How I Killed Pluto And Why It Had It Coming Part 5

I almost felt bad. This was too much! How was I going to give everything the attention that it deserved? I needed a plan, now.

Our goal was to follow good scientific practice and announce the existence of these objects to the world with a full scientific account in a scientific journal. But full scientific accounts take time. We had done well with our previous discoveries. Quaoar had taken about four months from discovery to scientific paper. Sedna had taken about the same. We were pretty proud of our speed. But even if we could keep up the fast rate, we suddenly had Santa and Xena and now even Easterbunny to write papers about.

David and Chad and I made a plan. Santa had been discovered first, and we knew the most about it already. We would each write papers on different aspects of it. Whenever the first paper was finished, we would have a low-fanfare announcement. We knew that Santa was smaller than Pluto, and we didn't yet know all of the details of Santa's ma.s.sive collision and debris field, so we thought there would not be too much interest in it for the public. My goal was to get a paper on Santa finished before the birth of Petunia, since I still had a little free time. Her due date was now only three months away.

We would then save the big excitement for Xena and Easterbunny, which were sure to cause a stir. We were scheduled to be at the Keck telescope in September to get a first really good look at Xena. With some intense work we could have a scientific paper ready a month after that (the delusions of first-time parents astound me to this day) and make the announcement around the beginning of October. I liked this back-to-school timing, as I thought having the announcement of one or two new objects bigger than Pluto would be the sort of thing that schoolkids would think was cool to talk about in cla.s.s.

The plan required writing perhaps the three most important scientific papers of my life in under six months while having my first child. No problem, I thought.

Diane was having that last spurt of energy that comes in the weeks before delivery. The spare bedroom, which for years I had dubbed the "bike and computer room," was suddenly transformed, with a crib and pale green walls and a collection of infant clothes waiting for an owner. I acquired a bit of sympathetic energy and redoubled my writing efforts so I, too, would be ready for Petunia. We were going to pull it off, as long as everything went as planned.

Chapter Eight.

LILAH, AN INTERMISSION.

On Thursday, July 7, 2005, I decided to do something that I almost never did-stay home to get work done without the distractions of the people who kept stopping by my office to check on plans for Santa or Easterbunny or Xena, or to chat about nothing in particular. I had about one more day of work to go before I was finished with the first scientific paper about Santa. According to my calculations, Petunia was due within the next few weeks, so I wanted to get the paper out in the next day or two, just to be safe.

Rumors were already starting to circulate within the astronomical community that we were onto something big, and publis.h.i.+ng the announcement about Santa quietly seemed like a safe way to deflect attention from the real real big announcement that was soon to come. big announcement that was soon to come.

The Thursday that I stayed home, Diane was at work in what was to be Petunia's room, putting some last touches on the decorations and furnis.h.i.+ngs, but I noticed little, since I was deep into the a.n.a.lysis and the explanations in my head. Still, at some point I noticed an unusual groan/sigh from the other room.

"What was that?" I called out to Diane.

"I'm just having a little cramping today. The doctor said I was supposed to expect something like this," said the ever-cool Diane.

"Are you sure? I've never heard you make sounds like that before."

"Nah. Just what the doctor warned."

I suggested that, for fun, we do a labor dress rehearsal. I would write down when Diane had little cramps and time them just as we would the real thing.

"Fine," Diane said, humoring my usual need to a.s.sign concrete numbers to everything going on around me.

I went back to work, a little more distracted now.

Fourteen minutes later, I heard the sound again. I remembered my birthing cla.s.ses. Fourteen minutes was a pretty long interval. There was nothing to worry about. I was not even supposed to really begin timing things until the contractions were less than ten minutes apart. Even then, if contractions are more than five minutes apart you probably have many hours to go. The best thing to do is go on with whatever you should be doing instead. Like finis.h.i.+ng a paper.

Diane nonchalantly replied, "Well, you missed the one in between."

What? That would make the contractions six minutes apart. And six minutes later, there was another. That would make the contractions six minutes apart. And six minutes later, there was another.

"Umm, Diane? Could this be for real?"

Diane didn't think so but suggested that we pack our bags just in case if it would make me happy.

By the fourth contraction, I decided that I needed to be keeping track down to the second and I also needed to count the length of each contraction. Five minutes and twenty seconds, lasting fifty-one seconds. I started writing down the strength: stronger, really mild, strong, supermild.

