Mike Brown: Planet killer
Look, Pluto had a good run. While 76 years is nothing in astronomical time, in the human span it’s a whole lifetime. For all those decades, Pluto was regarded as a planet, the smallest and most distant member of our solar system family. It had an affectionate place in human hearts, and a Disney cartoon character and an element as famous namesakes. And then, Mike Brown killed it.
He admits as much; it’s the title of his book, “How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming.” In 2005, the Caltech astronomer found, in the same neighborhood as Pluto, an object at least as big as Pluto, which he called Eris. It not only looked like another planet, it looked like there could be more like it out there. The world of astronomy had to decide: Either all of these newcomers would have to be defined as planets too, which kind of lowered the tone of the whole solar system, or the definition of “planet” would have to get more exclusive, which meant that Pluto would be booted from the planet club. That happened in 2006. Who knew a scientific definition could get everyone so emotional?
How could you not, well, go into space, growing up where you did?
I grew up in Huntsville, Ala., where they were building the rockets. As a kid you’d be playing and suddenly you’d hear brrrrrr, feel the ground shake, and it was the Saturn 5s being tested. We had an astronaut down the street. My father worked on the Apollo landers and moon rovers. So it seemed everybody wanted to do something with space.
But not necessarily with the solar system, right?
When I was in grad school, the solar system was really the runt of astronomy. People who did work in the solar system were deemed slightly pathetic. Everybody would pat you on the head and say, “That’s nice -- you look at planets? I can look at planets without even using a telescope.”
So there’s this pecking order in astronomy. If you studied the most distant things, you were the coolest person around. The discovery in 1992 of the Kuiper Belt [a massive cluster of space objects beyond Neptune] that made it suddenly obvious that we didn’t know [everything] about the solar system.
It’s right there over everybody’s head and nobody looks. That is the part that amazes me. You don’t notice because you forget to look.
And you started looking there.
I was convinced there was another planet out there past Pluto. The only way to find it was to look at the whole sky, and modern telescopes look at about this much [he puts his fingers close together]. The Palomar Observatory telescope had stopped being used a long time ago because people had already looked at the whole sky -- why bother looking again? So I started using Palomar’s 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope. You have to look for things in the solar system that move. The only way is to take two pictures and look for something that’s [changed position]. The very first picture of Eris was taken by the exact same telescope in 1954.
In his book, “A Short History of Nearly Everything,” Bill Bryson writes that our sense of the solar system as a kind of cozy place is out of whack; if Earth were the size of a pea, Pluto would be a bacterium a mile and a half away -- hardly neighborly.
One of the reasons the public is still so in love with Pluto is this incredibly incorrect sense of Pluto’s place in the solar system. My own daughter has a placemat that has nine planets, and Pluto is the smallest, but just barely -- who wouldn’t think that [it] deserved to be a planet? But it’s such an incorrect view of what the actual solar system is like. When I show people a picture of [the planets’] actual sizes, they gasp. I understand why people feel that way about Pluto, but they’re feeling that way about the fictional Pluto. In light hours, Pluto is about 4 hours out [from the sun]. We are 8 minutes.
What was your eureka moment?
I was sitting in this very chair looking at pictures on the computer that the robotic telescope had taken the night before. The software would pick out potential things that were moving [by comparing photo images] -- most[ly] it would be cat hairs or an airplane, things that computers are not very good at distinguishing. That morning, I was clicking through and I got to this one. The fact that it was the brightest thing I’d ever seen, and most distant, meant this thing had to be huge. So I went back and double checked, and I realized, oh my God, this is actually real. This thing is bigger than Pluto. I picked up the phone and called my wife and said, ‘I just found a planet.’
Did you foresee the repercussions, astronomical and social?
When I discovered Eris [named for the Greek goddess of discord], and that it was as big as Pluto or larger, it seemed it was going to have to be a planet -- or Pluto was going to have to be demoted. I always figured that astronomers would never have the guts to get rid of Pluto as a planet, even though it was the right thing to do. It became obvious from a scientific point of view that Pluto really belonged with the Kuiper Belt rather than the planets. But I didn’t believe that astronomers were ever going to demote Pluto. There would be a huge public outcry. The Hayden Planetarium in New York had [already] sort of taken Pluto out of its planets [list], and that led to this big protest. People were not going to let it go easily.
