How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming

The book is worth reading even though Mike Brown fails to make an air-tight case as to why Pluto had to go. The book not only chronicles the politics and drudgery involved in finding a new object orbiting the Sun, it illuminates why schools like Caltech have a built-in advantage due to their large number of telescopes, comprehensive archived data set and staff that are unavailable to other researchers.For example, Brown documents how the first 10th planet candidate, Quaoar, was discovered by his graduate student Chad Trujillo, not Brown. Brown, as Trujillo's Ph.D. advisor, got the credit. The story is similar to Jocelyn Bell's, an earlier Caltech Ph.D. candidate, where Bell's Ph.D. advisor got the credit and Nobel prize for discovering the first quasar when in fact it was Bell who discovered the quasar. In the book, Brown makes it clear that Trujillo deserved the credit but at a Caltech fund raising dinner, Brown's introduced as the 'man who found the thing beyond Pluto...'After Trujillo moves on to his post-doc work in Hawaii and more data has made it clear Quaoar isn't larger than Pluto, Brown comes close to giving up the search altogether. By the time the story reaches that point, Brown has made it clear how boring the task is. The task entails looking at thousands upon thousands of pictures searching for a dot that has moved.When Brown resumes scanning the images searching for the tenth planet, new technology enables him to see objects far fainter than previously available. The advent of large digital images eliminates the need for shuffling plates between scopes, darkrooms, archives and light tables. Moreover, the new tech captures the new images much faster than film could so more, higher quality, images can be gathered per observing session.Brown also documents why the term 'scientific consensus' should be discounted. Had Brown believed the consensus, he never would have looked for a tenth planet. An earlier search, also conducted at Caltech by Charles Kowal, had failed to turn up any object and the consensus was there was nothing the size of Pluto out there. Brown took the career-risking move looking for something most of his colleagues didn't believe existed. The move paid off when Trujillo found Quaoar, the first 10th planet candidate. Caltech's private dataset came in handy when Trujillo suggested that they look through Kowal's plates in the building's basement to see if Kowal had imaged Quaoar but failed to spot it. Kowal had indeed imaged Quaoar and had failed to spot it in his plates. Trujillo's advantage over Kowal was due to Trujillo's being able to use computers to filter out the static objects that appeared on multiple plates.I watched the 2005 priority drama play out by lurking in the Minor Planet Mailing List while the Spanish and German astronomers defended the Spanish claim to priority to having found Haumea. The astronomers who post to the list are a mix of amateurs and professionals who are looking for small solar system objects. What distinguishes the amateur from professional is primarily the telescope resources available to them. Both groups are doing pretty much the same thing, gathering images and then looking for objects that move. The pros, because they have access to larger scopes, can see fainter objects. Moreover, some of the pros, have access to data not available online and hence can, as Brown did, look back through that data to hone their trajectory estimates. Some of the amateurs resent some pro's snobbishness because the amateurs believe that they could do the job as well, if not better were they given the same access. The belief is reinforced by the fact that the radio astronomers frequently post requests to the list asking for amateur optical data to better refine where to point their radio telescopes and the fact that the most successful human comet hunters are amateurs. Given that perspective, the amateurs become prickly when some professional astronomers, such as Brown, deride their work.Brown goes on to explain the tradeoff the rules for allocating discovery credit create and why a discoverer may wish to keep a discovery secret for awhile. A researcher may announce a discovery immediately to claim discovery credit but then opens the field for competitors to discover something more significant some time later or to withhold the news, do the additional research and then release the announcement along with its implications. The second path opens the door to a priority claim from the researcher's competitors. A similar story played out in 1974 when the fourth quark was discovered at Stanford and Brookhaven jumped in to say they had found the same object several months earlier.When Jose Luis Ortiz, a Spanish astronomer, announced having found Haumea, Brown thought he'd been scooped. Brown sent Ortiz an email congratulating Ortiz on the discovery. Brown had been gathering more data on Haumea before Ortiz' announcement so that Brown could better characterize Haumea's characteristics such as mass and surface composition and hence lost priority when Ortiz chose the first path.It wasn't until later when some of Brown's colleagues found evidence that Ortiz had peeked at Caltech's data that the controversy arose. Brown makes his case that either Ortiz did not have priority in finding Haumea because Ortiz accessed Caltech's data prior to the finding Haumea to see where Ortiz should look or if Ortiz had found Haumea and then accessed Caltech's data to verify his find, Ortiz failed to acknowledge having used Caltech's data in his announcement. Either case reflects poorly on Ortiz.I couldn't but help think that when the battle over Pluto planetary status broke out a year later that it was an argument over taxonomy. Brown reinforces that sense when he attacks the IAU's (International Astronomical Union) initial position of declaring any object that is large enough to become spherical as a planet and is not orbiting a planet as 'a mess.' The IAU's initial definition allowed a previously demoted body, Ceres, to become a planet once again, added Charon to the list and allowed Pluto to remain a planet as well as included Brown's Eris. Had the definition been accepted, there would have been 12 planets instead of the now 8. As Brown wades through all the arguments, pro and con, flaws in various definitions become apparent. In the end, Brown argues that rather than a legalistic definition defining what a planet should be it should come down to common sense which raises the question `whose common sense?' as reasonable cases can be made for a variety of classification methods.If a sufficiently large body is ever found either in the Kuiper belt or in the Oort cloud and the current definition precludes its inclusion, Pluto may rejoin the pantheon of planets when the current definition is revised. Pluto may not be dead, as Brown declared, but merely in a coma.If a dataset the caliber of the one Caltech has become publicly available and there is in fact such a body out there, it may well be that a project such as Galaxy Zoo will be the group that uncovers the 10th, now 9th, planet given the size and tedium of the task it'll take to spot it.Brown's inclusion of details from his personal life add, not detract, to the book. The personal stories give insight into Brown's obsessive traits, his adoration of his wife and daughter and how his daughter's birth gave rise to the subsequent priority fight over Haumea. All of those personal aspects play a role in his job. The career/family tradeoffs that Brown is forced to choose between will resonate with anyone who has been faced with similar choices.There's a hilarious portion wherein Brown scoops his sister's announcement that she's pregnant and how it happened. The incident illustrates how a creative mind can weave a narrative out of completely unrelated facts.Finally, Brown documents how he taught his daughter rudimentary sign language before she could speak because he believed that the brain is capable of speaking prior to its mastering control of the muscles that make speech possible. The fact that she learned not only to sign various requests and to thank her parents when those requests were granted but, it enabled her to make clear that she could also, like her father, jump to conclusions not quite warranted by the facts. The signing passages were a remarkable story by themselves. Were I to father children once again, I too would be teaching them to sign before they could walk.Read the book - odds are you'll like it.

