How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [70]
I told him about the discovery. When he asked me the name of the new planet, I realized that I didn’t even know yet what the official license plate number designation was going to be (it turned out to be 2003 UB313). I told him that it had no name yet.
“Well, what do you guys call it among yourselves?” Ken wanted to know.
“Xena. It will have a real name soon, but for now we call it Xena.”
Ken chuckled and wrote it down.
Contrary to what I thought that morning, it would not get a real name soon. After Ken wrote it down that first time, Xena became its nickname for more than a year. There are many people, I believe, who still think that the object remains named Xena.
Ken Chang was right. The story did end up missing almost all of the Saturday and Sunday papers, and though the discovery was not exactly old news by Monday, it was indeed clear that Friday at 4:00 p.m. is not the right time to make a press announcement—unless, perhaps, you are announcing that you are going back to rehab, and you hope no one notices. But at least, by virtue of that one accidental phone call, the announcement of the discovery of the tenth planet hit the front page of The New York Times on Saturday, July 30, 2005.
By about noon on Friday, I had built a webpage describing Xena. It was spare but would have to do. I drove up to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory—JPL—where they had the facilities to put on a major press conference.
I can no longer put together a timeline for the rest of that day; most of the memories are simply too jumbled. I recall at some point changing shirts and shaving in the men’s room at the press building at JPL. I don’t remember a single thing I or anyone else said at the press conference, though I vaguely remember standing in front of a TV camera with a small speaker in my ear; every three minutes I was connected by satellite to some different TV show. I don’t know what I said, and I certainly don’t want to know how I looked.
I drove home late in the evening. A few minutes after arriving home, the head of the media department at JPL called me to double-check that I was all right. I remember that conversation extremely well. “I’m fine,” I said. “I’m lying on the bed and Lilah is asleep in my arms. What could be better?”
“Good,” she said. “Then would you mind doing Good Morning America on Monday morning, and they want you to bring Lilah.”
At 2:00 a.m. on Monday, Diane, Lilah, and I drove down to a Hollywood studio. Normally I would consider this hour to be thoroughly indecent, but given the round-the-clock schedule we were currently on, 2:00 a.m. was no better or worse a time than 2:00 p.m. Actually, it was better, as there was no traffic.
When I arrived at the studio, I was hooked up with earpieces again and talked about planets, old and new, with Charlie Gibson and Diane Sawyer. At the end, my wife brought Lilah over for the cameras. Two thousand miles away, in Alabama, my mother was on the edge of her seat. She already knew about all of the planet parts, so that was just filler. But it was the first time she had ever seen Lilah.
According to my calendar, the following weeks were a storm of interviews and talks and TV appearances, of which I have no memory. If you look at the records I kept of Lilah’s eating and sleeping and crying and smiling, you would not know that any of it had happened.
A week after the biggest scientific announcement of my life, it seems that all I cared about was whether or not Lilah would sleep and how frequently she would feed.
Day 31 (7 Aug 2005): Lilah is one month today! To celebrate her birthday she had a record sleep last night, almost 5 hours! It included an hour-long car ride at the beginning, which may or may not have contributed, but to top it off she then had two 3½-hour sleep sessions in a row. If you look carefully you will also note that she is, in general, stretching things out more (well, at least at night). For the past 5 days we have dropped from 10 feeds a day to 9 feeds a day. This may not seem like much to you, but it is about 45 minutes