#2: How I killed Pluto and why it had it coming, Mike Brown

Mike's five years bet to discover a planet bigger than Pluto was lost, yet along the way, instead of watching the end of the solar system, he found out that it was only the beginning: he was expecting a baby girl. He also found what looks like an object bigger than Pluto, but Santa's rather shiny surface tricked him. Even so, he kept looking for something over the sky, something that no one else thought existed, and something that in fact might not even exist. But it was there: a few weeks later, he finds Xena. So, are there ten planets now? or eight? One object might not be enough to kill Pluto, but a few months later, he finds EasterBunny. 

Brown then shows us the complexity of scientists' jobs when it comes to discoveries: One can wait until they have a relatively good knowledge of the object discovered before they share it, but the risk is that someone else finds it before, or one can declare their discovery right after the object was found, but then they lose the advantage of studying it on their own before the others: After all, what would be the point in looking for new objects if it was to make the finding accessible for everyone directly. His discoveries were propitious as only a few months before Lilah was born. He had now to take care of his daughter while dealing with his scientific papers, and now he had one more issue: someone found the geographical coordinates of Santa from the data of a telescope that Brown had used in the past, and stole his discovery. His two other most important findings were in danger because Brown found them using that same telescope. He announced it the day after. 

Now that two objects larger than Pluto were discovered, were they eleven planets? What was even a planet? something larger than Pluto? How in the first place Pluto was called a planet? Perhaps it might have been a mistake, but everyone loves Pluto, and no one would want to leave it. A vote had to be made at the International Astronomical Union. Eventually, Pluto was gone, because it made more sense to attribute Pluto and the other objects to the category of objects in the Kuiper Belt. Pluto, along with other objects, became dwarf planets, but isn't a dwarf planet still a planet? "a dwarf tree is still a tree" after all, why would a dwarf planet not be a planet? Well, to make sense of this, the 8 planets were called "Classical planets", so that the two subcategories could fit under the category "planet".  It's after saying "Pluto died" that Mike Brown started to be called the "Pluto-killer".

Kuiper Belt

I found this book very interesting to read for Mike Brown successfully carried me into the most intimate parts of his life while describing his job in a way that makes it easy to understand, and raising questions that make me reflect few topics. Why do we like to put words on everything that exists? It is essential to classify what's in our world to get a better sense of it, whether it is a planet, a continent, a country or a city. This book also reminds us that perhaps our understanding of the world will never come to an end, but that we should keep on going, whether it is by looking up to the sky or looking down on earth, using science is essential for us to improve our condition. 

Milky Way