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

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 findinga 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 whenthere 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