We spent a few hours trying to decide if Diane was in labor or if this was just a false alarm. I plotted some graphs. The contractions came a little closer together, just as they were supposed to. And then they didn't. I trusted the expert opinion. We weren't supposed to do anything until they came four minutes apart, lasted a full minute, and did that consistently for an hour. But they never hit that magical four-minute interval. And they only occasionally lasted a full minute. And sometimes they were hardly there at all. The last contraction that I recorded that morning occurred at 11:14:40, four minutes and fifty seconds after the previous one. It lasted fifty seconds and was medium strong. Things were really going nowhere. And then Diane's water broke, perhaps changing astronomical history.

We were as calm as parents-to-be in labor could be, even stopping at my favorite coffee spot on the way (it was on the way, really; our birthing teacher had even recommended doing so!), since I knew it would be a long night for me. In the end, I didn't need the coffee, since there would be no all-night exhausting labor. Petunia had fooled us all by deciding to try to emerge foot first, and when the doctors realized this, they quickly whisked her out at the point of a knife.

"It's a boy!" the doctor a.s.sisting our primary doctor said.

A boy? How could we have gotten that that wrong? I suddenly started thinking through everything that would be different. wrong? I suddenly started thinking through everything that would be different.

"Girl, I mean." The umbilical cord had been strategically placed to cause initial confusion.

The three of us slept in the little hospital room that night, and in the still, slightly dark early morning, as Diane got some rest, I took the little swaddled bundle with me out into the hallway and stood in front of a full-length window looking east. It was less than three weeks past summer solstice, and the sun was making an early rise into an orange sky.

"Welcome to the world," I told Petunia. "The sun rises just like this every morning. It'll do it tens of thousands of times for you."

She opened her eyes and made a peeping squawk. Time for food, and I was of no use.

Petunia needed a real name. Diane used to joke, to anyone who would listen, that I'd get no say in her naming.

"Do you think I want her named Quaoar?" she would say.

We had tried to agree on a name a few months earlier. We had each made a list. Diane had crossed off all of the names on my list, and I had crossed off all of the names on hers. By the day after Petunia's birth, we still had no name. The nurses wanted a name for the birth certificate. In a sneaky move, Diane pulled a name from her list. For some reason, it seemed new and fresh. It means "night" in Arabic. And I didn't know anyone with that name. So Petunia became Lilah. And I can't imagine my world without a Lilah in it.

Those early weeks were a blur. Like most new parents, I slept no more than two or three hours at the longest. How tired was I? One morning I piled a load of laundry into the was.h.i.+ng machine, scooped a plastic cup of laundry detergent from the box, and poured it into the receptacle in the was.h.i.+ng machine. The detergent filled the receptacle and then spilled over the edges. This had never happened before. I had never scooped out more detergent than could fit into the receptacle. I thought hard. I stared at the detergent. I stared at the object in my hand. It was not the small detergent scoop, but a big plastic cup. Why would there be a big plastic cup in the detergent box? I read the side of the detergent box, then it became clear that this was not detergent but kitty litter. I had just loaded the was.h.i.+ng machine full of kitty litter. I pondered what would happen if I started the was.h.i.+ng machine with the kitty litter inside-the clumping kind!-and then spent the next thirty minutes trying desperately to get every last bit of litter out of the machine. Then I went to get some sleep; I could do laundry later.

Lilah did little more than sleep and eat and cry, which to me was the most fascinating thing in the entire universe. Why did she cry? When did she sleep? What made her eat a lot one day and little the next? Was she changing with time? I did what any obsessed person would do in such a case: I recorded data, plotted it, and calculated statistical correlations. First I just wrote on sc.r.a.ps of paper and made charts on graph paper, but I very quickly became more sophisticated. I wrote computer software to make a beautifully colored plot showing times when Diane fed Lilah, in black; when I fed her, in blue (expressed mother's milk, if you must know); Lilah's fussy times, in angry red; her happy times, in green. I calculated patterns in sleeping times, eating times, crying times, length of sleep, amounts eaten.

Then, I did what any obsessed parent would do these days: I put it all on the Web. It's still there, at least until Lilah gets old enough to find it and is sufficiently mortified that she makes me take it down (www.lilahbrown.com). I wrote thoughts about Lilah's sleeping and eating progress daily. Lilah developed an international following of people who, for whatever reason, were fascinated to know when a random infant would sleep and eat and what her father would say about it. If I ever missed posting data for a day, I was sure to hear about it from Lilah's fans.

