How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming (19 page)

My sluggish brain was now trying to accelerate to full speed for the first time in nineteen days. I did some quick calculations to get the precise coordinates of Santa on the days on the list, and I compared. Perfect fit. Santa had been found.

I remember this moment as a sharp pain in my stomach. We had been scooped. After discovering Santa six months earlier, and working hard to do a thorough job and write a scientific paper on the discovery (and failing, by one day, because of Lilah being born just a bit earlier than I had expected), someone had come out of nowhere and kicked us in the gut.

Who were these people, and what right did they have to take
my objects? My objects! Santa had been my baby for six months already. I looked up the culprits. I had never heard of them. They were at a small Spanish university, and they had never discovered anything previously. How could this have happened?

Chad sent an e-mail; someone had told him, too. He wrote:

There must be a way to make this all go away, I remember thinking. Maybe we could explain that we knew about it first. Or that our talk title was our announcement, our proof that we had been there first. Maybe there was still some way to salvage our discovery. There had to be a way. I was exhausted, but I knew that, with some sleep, I could find a way.

I heard Lilah cry. Diane was still trying to take a little post-dinner nap, so I let her sleep and went in to check on Lilah. I put on some music and danced with her for a while in her room. Just a few days earlier she had started making real smiles. She made one then. I sat down in the rocking chair with her until we both fell asleep. A few minutes later I opened up my eyes, put her down in her crib, and went back to my chair.

I had figured out a way to make it all right.

I sent e-mails to Chad and David telling them the details. I sent an e-mail to the NASA official with whom I had promised to confidentially share the position of Santa, saying that there was no longer any need for secrecy. And I started answering inquiries from the press who had seen the announcement and were already starting to take notice. They wanted comments from the guy who usually found these large objects out in the Kuiper belt, and they wanted to know how someone had beaten me to it.

Diane woke up and came in the room, and I told her what had happened. She protested that Santa had been my discovery,
and I explained to her that no one owns the sky. If someone points a telescope at something, sees it, and announces it for the first time, it is that person’s discovery, even if I knew about it earlier. In science, the first to announce takes the prize. The Spanish astronomers had announced Santa first, therefore they were the discoverers. Not only was there no argument that we could use to say otherwise, I didn’t
want
to argue otherwise. I think the system is a pretty good one, even when it means I get scooped.

Perhaps this was even a good thing, I explained to Diane. In a few months we would be announcing Xena and Easterbunny—both even bigger than Santa—and having an earlier announcement of a large object from a different group in a different country on a different continent added a bit to the excitement of it all. I could not have come up with a better plan myself.

Diane, without the benefit of the adrenaline that had been pumping through my system for the previous hour, stared at me as if I were a lunatic. But as lunatics go, I was not too crazy. With the question of who discovered Santa now settled, we might as well make something good out of it.

Diane went back to sleep, while I went back to my e-mail.

The astronomical-media grapevine had picked up on the fact that K40506A—the object that Chad and David had included in the titles of their talks at the conference in September—was the same as the new object just announced (which now had yet another name: 2003 EL61, based on the fact that the astronomers who had discovered it found it by looking through old images from 2003, much as I had been looking through old images myself when I found it). A headline from the BBC blared: “Conflicting Claims in Planetary Discovery.” The article breathlessly exclaimed how astronomers were already passionately arguing about whose claim was legitimate and how the dispute
was bound to reach the highest levels of the International Astronomical Union. And that the object could well be twice the size of Pluto.

Twice the size of Pluto? We knew, of course, that 2003 EL61 or Santa or K40506A or, later, Haumea was only about a third the mass of Pluto. We had followed the orbit of Rudolph, the tiny moon going around Santa, and had accurately determined the mass in the process. But the new discoverers didn’t know anything about the moon. They had discovered Santa/2003 EL61 only a few days earlier and hadn’t taken the time to do anything but make the announcement. Nobody knew about the little moon, because I had never quite finished the paper announcing its discovery.

I suddenly acquired a new worry. If the press started gushing about something potentially bigger than Pluto that turned out to be only a third the size of Pluto, what would happen in a few months when we announced the existence of something that really
was
bigger than Pluto? Would people simply say, “Oh yeah, we heard about that one already”?

With the perspective of the years that followed, and with the help of a reasonable amount of sleep, it is now clear to me that my worry was misplaced. Things that are real, that are important, will go into textbooks, into documentaries; they will become part of our culture. Everything else will fade. Still, at the time, I thought it very important to do two things. First, I wanted to make sure that no one could possibly claim that I was attempting to steal any credit for the Spanish team’s discovery, and second, I needed to make sure that everyone knew as quickly as possible that 2003 EL61/Santa was only about a third the size of Pluto.

First, to quickly answer all of the e-mail questions I was getting from reporters, I made a website describing 2003 EL61 and
what we knew about it. I put a picture of Santa and its moon Rudolph on the site, showed the orbit, and explained how we knew that Santa was only a third the mass of Pluto. I described how we had found it back during the previous December and were preparing a paper describing the discovery. And then I wrote extensively about why I thought that the accepted scientific practice of assigning discovery rights to the first person to announce was the right thing to do.

