How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming [Hardcover]

Mike Brown (Author)

Book Description

Release date: December 7, 2010

The solar system most of us grew up with included nine planets, with Mercury closest to the sun and Pluto at the outer edge. Then, in 2005, astronomer Mike Brown made the discovery of a lifetime: a tenth planet, Eris, slightly bigger than Pluto. But instead of its resulting in one more planet being added to our solar system, Brown’s find ignited a firestorm of controversy that riled the usually sedate world of astronomy and launched him into the public eye. The debate culminated in the demotion of Pluto from real planet to the newly coined category of “dwarf” planet. Suddenly Brown was receiving hate mail from schoolchildren and being bombarded by TV reporters—all because of the discovery he had spent years searching for and a lifetime dreaming about.

Filled with both humor and drama, How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming is Mike Brown’s engaging first-person account of the most tumultuous year in modern astronomy—which he inadvertently caused. As it guides readers through important scientific concepts and inspires us to think more deeply about our place in the cosmos, it is also an entertaining and enlightening personal story: While Brown sought to expand our understanding of the vast nature of space, his own life was changed in the most immediate, human ways by love, birth, and death. A heartfelt and personal perspective on the demotion of everyone’s favorite farflung planet, How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming is the book for anyone, young or old, who has ever dreamed of exploring the universe—and who among us hasn’t?

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A Letter from Author Mike Brown

My daughter Lilah, now five years old, is mad at me for killing Pluto. When I began a project 13 years ago to chart the slowly-moving objects of the distant outer solar system, my goal was never to pull Pluto off of its cherished planetary pedestal. I wanted to be a planet discoverer, like William Herschel or Clyde Tombaugh before me. I had a strong feeling that somewhere out there something bigger than Pluto was lurking, and I knew that whoever found it would get to claim the mantle as the only living planet discoverer.

I was right. Something bigger than Pluto was out there (or at least something more massive than Pluto; sizes are a little harder to pin down precisely) and one January morning in 2005, my small team of astronomers and I found it. We announced the discovery of the 10th planet to an unsuspecting world late on the afternoon of Lilah’s 22nd day of life. A little after her first birthday, though, the doors to the planetary club were locked and Pluto and my own discovery were kicked out on the curb. The solar system was down to only eight planets.

It was hard not to mourn the loss of my now ex-planet, except for the fact that I had to admit that kicking it out was the most scientifically sensible thing to happen to planetary classification since asteroids were also kicked out almost 200 years ago. The solar system is a beautiful and profound place, and it is made richer with the realization that the eight planets are the foundation throughout which countless smaller bodies continuously swirl.

When Pluto was first demoted, people said to me, “What about the children? How could you do this to them?” But, in fact, children live lives that are always changing. It’s the adults who have had the hardest time reconciling the new understanding of the solar system with what they remember from when they themselves were children. So, it made sense that I used to joke about what would happen the moment when Lilah first learned about the solar system. She would come home, and I would say, “Tell me all about the eight planets,” and when I would try to tell her about the olden times when we used to think there were nine—or even ten!—planets, she would slowly shake her head and exclaim, “Daddy, adults are so stupid.”

But I was wrong.

Lilah knows all about Pluto. She has a stuffed dog, a planet lunch box, a solar system place mat at the dinner table. She feels as warmly towards the ice ball as someone ten times her age, and, like many of those older people, she is mad at the person who killed it. Lilah, though, has a solution. She recently told me, “Daddy, I know that you had to kill Pluto, but will you promise me one thing?”

“Of course,” I said.

“You have to go find another planet, and when you do, you have to name it Pluto for me, OK?”

