How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming

by Mike Brown

  “Well, what do you guys call it among yourselves?” Ken wanted to know.

  “Xena. It will have a real name soon, but for now we call it Xena.”

  Ken chuckled and wrote it down.

  Contrary to what I thought that morning, it would not get a real name soon. After Ken wrote it down that first time, Xena became its nickname for more than a year. There are many people, I believe, who still think that the object remains named Xena.

  Ken Chang was right. The story did end up missing almost all of the Saturday and Sunday papers, and though the discovery was not exactly old news by Monday, it was indeed clear that Friday at 4:00 p.m. is not the right time to make a press announcement—unless, perhaps, you are announcing that you are going back to rehab, and you hope no one notices. But at least, by virtue of that one accidental phone call, the announcement of the discovery of the tenth planet hit the front page of The New York Times on Saturday, July 30, 2005.

  By about noon on Friday, I had built a webpage describing Xena. It was spare but would have to do. I drove up to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory—JPL—where they had the facilities to put on a major press conference.

  I can no longer put together a timeline for the rest of that day; most of the memories are simply too jumbled. I recall at some point changing shirts and shaving in the men’s room at the press building at JPL. I don’t remember a single thing I or anyone else said at the press conference, though I vaguely remember standing in front of a TV camera with a small speaker in my ear; every three minutes I was connected by satellite to some different TV show. I don’t know what I said, and I certainly don’t want to know how I looked.

  I drove home late in the evening. A few minutes after arriving home, the head of the media department at JPL called me to double-check that I was all right. I remember that conversation extremely well. “I’m fine,” I said. “I’m lying on the bed and Lilah is asleep in my arms. What could be better?”

  “Good,” she said. “Then would you mind doing Good Morning America on Monday morning, and they want you to bring Lilah.”

  At 2:00 a.m. on Monday, Diane, Lilah, and I drove down to a Hollywood studio. Normally I would consider this hour to be thoroughly indecent, but given the round-the-clock schedule we were currently on, 2:00 a.m. was no better or worse a time than 2:00 p.m. Actually, it was better, as there was no traffic.

  When I arrived at the studio, I was hooked up with earpieces again and talked about planets, old and new, with Charlie Gibson and Diane Sawyer. At the end, my wife brought Lilah over for the cameras. Two thousand miles away, in Alabama, my mother was on the edge of her seat. She already knew about all of the planet parts, so that was just filler. But it was the first time she had ever seen Lilah.

  According to my calendar, the following weeks were a storm of interviews and talks and TV appearances, of which I have no memory. If you look at the records I kept of Lilah’s eating and sleeping and crying and smiling, you would not know that any of it had happened.

  A week after the biggest scientific announcement of my life, it seems that all I cared about was whether or not Lilah would sleep and how frequently she would feed.

  Day 31 (7 Aug 2005): Lilah is one month today! To celebrate her birthday she had a record sleep last night, almost 5 hours! It included an hour-long car ride at the beginning, which may or may not have contributed, but to top it off she then had two 3½-hour sleep sessions in a row. If you look carefully you will also note that she is, in general, stretching things out more (well, at least at night). For the past 5 days we have dropped from 10 feeds a day to 9 feeds a day. This may not seem like much to you, but it is about 45 minutes of saved time for Diane every day (or, more accurately, 45 minutes of extra sleep at night)! There was even her first 8 feed day back on Day 29 that originally passed without note. My original complaint back around Day 12, when it appeared that Lilah couldn’t distinguish between day and night, is clearly no longer valid. Night times are definitely for longer sleep periods. Thank you Lilah, thank you thank you!

  Chapter Ten

  STEALING THE SHOW

  The Internet chat group that had been irritated with me over the discovery and naming of Quaoar and Sedna was up in arms again. I didn’t know it, but Ortiz himself was apparently an occasional member of this group, and many were rallying around to defend him against the onslaught of the evil American astronomers trying to deny him credit for his discovery. Except, of course, there was no onslaught. I told anyone who would listen that Ortiz had indeed discovered 2003 EL61/Santa. Since I couldn’t really be excoriated for trying to steal Ortiz’s credit, they would find something else to rail against. They then argued that I had made up the story that someone had found the coordinates of Xena and Easterbunny, so that I would have an excuse to hold a press conference the day after Ortiz’s discovery in order to overshadow him. And then they hit on a new accusation: I was bad because I had been trying to keep Santa and Xena and Easter bunny secret. I chuckled and shook my head, given how hard we had tried to do everything correctly by scientific standards.

  Even Ortiz got into the act, declaring in an interview:

  With technology many times more advanced than ours, Brown’s team had discovered three big objects many months ago, but they were hiding its [sic] existence from the international scientific community, as they did before with Quaoar and Sedna.

  This secrecy was useful to Brown, as it allowed him to study his own findings in detail and exclusively. But his actions harm science and don’t follow the established procedures, that imply notifying the existence of a new object to the astronomical community as soon as it’s discovered.

