephant enthralls,” which rearranges as: “The tenth planet is near the whale,” which obviously refers to the fact that Xena is in the constellation Cetus, the whale. Unlike Galileo, though, I resisted. I was going to take my chances with Xena and Easterbunny.
Sometime in the late evening, I noticed an e-mail from Brian Marsden—gatekeeper of the solar system—with whom I had interacted on all of the other discoveries. He found the Spanish discovery suspicious, coming the same day as the name K40506A had appeared in public. He wanted to know if there was any way that the Spanish could possibly have been able to figure out where Santa was simply