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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



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-05/10/2006-      
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Dr. Bortrum

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