  Sigh. I almost sat down and wrote a long article on why the instant announcement of discoveries is precisely what good scientists don’t do and that the established scientific procedures are to confirm findings and write scientific papers before making public announcements, but I decided that the accusations were sufficiently ridiculous that I should ignore them and let them fade into their deserved oblivion.

  I will admit, though, to being stung and irritated to read Ortiz’s comments. I didn’t care about what nonastronomers were saying on chat groups, but I thought it harmful for professional astronomers to spout such nonscientific nonsense. And it seemed particularly uncharitable given how hard I had been defending Ortiz against all accusations and deflecting credit to him whenever possible. Odd, I thought.

  Given all of the chatter, I decided to write to Ortiz again to assure him that I considered him the legitimate discoverer of 2003 EL61. I asked him if he had thought about what name he would like to give it. Only the discoverer is allowed to propose a name, so this was a pretty unambiguous signal of my intent. I told him that we would be interested in giving the moon that we had discovered a name that fit with the name that they proposed for 2003 EL61. Ortiz wrote back thanking me for asking but saying that because of the recent onslaught they had had no time to even begin considering a name.

  The chat group continued to try to prove my malicious nature. One of the main proponents of this theme was the German amateur astronomer who had, a year and a half earlier, tried to thwart our naming of Sedna by naming some of his own objects Sedna. He had, interestingly, even taken part a bit in the Ortiz discovery. After Ortiz found the object in his old data, he had contacted the German amateur to get a current picture of the object. The amateur had promptly complied, becoming in the process a secondary member of the discovery team. It was an odd coincidence that the one person who appeared to have the biggest ax to grind against me happened to be involved in all of this. But coincidences happen all the time. I thought nothing of it. Brian Marsden, when he first learned this, said, “I smell a rat in here somewhere.” Marsden, as I continued to learn, has an acute sense of smell.

  Interestingly, after some time, a countertheme began to develop among the members of the chat group. Not everyone appeared to be convinced that the discovery of 2003 EL61/Santa had been legitimate on the part of the Spanish group, and they starte
d asking Ortiz probing questions. One particular question interested me: Did Ortiz know about our discovery of Santa before he claimed that he had discovered it himself? Had he ever accessed the website with all of the coordinates? Ortiz never responded, though his friend the German amateur defended him viciously through counterattack and accusation. It was all quite ugly, though perhaps no more so than many other chat groups on the Internet these days. I figured it was best to stay out of the fray.

  A week and a half after the initial announcements, I got a phone call out of the blue from an astronomer I didn’t know. Rick Pogge was a professor at Ohio State University, and his website database was the one that had been tapped into, forcing us to make the sudden announcement of Xena and Easterbunny. He was apologetic about what had happened. I told him not to worry; it would not have occurred to us or to someone else that anyone could have figured out a way to use these generally dull databases for nefarious purposes. And it would have been even less likely to occur to us that someone would actually do it. He then described all of his recent changes to the database, explaining how this sort of thing would never occur again.

  “Great,” I said. “That sounds great.”

  “But there’s something more that you need to know,” Rick said.

  More?

  Rick then told me an interesting story.

  He, like everyone else, had first learned about Xena and Easterbunny when he’d read the accounts of the press conference a week and a half earlier. As scattered press reports came out about someone tapping into some database, Rick first thought it was a really unfortunate story; then he thought, Wait, is that my database? Indeed, Rick had built the camera that was mounted on the telescope in Chile that we had been using to monitor Santa, Xena, and Easterbunny. One particularly nice feature of that telescope in Chile was that for routine observations, like taking pictures of the positions of our Kuiper belt object, we didn’t have to fly to Chile each time we wanted a picture, but instead a person permanently stationed in Chile would take the pictures we needed using the camera that Rick had built. Rick then maintained the database of observations that allowed astronomers to access their pictures after the camera had taken them.

  After suspecting that perhaps it was this database that had been tapped into, Rick became curious and began to look through the computer logs to see who had accessed the database. In the years that the database had been up, it was accessed almost exclusively by people who were supposed to be accessing it: the astronomers who were using the telescope that the database related to. Occasionally inadvertent access would show up once and never again.

  But the records also showed that one day in late July something odd had happened. A computer address that Rick didn’t recognize accessed the database multiple times in quick succession. Each time it accessed the database, it was pointing to a different webpage that showed the location of an object named K40506A on different dates. Rick looked up the computer address to see where it was from. It was from Spain. He looked in more detail. It was from the institute in Spain where Ortiz was a professor. This access to the database occurred two days before Ortiz announced the discovery of 2003 EL61. Ortiz had known all along.

  I sat at my end of the phone, stunned. I had Rick go back and tell me precise dates, times, and the computer addresses, and I wrote them all down.

  There was more.

  On the first day that Ortiz had tried to announce the discovery, he had inadvertently sent the announcement through the wrong channels, so he received no reply. The next day, he had sent a much more thorough announcement, including new observations by his German friend and more data from other old images. All of these extra data would have required knowing the position of the object more accurately than before. The morning before Ortiz sent all of the old data, Rick’s database had been accessed once again. A quick flurry of websites had been viewed, each showing the position of K40506A on different nights.