Ultimately the decision was to bump Pluto from the planet category.
I had no idea how it was going to go. For the first year, I was willing to go along with 10 planets because I figured it’s win-win -- either they’re going to call [Eris] the 10th planet, or they’re going to demote Pluto. The International Astronomical Union -- the U.N. of astronomy -- has the job and the right to name things in the sky and to classify them. I had no idea it was going to turn into a two-week-long astronomical catfight in Prague. Scientists sometimes cannot distinguish between scientific argument and scientists arguing, and this was mostly just scientists arguing.
Now Pluto is being called a “dwarf planet”; it sounds to me like an honorary term.What would you say to Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto, in the wake of all this?
I would just be impressed. Pluto is a tiny little thing; finding it in 1930 was a tremendous discovery. Who cares if it’s a planet or not a planet? It’s much more interesting that it was the first Kuiper Belt object [found], and the next Kuiper object wasn’t found until 1992. That tells you what a tremendous job he did. I’d love to sit down with him and talk about the sky, and what he saw and how he did it. He looked at every little square inch of the photographic plates; he stayed up all night taking the pictures; he developed the film. What I did took a lot of work, but I had computers and [a] robotic telescope. I still don’t understand how he did it.
Pluto’s status as a planet isn’t your only controversy. Your team found another “trans Neptunian” object in 2004, the one now named Haumea. Before you could publicly announce it, Spanish scientists said they’d discovered it, and there was a tussle over who had actually found it and who got credit.
I got this e-mail saying, “Oh look, somebody else discovered the object you were about to announce.” I am a trusting person, and even when people started asking did they do something [wrong], I was, “Nobody would do that.” There’s always a chance it was just an incredible set of coincidences. There was one chance [to sort it out] back when the IAU could have tried to understand it. Nobody wanted to know the answer, other than me. I am a little sad about that. I think something bad happened. Either there was an egregious case of scientific fraud, or there was a pretty egregious case of big-name scientists stomping on a small-name scientist, which would be me as the stomper. One of those two things happened.
The indisputable facts are that two days before they announced they had discovered this object, they accessed our web pages that showed where the object was. [My website] was protected, but one of the telescopes we were using kept [records] on a server in Ohio. It never occurred to anyone that this would be a problem. But if you know a telescope [is recording] here, and then here, and then here, then you say, “Oh, they’re tracking something that’s moving.”
They claim it was pure coincidence. They never had to really show any [research], they just said, “We discovered it.” They still have never written any scientific papers showing what they did and how they did it. I got to name the object, Haumea [Hawaiian goddess of childbirth], but [on] the official list, the name of the discoverer is blank. It is the largest object in the solar system discovered by nobody.
What does that do to concerns about scientific standards and rigor?
For me it was a big wakeup call. There’s a conflict in science that’s becoming more severe. When you make a discovery, the first thing you want to do is tell everybody because it’s the coolest thing you’ve ever done. Plus, you don’t know if somebody down the road made the same discovery or will make the same discovery tomorrow. But as a scientist, you want to do the job right. You don’t want to be cold fusion. The right scientific way is slow. If I discover something today, I could post it online and it would be everywhere the next day. I’m not going to do it, but I can see the temptation.
You’ve gotten sad letters from little children sticking up for Pluto, and some, well, some nastier comments from older people.
These days, some of the kids have gotten old enough to do obscene phone messages instead. Here’s one -- they always happen about 3 in the morning [he plays the messages]: “Just so you know, Pluto is a planet, you selfish, paint-licking, fetus-hormoning [expletive deleted] bitch!” Here’s one from 4 in the afternoon: “Hey! Pluto’s still a planet, you jackass!”
Your daughter grew up in the midst of all this, with her Pluto-themed placemat and a Pluto lunchbox and other Plutonian tchotchkes your friends thought were funny to give her.
She knows all about Pluto now, and she’s mad at me for killing Pluto, but she came up with a solution. She says, “OK, Daddy, it was bad of you to kill Pluto, but I won’t be mad if you promise to keep looking. You have to find another planet, and you have to name it Pluto.” So I’m still looking.
This interview has been edited and excerpted from a longer taped transcript. An archive of Morrison’s interviews is online at latimes.com/pattasks.
