Mike Brown by How I Killed Pluto & Why It Had It Coming

Author:How I Killed Pluto & Why It Had It Coming [Pluto, How I Killed & Coming, Why It Had It]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-53109-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-12-07T06:00:00+00:00

It was raining so hard that I was in danger of drowning.

We named this new object, found two days after Easter, Easterbunny.

Easterbunny was so bright that it was probably bigger than Pluto, too, or maybe the same size. We quickly took a look at it with the Keck telescope and realized that, like Xena, Easterbunny had a surface that looked like Pluto’s. The solar system had gone from one to two to three Pluto-like objects in just three months.

I almost felt bad. This was too much! How was I going to give everything the attention that it deserved? I needed a plan, now.

Our goal was to follow good scientific practice and announce the existence of these objects to the world with a full scientific account in a scientific journal. But full scientific accounts take time. We had done well with our previous discoveries. Quaoar had taken about four months from discovery to scientific paper. Sedna had taken about the same. We were pretty proud of our speed. But even if we could keep up the fast rate, we suddenly had Santa and Xena and now even Easterbunny to write papers about.

David and Chad and I made a plan. Santa had been discovered first, and we knew the most about it already. We would each write papers on different aspects of it. Whenever the first paper was finished, we would have a low-fanfare announcement. We knew that Santa was smaller than Pluto, and we didn’t yet know all of the details of Santa’s massive collision and debris field, so we thought there would not be too much interest in it for the public. My goal was to get a paper on Santa finished before the birth of Petunia, since I still had a little free time. Her due date was now only three months away.

We would then save the big excitement for Xena and Easterbunny, which were sure to cause a stir. We were scheduled to be at the Keck telescope in September to get a first really good look at Xena. With some intense work we could have a scientific paper ready a month after that (the delusions of first-time parents astound me to this day) and make the announcement around the beginning of October. I liked this back-to-school timing, as I thought having the announcement of one or two new objects bigger than Pluto would be the sort of thing that schoolkids would think was cool to talk about in class.

The plan required writing perhaps the three most important scientific papers of my life in under six months while having my first child. No problem, I thought.

Diane was having that last spurt of energy that comes in the weeks before delivery. The spare bedroom, which for years I had dubbed the “bike and computer room,” was suddenly transformed, with a crib and pale green walls and a collection of infant clothes waiting for an owner. I acquired a bit of sympathetic energy and redoubled my writing efforts so I, too, would be ready for Petunia.

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