  I kept writing. I was going from feeling stunned to feeling slightly giddy. The Spanish guys had stolen Santa out of the database, but they had botched the job. There were fingerprints all over the scene of the crime. And now they were busted.

  After I hung up the phone with Rick Pogge, I immediately called Brian Marsden.

  “I knew it,” he said.

  All I knew from Rick was that the computers accessing the database were at Ortiz’s institute in Spain. But Brian had an interesting idea. “Tell me those computer IP addresses,” he said. He then cross-checked them with e-mail he had received. The specific computer that had accessed the database the first time was the same computer from which the initial announcement was sent. The specific computer that had accessed the database the second time was the same computer from which the second announcement was sent. The first e-mail had come from Pablo Santos-Sanz, a student of Ortiz’s, while the second e-mail had come from Ortiz himself. The fingerprints matched perfectly.

  Though I will likely never be able to confirm most of this, here is my hypothesis as to what actually happened:

  On the second-to-last Wednesday in July, the titles for talks to be given at the big international conference were announced, including talks by Chad and David, which mentioned K40506A and described it as big and bright. The following Tuesday, Santos-Sanz noticed the titles, and, curious about K40506A, he typed it into Google. He was likely shocked (as I would be a week later when I did the same thing) to find precise information about where a telescope was pointed one night in May. After the initial shock, he must have felt some nervous excitement. He must have been savvy enough to realize that he might be able to find more information about where the telescope was pointed. He must have looked at the Web address and realized that it looked something like

  www.astro.osu.edu/andicam/nightly_logs/2005/05/03

  and he must have made the quick assumption that the last bit was the date. He changed it to something like

  www.astro.osu.edu/andicam/nightly_logs/2005/05/05

  and was suddenly rewarded with the position of K40506A on a different night. He collected a few more positions and set to work. Knowing precisely where the telescope was pointing over multiple nights is precisely the same as knowing where the object is on multiple nights. And knowing that means that you know enough to go find it yourself.

  What happened next I cannot figure out. Here is the story as I envision it. I think that Ortiz and Santos-Sanz really were engaged in a legitimate search for objects in the Kuiper belt, even though they had not yet been successful. My guess is that they had never gotten around to writing the computer software to help them with their search, so they merely had a big pile of images dating back several years, with no way to look at them. It wouldn’t be surprising. As I had learned over the past few years, writing the computer programs to analyze the data is at least as hard as collecting the data itself. But armed with the previous positions of K40506A, Santos-Sanz no longer had to look through all of his images; he could quickly determine which ones might have the object on it, and he no longer needed to write complicated software to look through a vast pile of images. He could instantly go to the right images—the ones where he knew K40506A had to be—and do a quick search by hand. He found it. He showed Ortiz. They announced their “discovery” on Wednesday, thirty-eight hours after the first data access. They must have had a busy thirty-eight hours.

  When the initial announcement received no acknowledgment (having never discovered anything before, they were unclear on the proper methods of sending in a discovery), they must have decided they needed more images to demonstrate that it was real.

  At this point, it remains possible that Ortiz was in the dark about what had happened. Perhaps Santos-Sanz had not told him about the computer access. Perhaps he was going to try to make it appear as if he had gotten all of his software written after all and had made a quick and spectacular find. But on Thursday morning, the day they decided they would need more images to convince people that their discovery was real, the database was accessed again.
This time the access came from Ortiz’s own computer. He did the same tricks to find more positions. Twelve hours later, Ortiz’s German amateur astronomer friend—the one who passionately disliked me—was observing the object from a telescope in Majorca. Two hours later, Ortiz re-sent an announcement of the discovery including the images from that very evening, in addition to old archival images that the German amateur had tracked down for them.

  This time the announcement went through the right channels. I would find out about it a few hours later, on a Thursday afternoon, while home with Diane and a twenty-day-old Lilah. Seven hours later, I sent my e-mail to Ortiz congratulating him on his fine discovery, thinking he had discovered something in the sky, not in the bowels of the Web.

  Brian Marsden had two more questions for me: What about the German amateur? Surely he was involved in this somehow. I told him no. Only the Spanish computers had accessed the database. I was certain that if the German amateur had learned about the computer logs he would not have been able to resist looking at them himself. I suspected that he had been duped like the rest of them. And he had been duped so well that he felt it right to be a vicious defender of the honesty of Ortiz.

  Brian’s last question: What are you going to do about this?

  I didn’t know. I hung up the phone. My anger was beginning to grow. These guys had stolen our discovery and, what seemed even worse, forced us to make an incomplete and hasty announcement of the biggest astronomical discovery of my lifetime. They had caused me to spend most of my past week at work rather than at home, where I was supposed to be on family leave. And these guys would have gotten away with it, too, if not for the careful sleuthing of Rick Pogge. What would be the right response? Public humiliation? An interstellar smack-down? I decided that, for now, the main thing I needed to do was go home.