How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming (20 page)

I didn’t think anyone would have gone to such lengths to steal the positions of Santa, but I suddenly had a new worry. On one of those nights when David’s Chilean telescope had watched K40506A, it had also watched K50331A and K31021C. I recognized those codes, too. They were Easterbunny and Xena. This was bad. Because the name K40506A was publicly involved in an astronomical controversy, people would
certainly
google the name, just as I had, and they would see a May position of K40506A. Some would take it a step further and fiddle with the
Web address as I had and find even more positions of K40506A. Some would even notice that other similarly named objects—K50331A and K31021C—occasionally appeared on the lists and wonder what they were. Some would track them down. And some would be aware enough about what it all meant to calculate positions in the sky. They would suddenly know exactly what and where Xena and Easterbunny were.

In the middle of the night, I sent an e-mail to Chad and David warning them about all of this and asking if they knew how to get the information off the website in Ohio. I then wrote to Brian Marsden and told him the news, too. You
could
use the name K40506A and a little Google sleuthing to figure out where it was. I then explained to Brian that while I was not paranoid enough to think that Ortiz had done this to find Santa—it was inconceivable that any astronomer would actually be that underhanded—I was
definitely
paranoid enough to think that now that Santa was out of the bag, someone would eventually find our two other objects the same way. I then told him about Xena and Easterbunny. I told him that our goal was still to wait a few months until we had scientific papers prepared on these discoveries before announcing them.

Finally I went to sleep. I slept through two successive Lilah feedings for the first time in twenty days.

When I woke up, I told Diane everything that had happened that night. I had coffee. I bounced Lilah around the house a little bit. Then I checked my e-mail again.

The press was fascinated, both by the larger-than-Pluto part of the story and by the astronomer-fisticuffs part of the story, even though neither was true. I kept pointing people to the webpage.

Ortiz wrote back, a little overwhelmed, it seemed. He
pointed me to a bare-bones website he had thrown together to describe the discovery. I added a link to his webpage from mine so people could read about the initial discovery.

Brian Marsden wrote back suggesting that perhaps I should be more suspicious. Did I not find the circumstances surrounding Ortiz’s discovery and announcement of 2003 EL61 odd?

David wrote back and said there was nothing we could do about the webpage in Ohio.

At 9:18 a.m. I got a new e-mail from Brian. It contained a list of all of the telescope positions of Easterbunny and Xena. Someone had already found all of the positions on the website in Ohio and had sent them in to the place where you announce discoveries. At the same time that the coordinates were sent to Brian, they were also sent to the Internet chat group that had been angry with me about my naming of Sedna and Quaoar. All of the information was now public, and there was no possible way to contain it. We were going to have to make the announcement right then.

I wrote to Brian with the official data and told him to proceed with the announcement. I wrote to Chad and David and told them what had happened and that we were instantly going live. And I sent one more e-mail to Ortiz:

Next, I needed to quickly make public webpages about Xena and Easterbunny, which would soon be getting new names. I would probably need to work on a press release. I kissed Diane and a sleepy Lilah goodbye and drove down to Caltech for the first time in twenty days.

At work, I called the Caltech press office and told the person who writes press releases, “We’ve discovered something bigger than Pluto and need to have a press release about it go out today.”

“Bigger than Pluto!” he exclaimed. “Wow! So it’s the tenth planet?”

I hadn’t figured that part out yet. I had strong opinions about planets. I didn’t believe that Pluto should be classified as a planet. The word
planet
should be reserved for the small number of truly important things in the solar system. Xena, though bigger than Pluto, did not rise to the level of a truly important object in the overall context of the solar system.

But but but but still.

“I don’t want the press release to say it’s a planet. Just say it’s something larger than Pluto,” I replied.

“Are you crazy?” he said. “This is the biggest astronomical discovery in the solar system in a century, and you’re going to be the one arguing that it’s not a planet?”

Uh. Yeah.

“If you call it the tenth planet, the public will be excited and
engaged. If you call it the biggest not-a-planet, people will just be confused.”

I remembered Diane’s words from before Lilah was born. I gave in. The press release that went out to the world that day was titled “Caltech Astronomer and Team Discover the 10th Planet.”

I would have a lot of explaining to do, once I got some sleep.

Next up was to arrange a press conference. I called my NASA contacts and told them that I needed to arrange a press conference that afternoon to announce the discovery of the tenth planet.

Impossible, they said. The space shuttle was up at the space station with missing tiles, and people were worried about a crack-up on the way down. They were having a press conference about
that
this afternoon. How about Monday?

Impossible, I said. If the announcement was not made before the sun went down, almost anyone with a modest-sized telescope could point to the now publicly available positions and say they had discovered the thing.

“Did you just say tenth planet?” they asked. We set up an international press conference for 4:00 p.m.

As soon as I hung up the phone, it rang. It was an old friend from college, Ken Chang, who happened to also be a science reporter for
The New York Times
.

“Tell me about this big object,” Ken said.

“Which one?” I asked.

“Um, what?” he said.

