Free How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown

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. Wewalked 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 “Y ES !”

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 Plutoseventy 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