In the years since, I have gotten occasional comments from parents-to-be or recent parents who stumble on Lilah's page. My favorite was from a first-time father in England who said that he kept the plot of Lilah's eating and sleeping posted on his refrigerator at home for the first six months of his daughter's life. He said it was vital to his sanity in those first few sleepless weeks to look up and see that, indeed, someday his daughter really would sleep more than two hours a time at night. My second favorite was from a friend who informed me after the birth of his daughter that reading Lilah's page was the worst thing he had ever done. His daughter was so much better than mine in every way that he had terrified himself for no reason. He had no statistical evidence to back up his a.s.sertion, so I, of course, didn't believe him one bit.

Today, when I go back and look at my comments and at the eating and sleeping records that I posted from July until the following March, when I finally ran out of steam, I can almost pull myself back into the moment. But mostly, I look at those early months and think: Really? Diane and I really woke up to feed Lilah three or four times a night for weeks on end? And feeding Lilah really took forty-five minutes? Twelve times per day? How did we have time for anything else? I think the answer is: We didn't.

With all of the plotting and charting, I thought I could do a better job of understanding things. And, of course, with understanding comes control. And if there was anything that I wanted to have some understanding and perhaps control over, it was Lilah's sleeping. Looking through Lilah's first six months, though, is a reminder that my understanding was minimal and my control was nil. But it didn't keep me from trying, plotting, calculating, predicting, and being continually proven wrong. Nothing could have been better.

Case in point, from my posting on the thirty-fourth and thirty-fifth days of Lilah's life, revealing almost all of my obsessions in only two paragraphs (which was all I could muster over two days, owing to sleep deprivation and lack of brain functionality): Day 34 (10 Aug 2005): Lilah is my hero! She had her first more-than-5-hours-between-feeds day ever last night. We fed her at 9:50 PM and she didn't wake up until 3:10 AM, when I got up to give her a bottle, at which point she stayed asleep until 6:15. OK, so here's the math: Diane could have slept from about 10:30 PM, when she finished feeding Lilah, until about 6:05 AM when she started getting up to feed Lilah. That is more than 7 hours in a row! The reality is not quite as good, of course, as Diane seems to wake up whenever I get up to feed Lilah and when I come back and when the cats jump on the bed and when Lilah makes funny sounds. But let's forget these sordid details momentarily. This is probably the longest Diane stayed in bed at night in Lilah is my hero! She had her first more-than-5-hours-between-feeds day ever last night. We fed her at 9:50 PM and she didn't wake up until 3:10 AM, when I got up to give her a bottle, at which point she stayed asleep until 6:15. OK, so here's the math: Diane could have slept from about 10:30 PM, when she finished feeding Lilah, until about 6:05 AM when she started getting up to feed Lilah. That is more than 7 hours in a row! The reality is not quite as good, of course, as Diane seems to wake up whenever I get up to feed Lilah and when I come back and when the cats jump on the bed and when Lilah makes funny sounds. But let's forget these sordid details momentarily. This is probably the longest Diane stayed in bed at night in months months, given that since about June, Lilah was pressing on her bladder and making her get up every several hours all night long. Fabulous! Way to go Lilah.Day 35 (11 Aug 2005): I guess the job of heroes is to disappoint their admirers. Pretty mediocre night last night, including a pretty short sleep after I gave her a bottle, which leads me to question: does she sleep better when Diane feeds her than when I give her a bottle? I have always thought so, but the data do not support my suspicion. If you examine all non-bottle feeds between 1 am and 4 am the average interval between feeds is 2 hours 39 minutes. If you examine the same bottle feeds you find an average of 2 hours 28 minutes between feeds. Hmmm. Eleven whole minutes. And a Student's T-Test shows that this difference is not even statistically significant. So I guess I should be happy about that. Me and a bottle are almost as good as the real thing. I guess the job of heroes is to disappoint their admirers. Pretty mediocre night last night, including a pretty short sleep after I gave her a bottle, which leads me to question: does she sleep better when Diane feeds her than when I give her a bottle? I have always thought so, but the data do not support my suspicion. If you examine all non-bottle feeds between 1 am and 4 am the average interval between feeds is 2 hours 39 minutes. If you examine the same bottle feeds you find an average of 2 hours 28 minutes between feeds. Hmmm. Eleven whole minutes. And a Student's T-Test shows that this difference is not even statistically significant. So I guess I should be happy about that. Me and a bottle are almost as good as the real thing.

