05/10/2006
Planetary Intrigue and Semantics
If my count is correct, this is the 350th column for old Dr. Bortrum. Seven years ago, I had no idea that I would be writing a weekly column for a Web site with an international audience. I didn’t even have the name Allen F. Bortrum, a thinly disguised permutation of my actual name, about which I’ve always had some reservations. (Just this past Sunday, my wife and I went to an event at which we were issued place cards and the last name was garbled.) In the past seven years, I’ve written on subjects ranging from Viagra to the Big Bang to recent topics such as intelligent behavior in crows. With no qualifications whatsoever, I’ve even assumed the role of a music critic and have blatantly taken any excuse to mention my golfing hole-in-one and later breaking my leg on that same hole.
How can I resist an obvious segue into reporting my 95-yard pitching wedge shot last week. It was uphill with a trap directly in front of the pin. My soaring shot just cleared the trap and you golfers can imagine my disappointment when I searched the green and surrounding rough and could not find my ball. You can also imagine my ecstasy when we discovered the ball in the cup! (Golfers will have an idea of the normal level of my golf game when I mention that I needed that shot for a par!)
I’m sure the joy I felt upon finding a little ball in a hole was miniscule compared to the elation felt by Michael Brown when he found a much bigger ball orbiting our Sun 10 billion miles out in space. Wives have a way of putting things in perspective. In January of 2005, Brown phoned his pregnant wife: “I just found a planet.” Her reply: “That’s nice, honey. Can you pick up some milk on the way home?” These quotes are from an article titled “Planet Finder” in the May issue of Discover magazine. In the article, Brown, an astronomer at Caltech (the California Institute of Technology) talks about his life with writer Cal Fussman.
The pictures of Mike Brown and his wry humor in the article remind me somehow of humor columnist Dave Barry. Brown seems like the kind of guy who deserves to find objects that will cause textbooks to be rewritten and who really doesn’t know if he did find a “planet” that day he called his wife. In past columns (10/17/2002 & 3/31/2004), I’ve mentioned two other objects, Quaoar and Sedna, that Brown and his colleagues Chad Trujillo at the Gemini Observatory and David Rabinowitz at Yale University discovered. Querying the StocksandNews search engine, I was surprised to find that I’ve neglected Xena, the object in Brown’s call to his wife. But first, let’s talk about Brown and how he became a finder of “planets”.
Brown lived on a sailboat when a grad student at the University of California at Berkeley. He was working with his adviser on the 120-inch telescope at the Lick Observatory. There was a small telescope on the side of the large main telescope. The small telescope wasn’t used much and Brown latched onto it to study Io, a volcanic moon of Jupiter. After getting his Ph.D. on his Io studies, he moved to Caltech, where he found himself working with the famed 200-inch Palomar telescope. Brown, accustomed to virtually unlimited access to the small scope at Berkeley, wasn’t happy with the fact he could only get time on the Palomar a few nights a year.
On the verge of quitting Caltech (his father called him a nut for considering that possibility), Brown again learned that a “small” (48-inch!) telescope in the Palomar Observatory would soon be idle. Brown seized the opportunity. Back at Berkeley in 1992, Jane Luu and David Jewitt had discovered an object a hundred or so miles in size in the so-called Kuiper belt in the far reaches of our solar system. Until then, the Kuiper belt was thought to be merely the home of comets no more than a mile in diameter. When Luu showed Brown the newly discovered object, Brown decided that the Kuiper belt was where the action is and at Palomar he realized the 48-inch telescope was just what he needed to pursue his quest for even bigger Kuiper objects.
Brown spent three years searching the sky with the 48-inch scope recording images on 14-inch square photographic plates, a time consuming job. No big objects. The pressure was on to write up the work, especially since the tenure committee at Caltech was considering Brown’s fate. But Brown went against the advice to write up the work and instead decided to restart the whole survey using a newly installed CCD camera. As we’ve discussed in past columns, CCDs (charge-coupled devices) are used in cameras and telescopes to replace the photographic plate and are extremely sensitive. Brown realized he could do in one month what had taken three years and that with CCDs he could see objects that were only a tenth as bright as with the plates. (Willard Boyle and George Smith at Bell Labs invented the CCD and I’ve mentioned before that I think they deserve the Nobel Prize for revolutionizing photography and astronomy.)
Fortunately, Brown had done enough other things that the tenure committee approved his tenure even though he had not yet found a big one in the Kuiper belt. The committee’s wisdom in its decision was soon apparent when, only a week after the decision, in June of 2002 Brown and company found “Quaoar” out there. Quaoar is half the size of Pluto. Later, in 2004, came “Sedna”, which is really out there, 8 billion miles away and in such a strange orbit that it can only be seen 200 years out of the 12,000 years it takes to orbit the sun. In December of 2004, they came up with “Santa” and the next month they found the one that Brown’s wife termed “nice”.
The “nice” one is Xena, which turns out to be 1,800 miles in diameter, 400 miles more in diameter than Pluto. Not only that; Xena is 10 billion miles away. After discovering Xena, the crew picked up another – Easter Bunny. It’s not bigger than Pluto. So, now we have Quaoar, Sedna, Santa, Easter Bunny and Xena. Are they planets? Is Pluto a planet? Some have already demoted Pluto. The debate rages on. Brown says he doesn’t care which way it goes. He’s gotten tired of saying that Quaoar/Sedna/ … are not planets but neither is Pluto. He likens the controversy over the definition of “planet” to that of the word “continent”. Why is Europe a different continent from Asia? If Australia is a continent, why isn’t Madagascar? Or New Zealand? Or Manhattan? There is no scientific definition of a continent – or a planet.
Finally, I was intrigued by the intrigue associated with the public disclosure of the discoveries of Xena and the smaller “planets” Easter Bunny and Santa. In the old days, when you made a discovery and wanted to publish your results you wrote a paper and submitted it to a journal and the process would take many months or even years before the public was informed. In the case of Xena, Santa and Easter Bunny, Brown and his colleagues wanted to do some scientific studies on the objects before letting the public in on their discoveries, especially Xena.
So, they waited until near the end of July of last year to talk about Santa at an astronomical conference. (Brown’s wife had her baby July 7.) However, they didn’t mention where Santa was in the sky. Yet, only a few days later, someone “discovered” Santa. At the conference, the Brown’s group had used their computer code for Santa – K40506A. Unbeknownst to Brown, Googling that code number led directly to an archive not meant to be public. The archive contained data on where their telescope was pointing during their observations. Armed with that knowledge, anyone could point their telescope in the same direction and “discover” the same object. It appears that a Spanish group did exactly that.
Brown and his team had planned to announce their discoveries of Xena and Easter Bunny in September and October. However, here it was a Friday morning and they realized that when the sun went down anyone could point their telescopes and “discover” these two objects/planets. So, that afternoon, 4 PM Pacific time on the last Friday in July last year, they held a press conference to announce both discoveries. The news of a new “planet” was buried on page 18 of the Los Angeles Times, not exactly where they had hoped it would appear.
All this could have been avoided if they had only used “Santa” at the conference a few days earlier! Incidentally, I just searched “K40506A” and came up with a plethora of sites relating to Santa. One is Brown’s Caltech Web site described as an “electronic trail” in which the accessing of the archive by the Spanish group is documented along with a congratulatory email from Brown to one of the Spanish researchers on their “discovery”. That and another email from Brown telling of Web server logs documenting the Spanish access to the archives went unanswered, prompting Brown to file a complaint with the International Astronomical Union. Be careful what you put out on the Internet!
Allen F. Bortrum
|