The bit about killing Pluto is a joke, of course. Pluto is still out there, just as oblivious of what people call it as ever. But it was Mike Brown whose discoveries forced the astronomy community to address the anomaly of Pluto being classified as a planet. And he, despite his years-long quest to discover a tenth planet, despite the glory associated with being the only living discoverer of a planet, was true to his scientific convictions, and argued against his discovery, and therefore against Pluto, being considered a planet.I will admit that I came into the Pluto controversy with a strong view of my own. I am one of those people who concluded many years ago, long before I ever heard of Mike Brown, that Pluto was not a planet. When it was discovered Pluto was thought to be quite a large object, and its designation as a planet made sense. But additional measurements showed it to be much smaller than originally thought,* smaller, in fact, than Neptune's moon Triton, itself believed to be a captured Kuiper Belt object. Further, it is locked in a orbital resonance with Neptune, where Pluto makes three orbits of the sun in the time Neptune makes two. So Pluto doesn't even orbit freely around the sun.**I've heard Mike Brown talk about his experiences, and came to this book expecting a good read. He delivered. The astronomy is interwoven with Brown's life during the period of discovery. Some may object to this, but scientific discoveries are made by people who are concurrently living their lives. Too often what we hear about are the odd ducks who live only for their science. But most scientists aren't like that; most have lives beyond science, and their work is intertwined with their broader existence.In this book we follow Brown from his early years in astronomy to his decision to look for another planet beyond Pluto. During his early, less than successful, attempts he meets, as a result of his work, the woman who will become his wife. We follow his courtship, marriage, and honeymoon as the search continues. The fruition of his search, the discovery of several large Kuiper Belt objects, overlaps the gestation and birth of his daughter.During the time he is completing papers on his discoveries, and awaiting his daughter's birth, controversy erupts. A previously unknown astronomer in Spain appeared to have found one of his discoveries, and beat him to a public announcement. Initially gracious, Brown learns that the Spaniard apparently used the internet to learn where he had pointed a telescope to track the object, and used that knowledge to find the object and claim the discovery. This motivates a discussion of how science works, and the competing pressures to, on the one hand, announce discoveries so as to claim credit and, on the other hand, to get the facts together and write a comprehensive paper that adequately describes the discovery.Having weathered that controversy, the Pluto issue explodes. Brown provides a comprehensive discussion of why it doesn't make sense to call Pluto a planet. He writes about the last time astronomers had this problem. (No, Pluto wasn't the first.) When Ceres was discovered between Mars and Jupiter in 1801 it was considered the eighth planet. (Neptune hadn't yet been discovered.) Then more "planets" were discovered between Mars and Jupiter. It was eventually realized that all these bodies couldn't be considered planets, and they ended up all being called asteroids. (The decision of the International Astronomical Union on Pluto made Ceres, like Pluto, a "dwarf planet".)Similarly, Brown argues convincingly that Pluto is simply one of the larger bodies in the Kuiper belt. Its interaction with Neptune caused it to be discovered earlier than other large Kuiper Belt objects, but it is otherwise unexceptional. The book includes an excellent discussion on how scientists choose categories for objects, and why definitions matter.All in all, this is a compelling book that captures the story of discovery and two controversies, as well as the reality--sometimes mundane, sometimes not--of how scientists actually live and work. And how can you not love a book where the astronomer gets the girl?* In 1980 A. J. Dessler and C. T. Russell wrote a humorous one page paper that was published in EOS (vol. 61, no. 44, page 690) titled "From the Ridiculous to the Sublime: The Pending Disappearance of Pluto". In it they pretended to take the historical mass estimates of Pluto as being correct, did a mathematical fit, and predicted that Pluto would disappear in 1984. They then speculated on what would happen after it disappeared. This is available online, just search for it.** I've heard the argument that Neptune could just as well be said to be in an orbital resonance with Pluto. While in a narrow technical sense that is true, saying it makes about as much sense as saying Neptune is in orbit around its moon Triton. Neptune is eight thousand times more massive than Pluto, and "captured" Pluto while itself remaining in a nearly circular orbit. Further, there are other Kuiper Belt objects in orbital resonance with Neptune, Pluto is simply the largest. When it comes to gravity size--or at least mass--matters.