Besides Lilah's sleeping, my other main obsession was her eating. Early on, I had taken over one of the nighttime feeding s.h.i.+fts, in an attempt to allow Diane to reclaim a small degree of normality. I used milk that Diane had diligently-if uncomfortably-expressed. I was in charge of milk stockpiling. Diane would hand me a bottle with a bit of milk in the bottom. If I thought we were going to need it soon, I would leave it fresh in the refrigerator, but in times of plenty, I could invest a bit in the future and put it in the freezer. Milksicles, we called them.

Over the first two months, as the milksicle bank began to grow, Lilah and I ventured farther and farther away from Diane. We went on hikes where I carried a tiny cooler full of ice packs and frozen milk, and I would calculate just when I needed to take out a container to thaw it so it would be ready precisely when Lilah would be hungry. I would pay dearly for any mistakes. Milk not ready yet when Lilah was hungry? Lilah: Waaaaaaaaaa. Brought too little, and she was still hungry? Lilah: Waaaaaaaa. Brought too much, and some thawed and went to waste? Me: Waaaaaaaa.

I invented-in my head-myriads of new devices specifically designed to help parents acquire, manage, and efficiently use their frozen milk supplies. One day I even started to create a supply database to record the comings and goings from the refrigerator and the freezer. Diane made me stop. "You're nuts," she said. "Don't you have better things to do?" I did. I really did. But I kept charting, graphing, and posting, nonetheless.

My last post was on March 4, 2006-day 240 of Lilah's life. By March I finally was back to work full-time and Lilah was spending her days with a nanny and another girl exactly her age, who to this day remains her inseparable best friend. I was just coming back from a trip to the East Coast, where I had spoken about planets, new and old. But all I could think of at the time was what Lilah might be doing: I've missed Lilah for the past few days. I'm on my way home from one of the longest trips since her birth. What's she going to be like when I get home? Actually standing? Able to wave bye-bye (we're working on that one now)? Finally relaxing now that mom and dad are more relaxed? Is that first bad case of diaper rash all resolved (we don't really need to talk about that, now, do we?). Can't wait. Can't wait. Can't wait.

And then that's all. I'm sure I didn't intend to stop forever that day. I'm sure I just got busy and skipped one day. Then two. Then a week. And then it was over. I'm sad now because as the memories have faded I can no longer go back and relive all of those moments of that time of Lilah's life. If I could, I would. I would do it all over.

Chapter Nine.

THE TENTH PLANET.

On the morning of the twentieth day of Lilah's life, only a few days after dumping kitty litter into the was.h.i.+ng machine, I received a strange e-mail. A NASA official in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., wanted to know about Santa, which he called K40506A, the name my computer program had automatically a.s.signed it on the day of discovery (K for Kuiper belt, 40506 for 2004, May 6, and for Kuiper belt, 40506 for 2004, May 6, and A A for the first one found that day). A colleague across the country was interested in studying K40506A, and the NASA official wanted to know when we were going to publicly announce the discovery. for the first one found that day). A colleague across the country was interested in studying K40506A, and the NASA official wanted to know when we were going to publicly announce the discovery.

My sleepy brain tried to make the connection: How would someone at NASA know about Santa, and, stranger, how did he know to call it K40506A? Had I told someone about it in the past few weeks? I couldn't remember mentioning it to anyone. Baffled, I did a quick search through my e-mails since Lilah's birth. Nothing but back-and-forth baby news and pictures. But the e-mail did jar my brain enough to remember that sometime in late July (and wasn't it now late July?) an online announcement would be made of the t.i.tles and subjects of hundreds of talks that would be given at an international planetary science conference in September. And near the middle of that list of talks were one by David and one by Chad, each talking about something that they called K40506A and which they declared to be the brightest object in the Kuiper belt. I, being on family leave, had no intention of attending any conferences anytime soon, but I was nonetheless listed as a coauthor on both of their talks.

I checked online and sure enough, the t.i.tles had been posted a day or two earlier, and people were already poring over them to see what we-and everyone else-were up to in advance of the actual meeting.

In the late afternoon, I wrote back to the NASA official and the distant colleague and said that we planned an official announcement of K40506A at the meeting in September, but that if it would be helpful for their research (and they could keep a secret), I would be happy to share the coordinates of the object earlier. I tried to be smooth and wrote: We weren't planning on making much of a big deal about this one. The ma.s.s is 32% that of Pluto, based on an orbital solution of its satellite. But we figure people are tired of hearing "almost as big as Pluto." We're waiting now for "bigger than Pluto."

