How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming

by Mike Brown

  The afternoon the group was to arrive, I waited on the dark ground floor of the observatory until I heard a knock on the door. As I opened it, I was blinded by the afternoon sun. When my eyes adjusted again, I finally saw the organizer of the tour walk in.

  “Hi, I’m Diane Binney,” she said.

  She was well dressed, poised, glamorous, outgoing, radiant. She was everything that you don’t stereotypically expect to find in someone from Caltech (including, in particular, me). I quickly introduced myself, and I thought: Who is this person?

  Diane Binney was the well-loved director of a group whose members attended tours and special talks and traveled to exotic locations, all associated with Caltech and its research. Diane had arranged this trip to Palomar Observatory and had invited me to speak, and, as I learned much later, everyone except for me on the Caltech campus seemed to know precisely who she was and had known for years. I had perhaps been staring into my computer screen too much to have ever looked up and noticed.

  I admit that I did not give the people on the tour the full attention that they deserved. I admit to spending more time telling Diane about the telescope and the dome and astronomy than I did everyone else. But I must have given an all-right tour—at least to her—because at some point while walking on a catwalk high above the ground on the outside of the observatory, she said, “Hey, do you ever use the telescopes in Hawaii?”

  I do.

  “Would you be interested in coming next spring on a travel program where we take people to the volcanoes and then up to the telescopes? Would you be able to talk about the telescopes and give tours?”

  Not checking my calendar, I simply said, “Absolutely.”

  Dinner soon began. I spoke for an hour and showed pictures of the sky, pictures of telescopes, and graphs of what was to be found out at the edge of the solar system. But mostly I talked about planets. I told the group that there had to be planets out there and that I was going to find them. Even as I said it, though, all I could think of was that I was halfway through my “maybe” list, and still I had found nothing. I could do the song and the dance and put on the excited face, but it was becoming possible that all of my searching would come to nothing.

  When the talk was over, the group got on their bus and left. I walked over to the little cottage where Kevin Rykoski lived. I had talked to Kevin and Jean Mueller on the phone every night discussing where to point the telescope, but now I finally had a chance to go sit on Kevin’s sofa and drink a beer. He had been at my talk earlier and had helped with the tour.

  Over time, my conversations with Kevin and Jean every night while taking the photographic plates had progressed from simple efficient talk about the sky and the weather to a more general extended chat. Jean would talk about her plans for a dream house on the river, while Kevin told stories about his teenage daughter or described how he would drive directly to the beach on the last morning before bright time started and sleep all day long. Kevin and Jean had also had inadvertent front-row seats to the demise of my long-term relationship from my days in Berkeley and my subsequent retreat from the cabin in the woods that my girlfriend and I had shared, to the death of my father, to the start and end of a new relationship or two; so, as I sat on Kevin’s sofa for the first time, our conversation naturally steered to the personal.

  All Kevin wanted to talk about was Diane Binney and why she kept talking to me. I told Kevin about the Hawaii trip and that we were talking logistics. He thought that sounded like an exciting first date. I insisted that it sounded like work, because that was all it was.

  Kevin wouldn’t let up. “Yeah, but she was paying you a lot of attention.”

  “She runs trips for people; it’s her job to be nice. I’m sure that all of the guys at Caltech that she has to work with get the wrong impression and make idiots of themselves. I’m not going to do anything stupid.”

  Six months later, I was in Hawaii with Diane and twenty or thirty people in her group. The group spent an enjoyable week on the lava, at the telescopes, at the beach, learning about geology and listening to me lecture about astronomy. The last night, when she was done with the trip and could finally relax, the two of us found ourselves down on the beach alone sometime after midnight. I pointed out the Southern Cross, just barely visible at the right time of year from Hawaii, and I showed her the paths of the planets and how she could pick out Saturn just setting into the ocean. I told her what it was really like to use the telescopes, and she talked of her nieces back in California. Saturn sank into the Pacific, and we finally walked back to our rooms. I was quite proud of myself for not having done anything stupid.

  When we got back to Caltech the following week, I found myself accidentally walking past Diane’s office a few times a day and accidentally running into her and stopping to talk. Every time I did, she was very nice, and I had to remind myself that, truly, it was her job to be nice and to appear happy to see me and that being stupid was the worst thing to do. On accidentally running into her in the early afternoon one pleasant spring workday, I asked if she needed a cup of coffee. She did. We walked down the street, drank coffee, and talked for three hours. Certainly, it was part of her job to be nice to me and cultivate me as a good resource. But it occurred to me that, even accounting for all of that, there was no reason for her to spend three hours in the middle of an afternoon with me when we both had many other things to do. It suddenly occurred to me that, in fact, I had been stupid all along.

  Later that summer, when Diane and I went on another trip together, I did no astronomy lecturing, and she brought no group. Instead, the two of us spent a week in a little cabin on a tiny island north of Vancouver. It was the least stupid thing I had ever done.

