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Mike Brown

How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming Hardcover – December 7, 2010

by Mike Brown (Author)

355 ratings

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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?

Print length

288 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Spiegel & Grau
Publication date

December 7, 2010
Dimensions

5.67 x 0.98 x 8.27 inches
ISBN-10

0385531087
ISBN-13

978-0385531085
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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.

From Booklist

Solar system astronomer Brown charted a career course to discover Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs), which in the 1990s were only theorized to exist beyond Pluto. Ultimately discovering several such frigid spheres, Brown embeds the science of his search strategies into the project’s personal importance in securing his academic future at Cal Tech and, incidentally, in meeting his future wife. In wry, self-deprecating tones, he writes of science, vocation, romance, and fatherhood, with the science as the selling point for readers because Brown’s success in discovering KBOs set the stage for Pluto’s recent reclassification as a mere KBO. Accounts of finding specific KBOs culminate in an acrimonious engagement Brown had with a Spanish astronomer, whom Brown suspected of stealing data in order to claim priority in discovering one KBO. Scandal! Touching on how media refract such scientific conflicts to the public, Brown concludes with the professional astronomers’ vote to expel Pluto from the club of planets, a decision that has already inspired several other titles (e.g., Barrie Jones’ Pluto, 2010). --Gilbert Taylor

Review

Praise for How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming

"Brown’s brisk, enjoyable How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming chronicles the whole saga [of the demotion of Pluto] and, in the process, makes Pluto’s sad fate easier to take. If we’ve lost a planet, we’ve gained a sprightly new voice for popular science…Writing with an appealing wit, Mr. Brown resists the glibness to which science popularizations sometimes fall prey. Instead he leavens his scientific account with a memoir of how he discovered the joys of becoming a husband and a father during the same period that he thought he was discovering planets. It’s a refreshing twist on stereotype: the scientist neither as madman nor mystic, but mensch…The cheerful, unaffected tone makes it hard not to like Mr. Brown, and to root for him when he finds himself in the midst of controversy… Amazingly, the author spins these parliamentary proceedings into a nail-biting roller-coaster ride: the skullduggery of secret committees, the raucous debate, the white-knuckle final tally. How many planets will we end up with? Eight? Twelve? Hundreds? Will the astronomers accept a definition that satisfies cultural expectations—but is bad science? Or will they find the courage the kill Pluto?... Brown narrates this entire story with so little rancor and so much generosity to rival astronomers that he can seem too good to be true. He even keeps his cool, and his class, while his research is plundered and his reputation attacked. It turns out you can kill a planet and still be a pretty nice guy.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Brown's brilliant scientific memoir brings clarity and elegance to the complexities of planetary science. Brown is also a surprisingly self-effacing and entertaining genius. But what comes through clearest is his uncompromising integrity, his 'take-no-prisoners' belief in science. He puts principle above his own best interest... [An] out-of-this-world science memoir.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Brims with humor and charm...exhilarating."—LA Times

“Brown clearly explains difficult scientific topics with humor and warmth…Deftly pulling readers along on his journey of discovery and destruction, Brown sets the record straight and strongly defends his science with a conversational, rational, and calm voice that may change the public’s opinion of scientists as poor communicators.”—Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)

“Finally I have someone to whom I can forward the hate mail I get from schoolchildren. After all these years, the real destroyer of Pluto has confessed. Part memoir and part planetary saga, How I Killed Pluto invites you into planetary scientist Mike Brown’s office, his home, and his head as he tells the story of how his research on the outer solar system led directly to the death of Pluto, the planet.”—Neil deGrasse Tyson, Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium and author of The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet

“Damn Mike Brown for exploding the solar-system model we’ve been carrying around in our heads since elementary school. Praise him for showing us that stargazing, far from being a dead science, is a living, changing wonder.”—Benjamin Wallace, author of The Billionaire’s Vinegar

“Romance, intrigue, laughter, skullduggery, and most of all: science! Mike Brown has done more than anyone to reshape our view of the solar system, and this first-person account of his discoveries is an irresistible page-turner. You’ll have so much fun, you won’t even notice how much you’re learning.”—Sean Carroll, author of From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time

“Science is at its best when it shakes up our thinking, and when it comes to planets, Mike Brown has grabbed on with both hands. Whether you think Pluto is a planet or just another ice ball, you’ll find Brown’s tale of exploring the outer solar system a charming and even endearing read. If Pluto is indeed dead, then its sacrifice was not in vain.”—Philip Plait, author of Death from the Skies!