Waiting, indeed. We were still months away from the planned announcement of Xena and Easterbunny, but the wait would be much shorter than I imagined.

I spent the next forty-five minutes cooking dinner, was.h.i.+ng dishes, and putting real laundry detergent in the was.h.i.+ng machine. Lilah woke up from her nap. Diane fed her. Lilah went back to sleep. I fed Diane. Diane went back to sleep. I fed myself. I was about to go back to sleep but instead checked my e-mail again.

An even stranger e-mail this time, from a colleague with whom we had already shared information about Santa so that he could help us with some of our ongoing studies. All he wrote was: Mike, is this one of yours?

What then followed was a list of dates and positions in the sky of the location of an object discovered a day or two earlier by-by whom?-a name I didn't recognize, at a telescope I had never heard of.

My brain clicked in a little as I scanned the sky coordinates on the list. I'm not the type of guy to memorize coordinates of everything in the sky, but I knew that Santa was high in the midnight sky in about the April time frame. So were the coordinates on the list. I knew how bright Santa was; the brightness of the object on the list agreed closely.

My sluggish brain was now trying to accelerate to full speed for the first time in nineteen days. I did some quick calculations to get the precise coordinates of Santa on the days on the list, and I compared. Perfect fit. Santa had been found.

I remember this moment as a sharp pain in my stomach. We had been scooped. After discovering Santa six months earlier, and working hard to do a thorough job and write a scientific paper on the discovery (and failing, by one day, because of Lilah being born just a bit earlier than I had expected), someone had come out of nowhere and kicked us in the gut.

Who were these people, and what right did they have to take my objects? My objects! Santa had been my baby for six months already. I looked up the culprits. I had never heard of them. They were at a small Spanish university, and they had never discovered anything previously. How could this have happened?

Chad sent an e-mail; someone had told him, too. He wrote: Someone found Santa and beat us to the discovery!

There must be a way to make this all go away, I remember thinking. Maybe we could explain that we knew about it first. Or that our talk t.i.tle was our announcement, our proof that we had been there first. Maybe there was still some way to salvage our discovery. There had to be a way. I was exhausted, but I knew that, with some sleep, I could find a way.

I heard Lilah cry. Diane was still trying to take a little post-dinner nap, so I let her sleep and went in to check on Lilah. I put on some music and danced with her for a while in her room. Just a few days earlier she had started making real smiles. She made one then. I sat down in the rocking chair with her until we both fell asleep. A few minutes later I opened up my eyes, put her down in her crib, and went back to my chair.

I had figured out a way to make it all right.

I sent e-mails to Chad and David telling them the details. I sent an e-mail to the NASA official with whom I had promised to confidentially share the position of Santa, saying that there was no longer any need for secrecy. And I started answering inquiries from the press who had seen the announcement and were already starting to take notice. They wanted comments from the guy who usually found these large objects out in the Kuiper belt, and they wanted to know how someone had beaten me to it.

Diane woke up and came in the room, and I told her what had happened. She protested that Santa had been my discovery, and I explained to her that no one owns the sky. If someone points a telescope at something, sees it, and announces it for the first time, it is that person's discovery, even if I knew about it earlier. In science, the first to announce takes the prize. The Spanish astronomers had announced Santa first, therefore they were the discoverers. Not only was there no argument that we could use to say otherwise, I didn't want want to argue otherwise. I think the system is a pretty good one, even when it means I get scooped. to argue otherwise. I think the system is a pretty good one, even when it means I get scooped.

Perhaps this was even a good thing, I explained to Diane. In a few months we would be announcing Xena and Easterbunny-both even bigger than Santa-and having an earlier announcement of a large object from a different group in a different country on a different continent added a bit to the excitement of it all. I could not have come up with a better plan myself.

Diane, without the benefit of the adrenaline that had been pumping through my system for the previous hour, stared at me as if I were a lunatic. But as lunatics go, I was not too crazy. With the question of who discovered Santa now settled, we might as well make something good out of it.

Diane went back to sleep, while I went back to my e-mail.

The astronomical-media grapevine had picked up on the fact that K40506A-the object that Chad and David had included in the t.i.tles of their talks at the conference in September-was the same as the new object just announced (which now had yet another name: 2003 EL61, based on the fact that the astronomers who had discovered it found it by looking through old images from 2003, much as I had been looking through old images myself when I found it). A headline from the BBC blared: "Conflicting Claims in Planetary Discovery." The article breathlessly exclaimed how astronomers were already pa.s.sionately arguing about whose claim was legitimate and how the dispute was bound to reach the highest levels of the International Astronomical Union. And that the object could well be twice the size of Pluto.

