How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming (31 page)

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I still haven’t drunk the celebratory champagne. The friend with whom I made the five-year bet on the foggy night at Palomar Observatory had generously given me a five-day extension, and Eris fit all of the characteristics that she and I had decided a planet must meet. She happily delivered the champagne the next time she was in town. In the end, though, Eris was not the tenth planet; it was instead the killer of the ninth. Champagne doesn’t make a good funeral drink.

Those five champagne bottles sit on my shelf still. I look at them every once in a while and wonder if the time will ever come to pop the corks. I’m still looking for planets, but the bar is now much higher. Anything new that wants to be called a planet needs to be a significant presence in our solar system, and I am not certain that there are any more hiding in the sky. But I keep going. Someday, I hope, I’ll be sitting in my office looking at pictures of the sky from the night before, and there on the screen will be something farther away than I’ve ever seen before,
something big, maybe the size of Mars, maybe the size of the earth—something significant. And I’ll know. And, as I did years earlier, I’ll immediately pick up the phone and call Diane. “Guess what?” I’ll say. “I just found the ninth planet.” And—once again—the solar system will never be the same.

It takes some time for a kid to figure out that her parents have a separate existence that takes place when she’s not around. By the time she was about three, whenever I was gone for a few days Lilah began getting immensely curious about where I was. That place would become a fabled land that she invoked when playing with stuffed animals or making up stories. Taiwan, to which I went one week during her third year and which she can now pick out on any globe, remains perhaps her favorite spot in the world. At one point during her third summer, she had named all of the corners of the swimming pool after different places, and she would cling to my back and direct me where to go next.

“Daddy, I want to go to Chicago.”

Swim, swim, swim.

“Daddy, Daddy, Berlin!”

Stroke, stroke, stroke.

“Boston.”

Glide, glide, glide.

“Daddy, Daddy, I want to go all the way to Taiwan!”

Taiwan, which she knew to be an island, required momentarily going underwater before emerging on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.

“Now back to Pasadena, California!” which was code for “Let’s get out and see if Mommy will bring out some snacks.”

Eventually she started figuring out why I would periodically disappear.

“Are you going to go talk about planets?”

And the answer, invariably, was yes.

Lilah loves planets. Other than the occasional dwarf-dog joke, I have never particularly pushed planets on her, at least not any harder than I push them on everyone else. Yes, I point out planets in the sky to her every time we go outside at night, but I do that to everyone. Beginning in that summer of her third birthday, Lilah had been particularly mesmerized by Jupiter. Every night for a few months, it was high in the evening sky—one of the first things to pop out of the murky twilight and reveal itself night after night. Back in the summer, she made sure we went outside right at her bedtime, when it was just barely dark enough to make out Jupiter, so she could say good night to it. As the summer changed to fall and then winter, it would already be dark as we were driving home, and for her, the highlight of the drive was always the moment after we’d climbed the little hill to our neighborhood and we had taken the final left-hand turn to point west; Jupiter suddenly would appear in her window, high enough in the sky to be seen even from the depths of her child car seat.

By late fall, though, Jupiter was no longer the king of the evening skies. Venus had crept up into the twilight to start to steal the show from Jupiter. Or at least, in Lilah’s view, to share
the show. She went from having only one planet to now having two planets to say good night to every night.

Lilah sees planets everywhere. You never quite realize—until you have an obsessed three-year-old—how prevalent images of planets are in everyday life. She’s got them on her lunch box (a gift from friends of mine, of course); she sees pictures in magazines and catalogs; she sees mobiles and puzzles at stores. I would tend to just walk by them without noticing, but she always runs up—“Daddy, Daddy,
look
!” She always quickly picks out Jupiter (the big one) and, of course, Saturn, with the rings. She recognizes the blue-and-green look of Earth. And she gets Venus right more often than I think any three-year-old should.

One night, after a long cloudy spell when we couldn’t see the planets at night, Lilah looked up at the sky, startled. “Daddy, Daddy,
look
! Jupiter
moved
!” And she was right. Venus and Jupiter had been slowly edging closer to each other over the past few weeks, but you wouldn’t have noticed it unless you were watching closely. Now they were suddenly so close that even a three-year-old could see that something had changed.

Lilah’s pointing out to me that Jupiter moved was—for me—the pinnacle of planetary charm. While most kids and adults can name the planets and point out pictures, almost nobody notices the real things, even when they are blazing in the evening sky. Planets are not just things that spacecraft visit and beam back pictures from. They’re not just abstractions to put on lunch boxes. They are really there, night after night after night, doing what planets do: moving; wandering.

