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

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 call 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 somewhereelse 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