How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [72]
Interestingly, after some time, a countertheme began to develop among the members of the chat group. Not everyone appeared to be convinced that the discovery of 2003 EL61/Santa had been legitimate on the part of the Spanish group, and they started asking Ortiz probing questions. One particular question interested me: Did Ortiz know about our discovery of Santa before he claimed that he had discovered it himself? Had he ever accessed the website with all of the coordinates? Ortiz never responded, though his friend the German amateur defended him viciously through counterattack and accusation. It was all quite ugly, though perhaps no more so than many other chat groups on the Internet these days. I figured it was best to stay out of the fray.
A week and a half after the initial announcements, I got a phone call out of the blue from an astronomer I didn’t know. Rick Pogge was a professor at Ohio State University, and his website database was the one that had been tapped into, forcing us to make the sudden announcement of Xena and Easterbunny. He was apologetic about what had happened. I told him not to worry; it would not have occurred to us or to someone else that anyone could have figured out a way to use these generally dull databases for nefarious purposes. And it would have been even less likely to occur to us that someone would actually do it. He then described all of his recent changes to the database, explaining how this sort of thing would never occur again.
“Great,” I said. “That sounds great.”
“But there’s something more that you need to know,” Rick said.
More?
Rick then told me an interesting story.
He, like everyone else, had first learned about Xena and Easterbunny when he’d read the accounts of the press conference a week and a half earlier. As scattered press reports came out about someone tapping into some database, Rick first thought it was a really unfortunate story; then he thought, Wait, is that my database? Indeed, Rick had built the camera that was mounted on the telescope in Chile that we had been using to monitor Santa, Xena, and Easterbunny. One particularly nice feature of that telescope in Chile was that for routine observations, like taking pictures of the positions of our Kuiper belt object, we didn’t have to fly to Chile each time we wanted a picture, but instead a person permanently stationed in Chile would take the pictures we needed using the camera that Rick had built. Rick then maintained the database of observations that allowed astronomers to access their pictures after the camera had taken them.
After suspecting that perhaps it was this database that had been tapped into, Rick became curious and began to look through the computer logs to see who had accessed the database. In the years that the database had been up, it was accessed almost exclusively by people who were supposed to be accessing it: the astronomers who were using the telescope that the database related to. Occasionally inadvertent access would show up once and never again.
But the records also showed that one day in late July something odd had happened. A computer address that Rick didn’t recognize accessed the database multiple times in quick succession. Each time it accessed the database, it was pointing to a different webpage that showed the location of an object named K40506A on different dates. Rick looked up the computer address to see where it was from. It was from Spain. He looked in more detail. It was from the institute in Spain where Ortiz was a professor. This access to the database occurred two days before Ortiz announced the discovery of 2003 EL61. Ortiz had known all along.
I sat at my end of the phone, stunned. I had Rick go back and tell me precise dates, times, and the computer