A few nights later, the show got even better. A tiny sliver of a moon appeared low in the early-evening sky and began working its way toward Jupiter and Venus. Lilah and I are moon watchers. And we both know that after appearing as a tiny sliver at
sunset, the moon gets bigger and moves east night after night in the evening sky. Based on how far the moon was from Venus and Jupiter, it was clear that in just two nights the moon would be packed tight right next to Jupiter and Venus. It would be a spectacular sight, with the three brightest objects ever visible in the night sky in an unmistakable grouping in the southwest just after sunset.

The night of the triple conjunction, I was on a long flight across the country. As I was packing my bags that morning, Lilah had sadly asked, “Daddy, are you going away to go talk about planets?”

I was. But I didn’t want talking about planets to make me miss seeing planets. I knew I was touching down at night in Florida long after Jupiter and Venus and the moon would have set, but I was careful to pick a window seat on the south side of the airplane so I could watch the show from the air. And the sight of the moon and Jupiter and Venus shining in a tight triangle over and behind the wing was as spectacular as Lilah and I knew that it would be. Though it was night in Florida, it would still be a beautiful late twilight in California. I quickly called home and told Lilah all about the view from 30,000 feet and told her to go outside right now and—
look
! She would see all of our favorite planets.

The tight-packed group of lights low in the early evening sky was the sort of sight that makes even non–night sky watchers suddenly look up and wonder. A few people would even think to look the next night, I suspected, to see if the sight was still there. They would notice that the moon had already moved farther east and gotten a little bigger, and they would see that the two other bright lights—Jupiter and Venus—were in slightly different spots than just one night earlier. Maybe then a person or two would be hooked. Maybe they would follow the moon’s movement
for the next week as it grew to full, watching as Jupiter appeared lower night after night, eventually leaving Venus alone in the sky. It would be a show worth following. I knew Lilah and I would watch it. Even when we were continents apart, we’d always be looking for the things that moved in the sky.

This book would never have been possible without the contributions of many people involved in the research and events described here. I would like to especially thank Jean Mueller and Kevin Rykoski for their early encouragement of and help with the search for large objects in the outer solar system, and Chad Trujillo and David Rabinowitz for many years of hard work and foresight into what might be out there and how to find it. Brian Marsden was always a voice of wisdom and kindness in the otherwise arcane world of solar system politics. My students throughout this period, Antonin Bouchez, Adam Burgasser, Lindsey Malcolm, Kris Barkume, Emily Schaller, Darin Ragozzine, and Meg Schwamb—now Drs. Bouchez, Burgasser, Malcolm, Barkume, Schaller, Ragozzine, and Schwamb—all provided fresh eyes and minds that aided many of the scientific insights described here.

While the research and discoveries were key, the book itself might not have ever been begun without encouragement from Heather Schroder on an early abortive version, and then a jump start from my agents, Caroline Greeven and Marc Gerard, who finally set me to work. Cindy Spiegel took the initial manuscript
and found a way to make small changes with big impacts and graciously laughed at me when I told her I was nervous to meet
real
writers. Brad Abernethy provided wonderful editorial advice and encouragement on an early draft, and explained to me that words mean what we think they mean when you say them. Emily Schaller, though mentioned above in her doctoral capacity, also deserves my deepest gratitude for reading every version of every chapter and always providing exactly the right combination of advice, criticism, and encouragement.

I regret that my father, Tom Brown, didn’t live to see most of the time period written about here, but he was nonetheless instrumental in instilling in me my love for space, science, and living on boats. My mother, Barbara Staggs, has always been my biggest fan, no matter what the arena, and my stepfather, Willie Staggs, my brother, Andy Brown, and my sister, Cammy Thornton, have always kindly tolerated this fact and provided balance, for which I am grateful.

Finally, I have to thank Diane and Lilah, who are the reason for the book and also the ones who allowed it to happen, by letting me mentally slip away on nights and on weekends to write the stories of us, and who continuously allow those stories to go on.

M
IKE
B
ROWN
is the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, where he teaches classes from introductory geology to the formation of the solar system. He is a native of Huntsville, Alabama, where he grew up listening to the tests of the Saturn rockets preparing to go to the moon, and he received his undergraduate degree in physics from Princeton University and his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley. He and his research group spend their time searching for and studying the most distant objects in the solar system and drinking coffee.