He was calling about Santa/2003 EL61, of course. He had not yet received the press release about the tenth planet. I quickly told him about our big discovery and asked him if he could wait until the 4:00 p.m. press conference to get the details.

“Four p.m.? On a Friday afternoon? To announce the discovery of the tenth planet? Are you nuts?”

It seemed to be the question everyone was asking me that day. I hadn’t even realized that it was a Friday, but that was good information to try to store in my brain. And, oh yeah, that it was July.

“Friday at four p.m. on the West Coast is too late for me,” Ken said. “It’ll miss the Saturday and Sunday papers and be old news by Monday.”

I told him about the discovery. When he asked me the name of the new planet, I realized that I didn’t even know yet what the official license plate number designation was going to be (it turned out to be 2003 UB313). I told him that it had no name yet.

“Well, what do you guys call it among yourselves?” Ken wanted to know.

“Xena. It will have a real name soon, but for now we call it Xena.”

Ken chuckled and wrote it down.

Contrary to what I thought that morning, it would not get a real name soon. After Ken wrote it down that first time, Xena became its nickname for more than a year. There are many people, I believe, who still think that the object remains named Xena.

Ken Chang was right. The story did end up missing almost all of the Saturday and Sunday papers, and though the discovery was not exactly old news by Monday, it was indeed clear that Friday at 4:00 p.m. is not the right time to make a press announcement—unless, perhaps, you are announcing that you are going back to rehab, and you hope no one notices. But at least, by virtue of that one accidental phone call, the announcement of
the discovery of the tenth planet hit the front page of
The New York Times
on Saturday, July 30, 2005.

By about noon on Friday, I had built a webpage describing Xena. It was spare but would have to do. I drove up to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory—JPL—where they had the facilities to put on a major press conference.

I can no longer put together a timeline for the rest of that day; most of the memories are simply too jumbled. I recall at some point changing shirts and shaving in the men’s room at the press building at JPL. I don’t remember a single thing I or anyone else said at the press conference, though I vaguely remember standing in front of a TV camera with a small speaker in my ear; every three minutes I was connected by satellite to some different TV show. I don’t know what I said, and I certainly don’t want to know how I looked.

I drove home late in the evening. A few minutes after arriving home, the head of the media department at JPL called me to double-check that I was all right. I remember that conversation extremely well. “I’m fine,” I said. “I’m lying on the bed and Lilah is asleep in my arms. What could be better?”

“Good,” she said. “Then would you mind doing
Good Morning America
on Monday morning, and they want you to bring Lilah.”

At 2:00 a.m. on Monday, Diane, Lilah, and I drove down to a Hollywood studio. Normally I would consider this hour to be thoroughly indecent, but given the round-the-clock schedule we were currently on, 2:00 a.m. was no better or worse a time than 2:00 p.m. Actually, it was better, as there was no traffic.

When I arrived at the studio, I was hooked up with earpieces again and talked about planets, old and new, with Charlie Gibson and Diane Sawyer. At the end, my wife brought Lilah over for the cameras. Two thousand miles away, in Alabama, my
mother was on the edge of her seat. She already knew about all of the planet parts, so that was just filler. But it was the first time she had ever seen Lilah.

According to my calendar, the following weeks were a storm of interviews and talks and TV appearances, of which I have no memory. If you look at the records I kept of Lilah’s eating and sleeping and crying and smiling, you would not know that any of it had happened.

A week after the biggest scientific announcement of my life, it seems that all I cared about was whether or not Lilah would sleep and how frequently she would feed.

The Internet chat group that had been irritated with me over the discovery and naming of Quaoar and Sedna was up in arms again. I didn’t know it, but Ortiz himself was apparently an occasional member of this group, and many were rallying around to defend him against the onslaught of the evil American astronomers trying to deny him credit for his discovery. Except, of course, there was no onslaught. I told anyone who would listen that Ortiz had indeed discovered 2003 EL61/Santa. Since I couldn’t really be excoriated for trying to steal Ortiz’s credit, they would find something else to rail against. They then argued that I had made up the story that someone had found the coordinates of Xena and Easterbunny, so that I would have an excuse to hold a press conference the day after Ortiz’s discovery in order to overshadow him. And then they hit on a new accusation: I was bad because I had been trying to keep Santa and Xena and Easter bunny secret. I chuckled and shook my head, given how
hard we had tried to do everything correctly by scientific standards.

Even Ortiz got into the act, declaring in an interview:

Sigh. I almost sat down and wrote a long article on why the instant announcement of discoveries is precisely what good scientists
don’t
do and that the established scientific procedures are to confirm findings and write scientific papers before making public announcements, but I decided that the accusations were sufficiently ridiculous that I should ignore them and let them fade into their deserved oblivion.

I will admit, though, to being stung and irritated to read Ortiz’s comments. I didn’t care about what nonastronomers were saying on chat groups, but I thought it harmful for professional astronomers to spout such nonscientific nonsense. And it seemed particularly uncharitable given how hard I had been defending Ortiz against all accusations and deflecting credit to him whenever possible. Odd, I thought.