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make discoveries, they verify their discoveries, they carefully document their discoveries, and they submit papers to scientific journals. What they don’t do is make discoveries and immediately hold press conferences to announce them (any scientist who ever contemplates such a thing can be stopped cold in his tracks by simply whispering the phrase “cold fusion”). Good science is a careful and deliberate process. The time from discovery to announcement in a scientific paper can be a couple of years. For all of our previous discoveries, we had described the objects in scientific papers before publicly announcing the objects’ existence, and the time between discovery and announcement was always less than nine months.

These scientific papers are important. They allow other astronomers to verify, confirm, and critique the analysis we have done. Sadly, because we were forced to announce Xena and Easterbunny prematurely, we hadn’t completed the scientific papers describing these objects. We find this situation scientifically embarrassing and apologize to our colleagues who are reduced to learning about this new object from reading reports in the press. We are hard at work on these scientific papers, but, as we have said above, good science is a careful and deliberate process and we are not yet through with our analysis. Our intent in all cases is to go from discovery to announcement in under nine months. We think that is a pretty fast pace.

One could object to the above by noting that the existence of these objects is never in doubt, so why not just announce the existence immediately upon discovery and continue observing to learn more? This way, other astronomers could also study the new object. There are two reasons we don’t do this. First, we have dedicated a substantial part of our careers to this survey precisely so that we can discover and have the first crack at studying the large objects in the outer solar system. The discovery itself contains little of scientific interest. Almost all of the science that we are interested in doing comes from studying the object in detail after discovery. Announcing the existence of the objects and letting other astronomers get the first detailed observations of these objects would ruin the entire scientific point of spending so much effort on our survey. Some have argued that doing things this way “harms science” by not letting others make observations of the objects that we find. It is difficult to understand how a nine-month delay in studying an object that no one would even know existed otherwise is in any way harmful to science!

Many other types of astronomical surveys are done for precisely the same reasons. Astronomers survey the skies looking for ever more distant galaxies. When they find one, they study it and write a scientific paper. When that paper comes out, other astronomers learn of the distant galaxy and they too can study it. Other astronomers cull large databases such as the 2MASS infrared survey to find rare objects like brown dwarves. When they find them, they study them and write a scientific paper. When the paper comes out, other astronomers learn of the brown dwarves and they study them in perhaps different ways. Still other astronomers look around nearby stars for the elusive signs of directly detectable extrasolar planets. When they find one, they study it and write a scientific paper. This is the way that the entire field of astronomy—and indeed all of science—works. It’s a very effective system; people who put in the tremendous effort to find these rare objects are rewarded with getting to be the first to study them scientifically. Astronomers who are unwilling or unable to put in the effort to search for the objects still get to study them after a small delay.

There is a second reason that we don’t announce objects immediately, and that is because we feel a responsibility not just to our scientific colleagues but to the public. We know that these large objects that keep being found are likely to be intensely interesting to the public, and we would like to have