This really is a good book - please do not be put off by the terrible, rather immature title as I nearly was. If you are at all interested in the life of experimental science of astronomy today then this is very much the book for you. It rather brings up to date the account given in the first chapters of Fred Hoyle's 'the black cloud' - only this time it's real life not fiction. This account centres on the discovery in recent years by Mike Brown and his team of the large Kuiper Belt objects - in particular Eris, which is slightly larger than Pluto and in a previous era would undoubtedly been hailed as the fabled tenth planet. It details the tremendous amount of hard work involved and alongside this, Mike's love life, his marriage and birth of his daughter. An intriguing account is given of an attempt (by a very cunning subterfuge) of a foreign astronomer to steal and claim for himself one of Mike's discoveries. This well illustrates the perennial problem in science of getting results published without them being stolen by someone else - which must nearly always involve a certain amount of initial secrecy. In respect of this he also mentions the case of Bell-Burnett who is often regarded as having her contribution to the discovery of Pulsars rather underplayed by her supervisor. The last chapter is a account of the demotion of Pluto (and hence Eris) to the status of dwarf planets by the IAU - a move strongly supported (with very full and drawn out reasons) by the author despite the fact that the decision is not to his advantage. Overall this really is very interestingly written with the personal nicely intermingled with the practical and the description of astronomical practices at just the right level for a layman to the subject. I wish there had been more of it. Good luck in the future Mike!

Well, the title is deliberately provocative, and isn't going to enamour the book to stick-in-the-muds who still think there should be nine planets (there are rational numbers other than eight, but nine isn't one of them). Part of me thinks that's a shame, because this is a wonderful tale, a delightfully told autobiography interleaving Mike Brown's professional and personal life, with the emphasis on the former but the latter being interesting and moving too. I loved his scientific and statistical approach to fatherhood - a refreshingly different approach.It's a shame that the decision to correct the 1930 classification of Pluto as the ninth planet has created publicity of the wrong sort, all focussed on Pluto rather than on the rich story that the discoveries have shown of the complexity and variety of the Solar System which is hidden by the old schoolbook nine-planet model.The book's core story of planet-hunting and the successes in finding trans-Neptunian objects both big and small, is well told, and is entertaining, funny and informative as well as emotional too: it's a personal account and so one needs to be prepared to read it with that in mind and question objectivity when it comes to the contention surrounding Haumea in particular, but Mike Brown seems to have gone out of his way to seem be initially accepting and then open-minded about the role of the alternate discoverers, when the evidence and the failure of the Spaniards to be equally open leaves me at any rate in little doubt that it is Brown's team that deserve the credit that has at least partially come with the naming of 2003 EL61 as Haumea.

First impression from the title - The rotter! This is a little gem of a book that should appeal to astronomers and non-astronomers alike.It is a tale of hard work spotting tiny objects in the dark reaches of the solar system and even the rather under hand tactics some use to steal people's thunder. This book lifts the veil on the detection of incredibly distant objects in our solar system and given the recent images of Pluto by New Horizons does make the title sound a bit premature. However, his discoveries of an impressive 16 Trans-Neptunian objects have shown that maybe Pluto is not the most distant object in the solar system and there needed to be a proper definition of what a planet is as the old definition would have resulted in there being perhaps hundreds of planets still all we need to know is Many Very Educated Men Just Screwed Up Nature.

I couldn’t put this down. Read it over two days. Delightful. Would make a wonderful gift for anyone with the remotest interest in astronomy or science.

Beautifully written account of a momentous period, the consequences of which are very much in the news today, with the recent New Horizons Pluto discoveries. Mike Brown is a quirky guy with a sense of fun, and masses of knowledge which he shares in a fantastically accessible and interesting way. He tells the story simply and honestly. I loved this book!