About the Author

Mike Brown is the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology. In 2006 he was named one of Time magazine’s 100 People Who Shape Our World as well as one of Los Angeles magazine’s Most Influential People in L.A. He lives in Southern California with his wife and daughter.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

What Is a Planet?

One December night in 1999, a friend and I were sitting on a mountaintop east of San Diego inside a thirteen-story-tall dome. Only a few lights illuminated the uncluttered floor of the cavernous interior, but above you could vaguely see the bottom half of the massive Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory. The Hale Telescope was, for almost fifty years, the largest telescope in the world, but from where we sat, with the weak yellow incandescent lighting being swallowed in the darkness above, you would never have guessed where you were. You might have thought you were deep in the interior of a pristine Hoover Dam, with cables and wire and pipes for directing the flow of water around. You might have believed that the steel structures around you were part of the far underground support and control of a spotlessly clean century-old subway system. Only when the entire building gently rumbled and a tiny sliver of the starry sky appeared far over your head and the telescope began to move soundlessly and swiftly to point to some new distant object in the universe, only then would you be able to make out the shadowy outline of the truss all the way to the top of the dome and realize that you were but a dot at the base of a giant machine whose only purpose was to gather the light from a single spot beyond the sky and focus it to a tiny point just over your head.

Usually when I am working at the telescope I sit in the warm, well-lit control room, looking at computer screens showing instrument readouts, staring at digital pictures just pulled from the sky, and pondering meteorological readings and forecasts for southern California. Sometimes, though, I like to step out into the cold, dark dome and stand at the very base of the telescope and look up at the sky through the tiny open sliver high overhead and see—with my own eyes—exactly what the giant machine is looking at. This December night, however, as I was sitting with my friend inside the dark dome, there was no sky to see. The dome was fastened closed, and the telescope was idle because the entire mountain was covered in cold, dripping fog.

I tend to get quite glum on nights when I’m at a telescope with the dome closed and the precious night is slipping past. An astronomer gets to use one of these biggest telescopes only a handful of nights per year. If the night is cloudy or rainy or snowy, too bad. Your night on the telescope is simply lost, and you get to try again next year. It’s hard not to think about lost time and lost discoveries as the second hand very slowly crawls through the night and your dome stays closed. Sabine—my friend—tried to cheer me up by asking about life and work, but it didn’t help. I instead told her about how my father had died that spring, and how I felt unable to really focus on my work. She finally asked me if there was anything that I was excited about these days. I paused for a few minutes. I momentarily forgot about the freezing fog and the closed dome and the ticking clock. “I think there’s another planet past Pluto,” I told her.

Another planet? Such a suggestion would have generally been scoffed at by most astronomers in the last days of the twentieth century. While it is true that for much of the last century astronomers had diligently searched for a mythical “Planet X” beyond Pluto, by about 1990 they had more or less convinced themselves that all that searching in the past had been in vain; Planet X simply did not exist. Astronomers were certain that they had a pretty good inventory of what the solar system contained, of all of the planets and their moons, and of most of the comets and asteroids that circled the sun. There were certainly small asteroids still to be discovered, and occasionally a bright comet that had never been seen before would come screaming in from the far depths of space, but certainly nothing major was left out there to find. Serious discussions by serious astronomers of another planet beyond Pluto were as likely as serious discussions by serious geologists on the location of the lost continent of Atlantis. What kind of an astronomer would sit underneath one of the biggest telescopes in the world and declare, “I think there’s another planet past Pluto”?

...

Almost a decade earlier, in the late summer of 1992, I was in the long middle years of my graduate studies at Berkeley (the place where I was taught that Planet X certainly did not exist and that we already knew pretty much everything we needed to know about what there was in the solar system). I didn’t think much about Planet X those days. I was midway through a Ph.D. dissertation about the planet Jupiter and its volcanic moon Io. When you’re midway through a Ph.D. dissertation, your mind acquires narrow blinders, so I didn’t think much about anything other than Io and how its volcanoes spewed material into space and affected Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field. I had so few thoughts to spare for most of the quotidian universe that I had fallen into a pattern of every day eating the same lunch at the same coffee shop right next to the Berkeley campus and having dinner at the same burrito stand a block away. At night I would ride my bicycle back down toward the San Francisco Bay to the marina where I lived on a tiny sailboat. The next morning I would start all over again. Less time thinking about what and where to eat and sleep meant more time thinking about Io and volcanoes and Jupiter and how they all fit together.

But, occasionally, even obsessive Ph.D. students need a break.

