How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [73]
There was more.
On the first day that Ortiz had tried to announce the discovery, he had inadvertently sent the announcement through the wrong channels, so he received no reply. The next day, he had sent a much more thorough announcement, including new observations by his German friend and more data from other old images. All of these extra data would have required knowing the position of the object more accurately than before. The morning before Ortiz sent all of the old data, Rick’s database had been accessed once again. A quick flurry of websites had been viewed, each showing the position of K40506A on different nights.
I kept writing. I was going from feeling stunned to feeling slightly giddy. The Spanish guys had stolen Santa out of the database, but they had botched the job. There were fingerprints all over the scene of the crime. And now they were busted.
After I hung up the phone with Rick Pogge, I immediately called Brian Marsden.
“I knew it,” he said.
All I knew from Rick was that the computers accessing the database were at Ortiz’s institute in Spain. But Brian had an interesting idea. “Tell me those computer IP addresses,” he said. He then cross-checked them with e-mail he had received. The specific computer that had accessed the database the first time was the same computer from which the initial announcement was sent. The specific computer that had accessed the database the second time was the same computer from which the second announcement was sent. The first e-mail had come from Pablo Santos-Sanz, a student of Ortiz’s, while the second e-mail had come from Ortiz himself. The fingerprints matched perfectly.
Though I will likely never be able to confirm most of this, here is my hypothesis as to what actually happened:
On the second-to-last Wednesday in July, the titles for talks to be given at the big international conference were announced, including talks by Chad and David, which mentioned K40506A and described it as big and bright. The following Tuesday, Santos-Sanz noticed the titles, and, curious about K40506A, he typed it into Google. He was likely shocked (as I would be a week later when I did the same thing) to find precise information about where a telescope was pointed one night in May. After the initial shock, he must have felt some nervous excitement. He must have been savvy enough to realize that he might be able to find more information about where the telescope was pointed. He must have looked at the Web address and realized that it looked something like
www.astro.osu.edu/andicam/nightly_logs/2005/05/03
and he must have made the quick assumption that the last bit was the date. He changed it to something like
www.astro.osu.edu/andicam/nightly_logs/2005/05/05
and was suddenly rewarded with the position of K40506A on a different night. He collected a few more positions and set to work. Knowing precisely where the telescope was pointing over multiple nights is precisely the same as knowing where the object is on multiple nights. And knowing that means that you know enough to go find it yourself.
What happened next I cannot figure out. Here is the story as I envision it. I think that Ortiz and Santos-Sanz really were engaged in a legitimate search for objects in the Kuiper belt, even though they had not yet been successful. My guess is that they had never gotten around to writing the computer software to help them with their search, so they merely had a big pile of images dating back several years, with no way to look at them. It wouldn’t be surprising. As I had learned over the past few years, writing the computer programs to analyze the data is at least as hard as collecting the data itself. But armed with the previous positions of K40506A, Santos-Sanz no longer had to look through all of his images; he could quickly determine which ones might have the object on it, and he no longer needed to write complicated software to look through a vast pile of images. He could instantly go to the right images—the ones where he knew K40506A had to be—and do