  Sometime during this period it became clear that all of my searching for planets was going to come to nothing, that all of the maybes were turning into definitely nots. Three years of intensive effort to find a planet was leading to the conclusion that nothing was out there to be found. I don’t actually remember when I finally closed the black hardbound notebook for the last time. I don’t know when I really admitted to myself that there was nothing there. In fact, I don’t remember much at all about planets and searching for them around this period. All of the irritation of the quickly dismissed nos and all of the frustration of the maybes that I had spent nights and nights at the telescope trying to track down suddenly seemed much less interesting than trying to figure out the next trip I would be asking Diane to take with me, to which she would inevitably say “YES!”

  Chapter Four

  THE SECOND-BEST THING

  In June of 2002, Chad Trujillo walked into my office and announced, “We just found something bigger than Pluto.” It turned out to be the second-best thing that happened to me that week, and it wasn’t even true.

  Chad had recently moved from Hawaii to California to work with me on a brand-new project: using the 48-inch Schmidt Telescope at Palomar Observatory to find planets. Yes, the project sounds familiar, and yes, I had spent three years using exactly the same telescope to find exactly the same planets, and I had thoroughly failed to find anything. Yes, I had even been strongly advised by people who were concerned with my career and who had influence over whether I, a young assistant professor, stayed at Caltech or not, to quit this planet searching altogether and do something more respectable. But really, how could I just stop? Sure, we had looked at a lot of the sky—more than anyone else since Clyde Tombaugh had discovered Pluto seventy years earlier—but we hadn’t looked at the whole sky. So how do you know that you’ve done enough? If there is only one or two or even just three new planets out there waiting to be found, what are the chances that you just didn’t look in quite the right spot? And how could you really convince yourself that there was nothing there unless you looked in every single corner where things might be hiding? Maybe the whales really had just slipped through the net.

  In the two years after I finally declared my initial search unsuccessful, every once in a while I would get a phone c
all or an e-mail from a friend who remembered that I had spent a long time talking about searching for planets, and the friend would invariably say something like “Hey, I just read in the newspaper that someone found a new planet, did you hear about it?” My breathing would stop while my pulse doubled as I tried to casually use my now-shaky fingers to quickly search my computer for the news of the day. “Oh, no, I haven’t heard, so, really, probably it’s nothing. Nothing at all.” At least I hoped. After all these years, the idea that someday someone would call me up and casually tell me that someone else had found a planet that I had missed still haunted me. Each time it happened, I would search the news and find, to the sudden restarting of my breath and calming of my pulse, that yes, indeed, a new planet had been found, but it was not a tenth planet orbiting around our sun, it was a planet orbiting a distant star far removed from our solar system. And I could then quickly tell the person how exciting it was that all of these new planets were being discovered around other stars and about how much we were learning, and how, oh, no, this was not the sort of planet I had been looking for at all. No one else was looking for planets out at the edge of our own solar system—at least that’s what I thought. What I hoped.

  Though my first search had come to nothing scientifically, planets were still never far from my mind. I still wanted to find one. I just needed a new way to do it.

  Less than a year after the first failure, I was back to work on the sky, and this time I was determined to do the job right. It was 2001, and though perhaps Arthur C. Clarke’s predictions of space tourism and obelisks on satellites of Jupiter had not come true, it was finally time to get rid of the hundred-year-old technology of the photographic plates. To some, it was a sad day when the photographic plate handling system at the 48-inch telescope was dismantled, though anyone who had ever had to work in the absolute darkness of the nighttime dome, moving plates from their holders to the telescope to the darkroom, could not have felt too bad to see it all go. The darkroom was turned into a storage room. The walls of the plate-handling room right next to the telescope were torn down to make room inside the dome. The mini elevator, which Jean had used innumerable times to transfer an exposed plate down to Kevin, who had been waiting in the darkroom, was permanently sealed. All of this was to make way for the new incarnation of the telescope: a modern, digital-camera-equipped, computer-controlled, remotely piloted sky-searching machine.

  The difference between the digital camera and the old photographic plates was extreme. With the plates, you would walk upstairs, load the photographic plate, open the enormous shutter on the camera, and expose the film to the sky for about twenty minutes. It would take about ten minutes to unload the exposed plate and load in a new one and start all over again. In contrast, with the digital camera, you never had to walk up the stairs—indeed, you needn’t even be awake! The computer opened the shutter, exposing the digital camera for about sixty seconds, and sixty seconds later you could be looking somewhere else in the sky. It took two minutes for the computer to do what it had taken forty minutes for Jean or Kevin to do earlier.

  The digital camera was small, though, compared to the photographic plates, and it covered only about one-twelfth as much of the sky (an area equivalent to about three full moons)—but since it was twenty times as fast, we were still ahead. Even better, in the 60 seconds that the digital camera was exposed to the sky it was able to see stars and moons and planets that were two or three times fainter than the faintest things we had seen on the photographic plates. I had been worried for the past several years that the things for which we were looking lurked just beyond the limits of what we could see. I had stared at many of those photographic plates that Kevin and Jean had taken, and had wondered what we were just barely missing.

  But now we were in business. We could run almost every clear night of the year without worrying about overworking anyone other than the computer. We could see fainter things. We could cover more sky. In the first four months, we planned to redo the whole region of the sky that had taken us three years to complete earlier. And then we were going to keep going. Surely, all of this would lead us to the planet that was still out there waiting to be found. I was certain we would find it quickly.