One afternoon, as on many times previous, after spending too much time staring at data on my computer screen and reading technical papers in dense journals and writing down thoughts and ideas in my black bound notebooks, I opened the door of my little graduate student office on the roof of the astronomy building, stepped into the enclosed rooftop courtyard, and climbed the metal stairs that went to the very top of the roof to an open balcony. As I stared at the San Francisco Bay laid out in front of me, trying to pull my head back down to the earth by watching the boats blowing across the water, Jane Luu, a friend and researcher in the astronomy department who had an office across the rooftop courtyard, clunked up the metal stairs and looked out across the water in the same direction I was staring. Softly and conspiratorially she said, “Nobody knows it yet, but we just found the Kuiper belt.”

I could tell that she knew she was onto something big, could sense her excitement, and I was flattered that here she was telling me this astounding information that no one else knew.

“Wow,” I said. “What’s the Kuiper belt?”

It’s funny today to think that I had no idea what she was talking about. Today if you sat next to me on an airplane and asked about the Kuiper belt, I might talk for hours about the region of space beyond Neptune where vast numbers of small icy objects circle the sun in cold storage and about how, occasionally, one of them comes plummeting into the inner part of the solar system to light up the skies like a comet. I might talk about the very edge of the solar system, where millions of little icy bodies never quite got gathered up into one big planet but instead stayed strewn in the disk surrounding the solar system. And I might tell you a little history, about how in the early 1990s no one had seen such a thing as this Kuiper belt, but a small group of astronomers who had predicted its existence had named the region the Kuiper belt after Dutch American astronomer Gerard Kuiper, who had speculated about its existence decades earlier. And finally, if you were still listening and the plane had not yet landed, I would tell you how this Kuiper belt was finally seen, for the first time, in the late summer of 1992, and how I first learned about it on the roof of the Berkeley astronomy building a day before it appeared on the front page of The New York Times.

But when Jane told me she had just found the Kuiper belt, I didn’t know any of this. Jane explained. She had not found this vast collection of bodies beyond Neptune, exactly, but simply a single small icy body circling the sun well beyond the orbit of Pluto. The body was tiny—much, much smaller than Pluto—and as far as anyone knew for sure, it might have circled the sun all alone at the edge of the solar system. But still, exciting, right?

Cute, I thought. But it’s just one tiny object, and it’s farther away than Pluto. How could that matter?

So I nodded and listened and, like any diligent Ph.D. student midway through a dissertation, eventually walked back down the stairs, stepped into my office, and reentered the world of Jupiter and Io and volcanoes, where I actually resided.

I was wrong, of course. Even though the object discovered was only a lonely, relatively tiny ball of ice orbiting beyond Pluto, it showed that astronomers had been wrong: They didn’t actually know everything; there were things still to be found at the edge of our own solar system. Some astronomers were reluctant to consider this new possibility seriously, and they dismissed the discovery as nothing more than a fluke that presaged absolutely nothing. But soon, as more and more astronomers became excited about the possibility of discovery and started searching the regions beyond Pluto, more and more of these small bodies began to be found.

By the end of 1999, on the foggy December night when Sabine and I were sitting underneath the Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory and I was proclaiming that I thought there were new planets to be found, astronomers around the world had already discovered almost five hundred of these bodies in a vast disk beyond the orbit of Neptune in what looked very much indeed like the Kuiper belt. From being something that most astronomers had perhaps heard of once or twice, the Kuiper belt had become the hottest new f...

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Spiegel & Grau; 1st edition (December 7, 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0385531087
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0385531085
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.67 x 0.98 x 8.27 inches

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Mike Brown

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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.

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Music, Math, Languages person

Fascinating!!!

Reviewed in the United States on June 22, 2018

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Incredibly interesting!!! This book explains a lot about objects in the Kuiper belt, and why Pluto is like them and unlike the rest of the planets. It tells us about an astronomer's day-to-day work and life (or lack of one until he meets the right woman). I still say, "Poor Pluto," and feel bad that it was demoted from "planetdom", but then, Pluto isn't a person, is it?

Check out a free class on Coursera that Mike Brown is teaching at Cal Tech on Solar System science -- he has me interested in the Solar System again, just when I was thinking we already knew all about it.

5 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Very entertaining read. Could have been more informative.