Why was it the right thing to do? It is the only way I can think of to strike the right balance between the desire of the broad community to have all information be public immediately and the desire of the individual to keep a discovery secret for years while slowly studying all of the implications and making all of the important findings before anyone else gets a crack at it. Both of these are natural desires. Neither of these is a particularly good idea. Instant disclosure leads to unvetted science being thrust into the community (such as the claim that 2003 EL61 was twice the size of Pluto), and it leads to a lowering of the incentives to make the discoveries in the first place. On the other hand, keeping discoveries secret prevents the broader scientific community from learning even more about the discoveries.

It took science a while to settle on the present system. In 1610, while watching Venus with his new telescope, Galileo noticed that it went through phases identical to those of the moon. He knew that his discovery was big, and he wanted to make sure everyone knew he had found it first, but he also knew that the discovery would be even better if he could wait just a few more months for Venus to come around to the other side of the sun and show the opposite phases. I understand how he must have felt, waiting for his planet to emerge from behind the sun; Xena still had another month to go before I could finally see it with the Keck telescope. To prove that he had already discovered the
phases of Venus, Galileo wrote to Kepler, “Haec immatura a me iam frustra leguntur oy,” which translates as something like “This was already tried by me in vain too early.” In case anyone else later claimed to have been the first to discover the phases of Venus, Galileo would be able to point out that his note to Kepler was really an anagram for
“Cynthiae figuras aemulatur mater amorum,”
or “The mother of love imitates the shape of Cynthia”: The mother of love—Venus—imitates the shape of Cynthia, the moon. The fact that Venus goes through phases just like the moon instantly proves that Venus goes around the sun, not the earth. Two millennia of understanding of the universe around us had to be thrown out the door at that moment.

These days anagrams don’t count. You have not officially discovered something until the moment of a scientific announcement.

I explained all of this on the website I put up overnight. Even so, I was tempted to add an anagram of my own: “The neat white elephant enthralls,” which rearranges as: “The tenth planet is near the whale,” which obviously refers to the fact that Xena is in the constellation Cetus, the whale. Unlike Galileo, though, I resisted. I was going to take my chances with Xena and Easterbunny.

Sometime in the late evening, I noticed an e-mail from Brian Marsden—gatekeeper of the solar system—with whom I had interacted on all of the other discoveries. He found the Spanish discovery suspicious, coming the same day as the name K40506A had appeared in public. He wanted to know if there was any way that the Spanish could possibly have been able to figure out where Santa was simply from knowing the name K40506A.

No chance, I said. It would be as if I’d decided to nickname some city somewhere in the world Happytown, and simply
hearing the nickname, someone had picked up a globe and pointed to the right spot. No chance whatsoever, I told Brian.

Around midnight I started working on the second part of my plan. I wanted to make sure that no one thought I was going to stake a claim. I wrote directly to the discoverer, an astronomer named José-Luis Ortiz.

A critical analysis of my e-mail suggests several things. First, I repeat the word
interesting
a lot when I am tired. Second, I was amazingly generous for someone who hours earlier had been trying to figure out how to turn back time and claim the discovery. If Ortiz had heard the stories that we were going to put up a
fight, he must have been quite relieved to get this friendly e-mail congratulating him on his discovery. Third, I parsed my words very carefully. We “found” the object, but Ortiz had “discovered” it, and I repeatedly called it “your” object. But I was not 100 percent straightforward. The claim that we were planning to submit the paper the following day was now true, but it hadn’t been true until we’d learned of this discovery. Overall, when I look back on this e-mail years after the fact, I am proud of myself for having written it.

Lilah was awake for a late-night feed, and it was my turn. She drank quickly and went back to sleep, not aware that anything in particular was going on.

I had one more task that night before going to sleep. I needed to finish the paper about Santa. I dug out my notes from twenty days earlier and tried to remember what else I had left to do. Very little, it turned out. In only a few more hours, I had tidied up the manuscript, finished one more calculation, uploaded everything to the website of the scientific journal, and pressed “submit.” The paper that was supposed to accompany the announcement of the existence of Santa was on its way, though it was now a paper describing an object called 2003 EL61 that had been discovered by someone else. I linked the paper to my own website so it could be found by all and crawled to bed as Diane was getting up to feed Lilah.

I didn’t sleep. Brian Marsden’s question about a link between “K40506A” appearing publicly and the Spanish discovery kept circling in my brain. Still, I couldn’t imagine how the name K40506A could be used to discover Santa. Finally, I got up, went back to my computer, and googled “K40506A.” First up were the stories now appearing overnight about the discovery. Second were the titles of Chad’s and David’s talks. Third was
something strange: a list of objects that had been observed by a telescope in Chile one particular night in May, including an object called K40506A. And it told where the object was.

What was this?

The address of the webpage was long. I went up successive levels of the tree and finally realized that the list was a record from a telescope in Chile that David had been using to watch Santa; the list was not even from the telescope itself, but rather from an astronomer at the University of Ohio who had built and kept track of the camera that the telescope used. And one of the seemingly innocuous things that he’d kept track of was what the camera he built was looking at and when.

I looked further and realized that if I fiddled with the Web address I could change the table to display different nights. The object K40506A appeared again, but now with a new position. A slight panic rose in my stomach. I kept fiddling with the Web address and kept getting the object’s coordinate on different nights. K40506A kept moving. Knowing where the telescope was pointing on successive nights as it tracked K40506A was as good as knowing where K40506A was on successive nights. And with successive nights of knowing where it was, it was only a small leap to knowing everything.