How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [67]
No chance, I said. It would be as if I’d decided to nickname some city somewhere in the world Happytown, and simply hearing the nickname, someone had picked up a globe and pointed to the right spot. No chance whatsoever, I told Brian.
Around midnight I started working on the second part of my plan. I wanted to make sure that no one thought I was going to stake a claim. I wrote directly to the discoverer, an astronomer named José-Luis Ortiz.
Dear Dr. Ortiz—
Congratulations on your discovery! We found the object, too, about six months ago and have been studying it in detail for the past few months. It has a few interesting properties that you might find interesting. Most interestingly, it has a satellite, and the orbital solution gives a system mass of about 28% of that of the Pluto-Charon system. It’s still probably the biggest KBO around but it has a sufficiently high albedo that it is not quite as big or massive as Pluto. I’ve got a paper describing the satellite that, ironically, I was planning to submit tomorrow. I will forward the paper to you as I submit it.
I am sure that I will get inquiries about your new object from different people; is there [or is there going to be] a website describing your survey or your discovery that I can point people to?
Again, congratulations on a very nice discovery!
Mike
A critical analysis of my e-mail suggests several things. First, I repeat the word interesting a lot when I am tired. Second, I was amazingly generous for someone who hours earlier had been trying to figure out how to turn back time and claim the discovery. If Ortiz had heard the stories that we were going to put up a fight, he must have been quite relieved to get this friendly e-mail congratulating him on his discovery. Third, I parsed my words very carefully. We “found” the object, but Ortiz had “discovered” it, and I repeatedly called it “your” object. But I was not 100 percent straightforward. The claim that we were planning to submit the paper the following day was now true, but it hadn’t been true until we’d learned of this discovery. Overall, when I look back on this e-mail years after the fact, I am proud of myself for having written it.
Lilah was awake for a late-night feed, and it was my turn. She drank quickly and went back to sleep, not aware that anything in particular was going on.
I had one more task that night before going to sleep. I needed to finish the paper about Santa. I dug out my notes from twenty days earlier and tried to remember what else I had left to do. Very little, it turned out. In only a few more hours, I had tidied up the manuscript, finished one more calculation, uploaded everything to the website of the scientific journal, and pressed “submit.” The paper that was supposed to accompany the announcement of the existence of Santa was on its way, though it was now a paper describing an object called 2003 EL61 that had been discovered by someone else. I linked the paper to my own website so it could be found by all and crawled to bed as Diane was getting up to feed Lilah.
I didn’t sleep. Brian Marsden’s question about a link between “K40506A” appearing publicly and the Spanish discovery kept circling in my brain. Still, I couldn’t imagine how the name K40506A could be used to discover Santa. Finally, I got up, went back to my computer, and googled “K40506A.” First up were the stories now appearing overnight about the discovery. Second were the titles of Chad’s and David’s talks. Third was something strange: a list of objects that had been observed by a telescope in Chile one particular night in May, including an object called K40506A. And it told where the object was.
What was this?
The address of the webpage was long. I went up successive levels of the tree and finally realized that the list was a record from a telescope in Chile that David had been using to watch Santa; the list was not even from the telescope itself, but rather from an astronomer at the University of Ohio who had built and kept track of the camera that the telescope used. And