Reviewed in the United States on October 2, 2019

Verified Purchase

The bad thing first: I wish this book come with photos and illustrations. For example, how are the telescopes mentioned in the book, big or small, look like? Can we see the discovery photo of Eris? What about a comparison chart of the dwarf planets? Of course you can find all the information online but why don't just include them here? The author surely holds all the rights. That could make the reading a lot more fun.
All the rest is good about this book. It chronicled in detail the few years surrounding the discoveries of new planet sized objects that eventually lead to the "demotion" of Pluto, a decision spearheaded none other than the author himself. The pacing of the story is handled well. We started right off when Dr. Brown joined Caltech and started working at Paloma. There was minimal "when I was young I dreamed to be a scientist" stuffs (except for his early encounter with planetary conjunction). No one cares. So that's good. Some reviewers complained that he devoted too much time writing about the birth of his daughter. I think that's totally fun to read. The event occurred at the crucial time of the discovery so it's not easy to separate them. Plus, this perfectly shows the person side of scientists. How they (actually "we") are no different from any other human being.
Overall, despite the obvious short-coming, this is a very fun read. You will find yourself hooked to the subject and pay more attention to science news after this.
And I hope a new "illustrated" edition could find its way to the publisher.

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J. Blair

Smart, Funny and thought-provoking

Reviewed in the United States on February 28, 2020

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I grew up being told Pluto was the 9th planet, and because of this, seeing it downgraded in 2006 felt like a personal loss, but I can't control these things, so I kept Pluto in my heart and even smiled because it's an icy rock 4 billion miles away and has no emotional feelings about its status, or anything else. Upon reading Dr. Brown's smart, funny and personal memoir, I still hold Pluto in high regard, (especially after seeing it courtesy of New Horizons) but I understand the logic behind its current classification. The story makes for excellent reading in 5 minute segments (if you get my drift) and I have nothing but respect for the the scientists who dedicate such a large part of their lives to expanding the knowledge of humankind and still manage to remain human. It was also an eye opener that backstabbing is alive and well in the fields of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

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Thomas C. Fletcher

A very readable book on planets and the Pluto controversy

Reviewed in the United States on July 24, 2015

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Mike Brown is a planetary scientist who, along with others, has discovered several dwarf planets, which, it turns out, are not planets at all -- they're something lesser and not necessarily only lesser in size.

What is a planet, anyway? That's a tough question, one that's boggled great minds and those of us who are simply curious about planets in general. The latest controversy (and, no, it's not the only one in history) came about not so very long ago when the experts began to wonder if Pluto really was a planet. The world certainly knew it as one but it had fallen on hard times when it was discovered over a number of years that it's just not very big. In fact, it's smaller than our own moon. In fact there are a number of moons that are larger than our own moon and yet no one calls them a planet. Well, that's simple: they're orbiting planets so they've got to be moons, right?

Maybe, kinda, well, hmmmm. The problem here is how to classify planets or moons for that matter. All of the planets are different. There are different kinds of planets -- terrestrial planets are named after Earth (terra) and include Mercury, Venus, Earth & Mars; then there are the Jovian ones, named after Jupiter (Jove). Terrestrial planets are rocky ones, Jovians are the gasbags -- Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune -- and yet all of them are very different. Earth has oceans, the other terrestrials don't. Jupiter is bigger than all the other planets combined.

And now we have Dwarf Planets, but they decided that they are NOT really planets, though the word is included.

Very puzzling indeed. Real planets, like the original 8 (NOT Pluto, not anymore!) are the ones that have a "dominant effect" on the solar system. I would never argue that Jupiter is anything but a major player around here what with its powerful gravitational field and all. But Mercury? It's small, hard to see oftentimes, and poses very little threat. The lesser stuff, those non-planets like asteroids and such that may get hurled in our direction to cause mass destruction (if and when they hit us) or joy (like when they run into Jupiter) seem a much more dominant effect to me.

I could go on and on and on but I wouldn't help you understand. But I'm happy to report that this book is not only good at explaining these problems but is very readable and even well-rounded -- we hear a lot about his young daughter who was a newborn baby when he got involved with the Pluto controversy and who actually communicated through sign language before she could speak. And she likes planets. Now THAT's a good kid! And you'll also learn about just how hard it is to find out about those faraway bodies that Dr. Brown and his colleagues are discovering -- we still really don't know how big Pluto truly is (though we'll get a better handle on it New Horizons spacecraft has just reached it).

A very good book, indeed! Another related one is "The Pluto Files" by Neil deGrasse Tyson.

4 people found this helpful

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TEY

I just read a book about astronomy!