So my search of the skies continues.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Though several reviewers admitted a grudge against Brown for picking off plucky underdog Pluto, they found his memoir a charming account of a scientist’s life and work. Given Brown’s popularity as an instructor and lecturer at Caltech, it is perhaps unsurprising that his book is accessible and enlightening. Critics were less certain about Brown’s decision to include so much of his personal life in the book. None actually said that Brown’s interludes about becoming a husband and father detracted from his story, but a few asked what they really added. Others, though, felt that this personal perspective perfectly rounded out Brown’s account of how he and his discoveries reshaped the solar system.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Spiegel & Grau (December 7, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385531087
• ISBN-13: 978-0385531085
• Product Dimensions: 5.7 x 1 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (95 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #142,807 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Mike Brown is the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology and has been on the faculty there since 1996. He specializes in the discovery and study of bodies at the edge of the solar system. Among his numerous scientific accomplishments, he is best known for his discovery of Eris, the largest object found in the solar system in 150 years, and the object which led to the debate and eventual demotion of Pluto from a real planet to a dwarf planet. Feature articles about Brown and his work have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and Discover, and his discoveries have been covered on front pages of countless newspapers worldwide. In 2006 he was named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People as well as one of Los Angeles magazine's Most Powerful Angelinos. He has authored over 100 scientific paper. He is a frequent invited lecturer at astronomical meetings as well as at science museums, planetariums, and college campuses. At Caltech he teaches undergraduate and graduate students, in classes ranging from introductory geology to the formation and evolution of the solar system. He was especially pleased by his most recent honor, the Richard P. Feynman Award for Outstanding Teaching at Caltech.

Brown received his AB from Princeton in 1987, and then his MA and PhD from University of California, Berkeley, in 1990 and 1994, respectively. He has won several awards and honors for his scholarship, including the Urey Prize for best young planetary scientist from the American Astronomical Society's Division of Planetary Sciences; a Presidential Early Career Award; a Sloan Fellowship; and, of course, the one that started his career, an honorable mention in his fifth-grade science fair. He was also named one of Wired Online's Top Ten Sexiest Geeks in 2006, the mention of which never ceases to make his wife laugh.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

59 of 65 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Story About the Science September 28, 2010

By N. Hawkins TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Thanks to Mike Brown, two of my childhood illusions have been shattered: Pluto is no longer a planet, and Astronomy isn't a riveting, exciting science as I thought it would be.

Mike Brown is a CalTech astronomer who has been looking for objects past Pluto and found over a dozen of them. That's where the problem lies. Most of objects are half the size of Pluto, and Eris is about 25% bigger than Pluto. So it stands to reason that either Eris is our new 10th planet in the solar system, or since it behaves a bit strangely like Pluto, then Pluto isn't a planet (since it moves in an irregular orbit, etc.) The logic makes sense, and Dr. Brown explains it from both sides and fully understands that growing up, all of us learned that Pluto was a planet, and that changing that would result in uproar. He's fair and balanced in his logic and reasoning and explains it very well.

Dr. Brown doesn't romance the life of the astronomer: they work odd hours, have to deal with weather, the moon, long hours poured over maps and plates to determine if objects move or not. They're obsessive creatures with understanding spouses (Dr. Brown mentions his spouse a lot, who sounds like a great person and adds "Astronomy wives" to the long list of suffering spouses who deal with a spouse with a crazy profession.)

There's an interesting background to what it means to actually discover something. I didn't know that there was a proper naming nomenclature behind finding objects. Giving Eris the original name of Xena (after the "Warrior Princess" TV show) lead to vigorous discussion. If it was a Kuiper belt object, then it should be named after a creation deity. This is something that not many people are aware of, and they got bent out of shape when Brown and his group deviated from it, even with nicknames.

The writing is strong. Sometimes with books written by scientists, the narrative tends to get in the way of the science. I hope that this isn't Dr. Brown's last book, because I could see him writing more books on astronomy for wider audiences.

Overall, I'd recommend this book for people with an interest in astronomy and anyone who has an interest in why Pluto isn't a planet any longer. It's a good read for anyone who's ever dreamed beyond the planet.

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars How 21st Century astronomy is done, and made compelling September 29, 2010

By Stephen Foster VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Who will be interested in this book? Astronomy buffs, of course, science historians, every last geek alive, people who enjoy really good writing, and (surprisingly) also anxious new parents.