  I was so certain that we were going to be finding things immediately that I decided I needed help. I recruited Chad Trujillo, who was just finishing his doctoral thesis—on, conveniently, finding objects in the Kuiper belt—at the University of Hawaii. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to convince him to come to Pasadena. He was so relaxed from his years in Hawaii that he seemed like someone more likely to live in a tree house than in a city, but having lived in the little cabin up in the woods in my earlier years in Pasadena, I knew where to find the most tree-houselike areas around. That, and the prospect of perhaps finding a planet or two, convinced him, and he moved to Pasadena and immediately set to work.

  He knew what he was doing so well and was already so good at it that I essentially handed him the keys to the telescope and stepped out of his way. In a few short months, we’d finished looking at the area of the sky we had previously covered with photographic plates, and, to my great relief, there truly was nothing there to have been seen. Soon we were on to fresh sky. And somewhere in that fresh sky we made our first catch.

  I’d love to write more about this very first discovery, about how Chad took pictures of the sky one night and then, while looking through them the next day, spotted a brand-new point of light slowly crawling across the images. I’d love to describe Chad’s excitement as he stepped across the hall into my office and showed me that first discovery. Yes, it was somewhat small—larger things had been stumbled upon in the Kuiper belt already—but we now knew for certain that if we could find this relatively small chunk of ice so quickly, any planets hiding out there were going to be within our grasp. I should have felt quite vindicated after all those years of searching. Perhaps I even did. The only problem is, I don’t remember any of it. When would it have happened? Probably November or December of 2001. Or was it January? Did Chad really come in and tell me? Did I then go across the hall and look at the pictures on his computer? It astounds me that I don’t remember any of it. I could go back and look up the records of that first discovery and perhaps refresh my memory. Instead, I went and looked back at my calendar for that time period to try to remember what else was going on that fall and winter.

  My calendar is filled with Diane: trips with her to Hawaii, to the San Juan Islands, to the Sierra Nevada, trips on which I didn’t even check the phase of the moon before going. And when there weren’t trips, there were dinners and coffees and lunches. A year earlier I had worked from 10:00 a.m. until 10:00 p.m. most days of the week; but in 2001–02, for the first time since I had become an astronomer, I was actually leaving work at an almost normal time. I wasn’t even coming into work most weekends. I wonder if that first discovery came on a weekend when I wasn’t there, or when Diane and I were off for a week snowbound in the mountains. I like to think so. I was confident in the future Chad was working on; I was confident in the future I was working on, too.

  The distraction of the winter continued into the distractions of the spring. By now Chad was discovering new objects beyond Neptune at a steady rate. One or two were big and bright enough that despite my distracted state at the time, I can still remember their discoveries—though, admittedly, a little vaguely. By the beginning of the summer, Diane and I had planned a long-weekend escape to a small beach town in the Yucatán. Before leaving, I had had a long conversation with one of my Ph.D. students. For some of my students I play multiple roles, including scientific adviser, speaking coach, writing instructor, tool provider, caffeine enabler, and, sometimes, relationship counselor. This student was complaining about the fact that her boyfriend, to whom she was engaged, thought that buying an engagement ring when they were not to be married for several years made no sense. On the airplane ride down to the Yucatán, I told Diane the story, and added the opinion that not only did I agree w
ith the boyfriend, but that I thought engagement rings were a silly waste of money anyway and wouldn’t it be wiser to buy useful things? Like kayaks? Or bicycles? Didn’t she agree? No, she didn’t, actually.

  I brought up the subject again at dinner our first night on the beach, and even once the next morning. Secretly, though, I had spent the previous month seeking out and buying the perfect engagement ring, and I had brought it with me. I had a plan. First, I would convince Diane that an engagement ring was the farthest thing from my mind; then I would plan a perfect seaside evening with dinner and a bottle of wine and spring it on her.

  As I have since learned, I’m not very good at keeping burning secrets. Rather than waiting until the evening, sometime in the middle of our second day there, while sitting in a little hammock overlooking the water, relaxed and happy and talking about nothing in particular, I quickly went back to our room and came back out with the ring hidden in my pocket. I knelt. I proposed. I then went on for several verbal paragraphs about the symbolic importance of a ring as a combination of a public statement, something akin to earnest money, and a down payment on life. I then produced the ring. Diane was stunned silent. You could almost hear the machinery in her head reprocessing the last few days. Her first words, after a considerable pause, were: “You are such a shit.” She continued processing the days, the conversations about rings, the fact that she’d thought I was hopeless. She wanted to know when I had gotten the ring (on the street right outside the hotel, perhaps?), who else knew (my mother, of course), why it fit perfectly (I had surreptitiously tried on her rings, and they all fit perfectly on my pinky, which I then had measured), how I had managed to pick one she liked so much (I modeled it somewhat after her grandmother’s wedding band, to which I knew she was much attached). Finally I had to remind her that I had actually proposed and she had not, in fact, given me an answer. She looked up and said, “YES!”