Reviewed in the United States on May 28, 2019

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I’ve read many books, but I can honestly say that this is the first book about astronomy that I’ve ever read, and I thoroughly enjoyed every bit of it. I loved the scientific explanations and I love the heartfelt joys of a new father. It make me curious, it made me laugh, it made me nostalgic, and it made me want to go outside and stare at the night sky. Which isn’t nearly as exciting when you live in the middle of the city lights. However, I will be planning a trip to an observatory in the very near future because Mr. Brown’s enthusiasm makes me want to see it for myself.

One person found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

alapper

The most interesting book I have read in recent years - with a terrible title

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 3, 2014

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This really is a good book - please do not be put off by the terrible, rather immature title as I nearly was. If you are at all interested in the life of experimental science of astronomy today then this is very much the book for you. It rather brings up to date the account given in the first chapters of Fred Hoyle's 'the black cloud' - only this time it's real life not fiction. This account centres on the discovery in recent years by Mike Brown and his team of the large Kuiper Belt objects - in particular Eris, which is slightly larger than Pluto and in a previous era would undoubtedly been hailed as the fabled tenth planet. It details the tremendous amount of hard work involved and alongside this, Mike's love life, his marriage and birth of his daughter. An intriguing account is given of an attempt (by a very cunning subterfuge) of a foreign astronomer to steal and claim for himself one of Mike's discoveries. This well illustrates the perennial problem in science of getting results published without them being stolen by someone else - which must nearly always involve a certain amount of initial secrecy. In respect of this he also mentions the case of Bell-Burnett who is often regarded as having her contribution to the discovery of Pulsars rather underplayed by her supervisor. The last chapter is a account of the demotion of Pluto (and hence Eris) to the status of dwarf planets by the IAU - a move strongly supported (with very full and drawn out reasons) by the author despite the fact that the decision is not to his advantage.
Overall this really is very interestingly written with the personal nicely intermingled with the practical and the description of astronomical practices at just the right level for a layman to the subject. I wish there had been more of it. Good luck in the future Mike!

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A provocative title for an informative and entertaining book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 15, 2014

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Well, the title is deliberately provocative, and isn't going to enamour the book to stick-in-the-muds who still think there should be nine planets (there are rational numbers other than eight, but nine isn't one of them). Part of me thinks that's a shame, because this is a wonderful tale, a delightfully told autobiography interleaving Mike Brown's professional and personal life, with the emphasis on the former but the latter being interesting and moving too. I loved his scientific and statistical approach to fatherhood - a refreshingly different approach.

It's a shame that the decision to correct the 1930 classification of Pluto as the ninth planet has created publicity of the wrong sort, all focussed on Pluto rather than on the rich story that the discoveries have shown of the complexity and variety of the Solar System which is hidden by the old schoolbook nine-planet model.

The book's core story of planet-hunting and the successes in finding trans-Neptunian objects both big and small, is well told, and is entertaining, funny and informative as well as emotional too: it's a personal account and so one needs to be prepared to read it with that in mind and question objectivity when it comes to the contention surrounding Haumea in particular, but Mike Brown seems to have gone out of his way to seem be initially accepting and then open-minded about the role of the alternate discoverers, when the evidence and the failure of the Spaniards to be equally open leaves me at any rate in little doubt that it is Brown's team that deserve the credit that has at least partially come with the naming of 2003 EL61 as Haumea.

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The Rotter - but then he didn't kill Micky Mouse's Dog

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 15, 2015

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First impression from the title - The rotter! This is a little gem of a book that should appeal to astronomers and non-astronomers alike.
It is a tale of hard work spotting tiny objects in the dark reaches of the solar system and even the rather under hand tactics some use to steal people's thunder. This book lifts the veil on the detection of incredibly distant objects in our solar system and given the recent images of Pluto by New Horizons does make the title sound a bit premature. However, his discoveries of an impressive 16 Trans-Neptunian objects have shown that maybe Pluto is not the most distant object in the solar system and there needed to be a proper definition of what a planet is as the old definition would have resulted in there being perhaps hundreds of planets still all we need to know is Many Very Educated Men Just Screwed Up Nature.

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Fun science for all

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 2, 2015

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Beautifully written account of a momentous period, the consequences of which are very much in the news today, with the recent New Horizons Pluto discoveries. Mike Brown is a quirky guy with a sense of fun, and masses of knowledge which he shares in a fantastically accessible and interesting way. He tells the story simply and honestly. I loved this book!

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Peta Bosley

Great book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 20, 2015

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Excellent book. I studied Prof Brown's course on Science of the Solar System with Coursera / Caltech and this was recommended by one of the students.
I have bought 2 more for our Astronomy Group Raffle prizes!

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