By coincidence, Amazon delivered this book just as I was re-visiting perhaps the best scientific discovery book ever written: The Double Helix, so I had the Gold Standard fresh in my mind as I dove into this one.

Mike Brown is a good writer. There are three separate stories in here. There's the discovery of the "tenth planet" and the eventual (correct) decision to instead demote Pluto, which is a fascinating tale.

Then, just when you think the fat lady is about to sing, outrageous cheating, lies, international intrigue, and clever 21st Century detective work appear out of nowhere.

And then there's what was going on in the author's life at the time, the whole back-story of how he got into astronomy, and how his discoveries affected him and his new family. All of that is an integral part of the story, and besides, you might be as amused as I was that this very bright man, quite capable of discovering planets and accurately describing how his wife and he came together, yet still somehow believes that HE was the one doing the courting.

In case you worry that the whole thing might be too touchy-feely, let's head down into the astronomy for a moment. I was delighted that the storied but almost-forgotten wide-field Schmidt telescope at Palomar (the source of the first and still-relevant star map of the Northern Hemisphere) became the workhorse of the whole endeavour. This saved the researchers' very limited time on the "big guns" (the 200" Palomar, the Keck, and the Hubble) for the luxury of the occasional urgent zoom-shot that might, if lucky, discover a moon or even methane.

The Keck (twin-telescope observatory on Mauna Kea) session is particularly interesting. If you have a vague idea of adaptive optics, and idly thought about learning more by reading the Wikipedia entry (oh, be my guest :-), you might instead pick this book up. Luckily for us inquiring amateurs, Mike Brown's team needed quick access to one of the Kecks, so they had to accept a night when the real purpose of the evening was to test and calibrate the new "laser reference star" for the adaptive optics system. In the space of a page or so, we get to understand the concept well enough to take on a Congressional investigation committee, or at the very least a cocktail party.

There is hard science in here, but "hard" simply means solid, not difficult: everything that needs explained gets very clear treatment indeed. Need to get a hands-on sense of how far away these strange objects are? All you need is a sheet of paper, a quarter, a pencil, and page 100 of this book. You will also learn that the team's concurrent discovery of another distant orbital object (Sedna, including its satellite, its strange orbit and its debris-field), has led to a basic (and ongoing) re-think of the birth of the Solar System. It would have been nice if this angle, which doubtless has much more astronomical significance than the discovery of "the 10th planet", had been gone into in more detail. But if the book leaves you wanting more astronomy, the good news is that you can get regular (and fascinating) updates by subscribing to (Amazon doesn't allow external link addresses, so take the following as a broad hint) mike browns planets dot com.

Enough astronomy; back to sign-language: Intertwined in all this are his interactions with co-workers and his utterly-geeky and hilarious approach to birth-anxiety and child-rearing. If you are a new parent, you may laugh at his obsession about graphing birth-dates and everything else in obsessive detail. All fine and well, but what might really grab you is his idea that, instead of waiting for your child to develop verbal ability, you instead deliberately teach the concepts of sign-language. For example: if you're about to turn on a light, hold a fist high above your head, then as you flip the light-switch, open your fingers. You may eventually be rewarded by a pre-verbal child, bothered by the moon going behind a cloud, instructing you to bring it back by using the same gesture: Mike Brown was. (Unluckily for his daughter's developing world-view, the moon immediately obliged.)

How tough a book is it? When I finished, I sent it to my 13-year-old son, who swallowed it in one gulp, accompanied by loud belching.

So why not five stars? Easy: I'd just finished "The Double Helix."

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars This book is to astronomy December 18, 2010

By Deward Hastings

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

as "Soul of a New Machine" was to the birth of the "small computer" revolution. I thought it would be a fun bedtime read for a week or two . . . instead it kept me awake until I was done. Previous reviews have explained the story well enough . . . I'll just add a vote that it's a great, fun read . . .