How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [83]
“I hope they’ll decide before my daughter learns to stand,” I joked a few months later, since Lilah was already crawling by that point.
When we discovered that Xena was not alone at the edge of the solar system, that it had a tiny moon going around it, reporters called again and wanted to know how the moon got there, what it looked like, and what we were planning to call it (Gabrielle, of course, after Xena’s spunky TV sidekick). And then they asked: When is the IAU going to make a decision about planets?
“I hope they’ll decide before my daughter says her first words,” I joked the next winter, since by then Lilah was already standing and taking increasingly assured strolls around the periphery of the room.
In the spring, when we finally were able to use the Hubble Space Telescope to figure out just how big Xena really was, reporters called again and wanted to know what Xena was made of, how it had gotten so big, and how much larger than Pluto it was (only 5 percent, it seemed, which was uncomfortably close to not even being bigger than Pluto at all, particularly when you include approximately 4 percent uncertainty in the measurement). And then they asked: When is the IAU going to make a decision about planets?
“I hope they’ll decide before my daughter goes to college and takes an astronomy class,” I finally reverted to joking when it became clear that no decision was going to be made anytime soon.
People kept asking me when the IAU was going to make a decision because they thought I should know. But I didn’t know anything. During this entire period, no one officially connected with the decision making—and I didn’t even know who that might be—ever once contacted me to ask a question or to tell me what was going on. I assumed that I was going to wake up one morning, open the Los Angeles Times, and see that I was suddenly the official discoverer of a planet. Or that there were only eight planets. Or that I had discovered many planets. Or that I had discovered the only thing in the solar system larger than a planet that wasn’t a planet.
In the face of this uncertainty, I figured it best to be prepared for all options. I called up the person in media relations at Caltech who had—months earlier now—pressed me to decide whether or not to call Xena a planet in that original press release. I told him that we needed to prepare another press release, this time for the IAU decision.
“Great!” he said. “What did they decide to do?”
“Well, actually, they haven’t decided anything yet.”
“But they’re deciding soon, right?”
“Well, actually, I have no way of knowing what they are doing. They might decide tomorrow, and they might decide a decade from now.”
“So …” He paused. “What are we going to say in a press release?”
I knew that I wanted to have the opportunity to tell the full scientific story to the public. I had missed that chance, I felt, back in the original hurried rush when we had to make the announcement right away. I wanted the beauty and subtlety and essential order of the solar system to be at the center of the discussion after a decision was finally made. I cared less what the IAU decided—within limits, of course—than that the science got explained correctly.
“We’re going to write four different press releases,” I explained.
Ten planets made sense if you wanted your planets to have more emotional resonance than scientific significance. We very quickly wrote that press release, hailing Xena as the tenth planet. It made me proud to think of my tenth planet, but even from early on I admit that it also made me feel a little fraudulent. The discovery of Uranus was a big deal, and that of Neptune was amazing. But Xena? Little Xena? The tenth planet? Still: I channeled my inner geologist. If it mattered emotionally, that was all that