When astronomers debated the fate of Pluto, the stakes for author Mike Brown were personal.
AS AN ASTRONOMER, I have long had a professional aversion to waking up before dawn, preferring to see sunrise not as an early-morning treat, but as the signal that the end of a long night of work has come and it is finally time for overdue sleep. But in the predawn of August 25, 2006, I awoke early and was sneaking out the door, trying not to wake my wife, Diane, or our 1-year-old daughter, Lilah. I wasn’t quite quiet enough. As I was closing the front door behind me, Diane called out, “Good luck, sweetie!”
I made the short drive downhill through the dark empty streets of Pasadena to the Caltech campus, where I found myself at 4:30 a.m., freshly showered, partially awake, and uncharacteristically nicely dressed, unlocking my office building to let in news crews that had been waiting outside. All of the local news affiliates were there, as well as representatives of most of the national networks.
It was the last day of the International Astronomical Union meeting in Prague, Czech Republic, and the final item on the IAU agenda was a vote on what to do with Pluto. Everyone’s favorite ice ball was in imminent danger of being cast out of the pantheon of planets by the vote of astronomers half a world away; whatever happened would be big news around the globe.
For me the vote had less to do with the ninth planet than with the 10th. I cared a lot about that 10th planet, because 18 months earlier, I had discovered it—a ball of ice and rock slightly larger than Pluto circling the sun every 580 years. I had been scanning the skies night after night looking for such a thing for most of a decade, and then, one morning, there it was. At the time of the Pluto vote, my discovery was still officially called only by its license-plate number of 2003 UB313, but to many it was known by the tongue-in-cheek nickname of Xena, and to even more it was known simply as the 10th planet. Or maybe, after the vote in Prague, not the 10th planet. Xena had precipitated a year of intense arguments about Pluto, because Xena was Pluto-like in every way—yet larger. It was clear that Xena would share whatever fate was dealt to Pluto. If Pluto was to be a planet, then so too was Xena. If Pluto was to be kicked out, Xena would get the same boot. It was worth waking up early to find out the answer.
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