Twice the size of Pluto? We knew, of course, that 2003 EL61 or Santa or K40506A or, later, Haumea was only about a third the ma.s.s of Pluto. We had followed the orbit of Rudolph, the tiny moon going around Santa, and had accurately determined the ma.s.s in the process. But the new discoverers didn't know anything about the moon. They had discovered Santa/2003 EL61 only a few days earlier and hadn't taken the time to do anything but make the announcement. n.o.body knew about the little moon, because I had never quite finished the paper announcing its discovery.

I suddenly acquired a new worry. If the press started gus.h.i.+ng about something potentially bigger than Pluto that turned out to be only a third the size of Pluto, what would happen in a few months when we announced the existence of something that really was was bigger than Pluto? Would people simply say, "Oh yeah, we heard about that one already"? bigger than Pluto? Would people simply say, "Oh yeah, we heard about that one already"?

With the perspective of the years that followed, and with the help of a reasonable amount of sleep, it is now clear to me that my worry was misplaced. Things that are real, that are important, will go into textbooks, into doc.u.mentaries; they will become part of our culture. Everything else will fade. Still, at the time, I thought it very important to do two things. First, I wanted to make sure that no one could possibly claim that I was attempting to steal any credit for the Spanish team's discovery, and second, I needed to make sure that everyone knew as quickly as possible that 2003 EL61/Santa was only about a third the size of Pluto.

First, to quickly answer all of the e-mail questions I was getting from reporters, I made a website describing 2003 EL61 and what we knew about it. I put a picture of Santa and its moon Rudolph on the site, showed the orbit, and explained how we knew that Santa was only a third the ma.s.s of Pluto. I described how we had found it back during the previous December and were preparing a paper describing the discovery. And then I wrote extensively about why I thought that the accepted scientific practice of a.s.signing discovery rights to the first person to announce was the right thing to do.

Why was it the right thing to do? It is the only way I can think of to strike the right balance between the desire of the broad community to have all information be public immediately and the desire of the individual to keep a discovery secret for years while slowly studying all of the implications and making all of the important findings before anyone else gets a crack at it. Both of these are natural desires. Neither of these is a particularly good idea. Instant disclosure leads to unvetted science being thrust into the community (such as the claim that 2003 EL61 was twice the size of Pluto), and it leads to a lowering of the incentives to make the discoveries in the first place. On the other hand, keeping discoveries secret prevents the broader scientific community from learning even more about the discoveries.

It took science a while to settle on the present system. In 1610, while watching Venus with his new telescope, Galileo noticed that it went through phases identical to those of the moon. He knew that his discovery was big, and he wanted to make sure everyone knew he had found it first, but he also knew that the discovery would be even better if he could wait just a few more months for Venus to come around to the other side of the sun and show the opposite phases. I understand how he must have felt, waiting for his planet to emerge from behind the sun; Xena still had another month to go before I could finally see it with the Keck telescope. To prove that he had already discovered the phases of Venus, Galileo wrote to Kepler, "Haec immatura a me iam frustra leguntur oy," which translates as something like "This was already tried by me in vain too early." In case anyone else later claimed to have been the first to discover the phases of Venus, Galileo would be able to point out that his note to Kepler was really an anagram for "Cynthiae figuras aemulatur mater amorum," "Cynthiae figuras aemulatur mater amorum," or "The mother of love imitates the shape of Cynthia": The mother of love-Venus-imitates the shape of Cynthia, the moon. The fact that Venus goes through phases just like the moon instantly proves that Venus goes around the sun, not the earth. Two millennia of understanding of the universe around us had to be thrown out the door at that moment. or "The mother of love imitates the shape of Cynthia": The mother of love-Venus-imitates the shape of Cynthia, the moon. The fact that Venus goes through phases just like the moon instantly proves that Venus goes around the sun, not the earth. Two millennia of understanding of the universe around us had to be thrown out the door at that moment.

These days anagrams don't count. You have not officially discovered something until the moment of a scientific announcement.

I explained all of this on the website I put up overnight. Even so, I was tempted to add an anagram of my own: "The neat white elephant enthralls," which rearranges as: "The tenth planet is near the whale," which obviously refers to the fact that Xena is in the constellation Cetus, the whale. Unlike Galileo, though, I resisted. I was going to take my chances with Xena and Easterbunny.

Sometime in the late evening, I noticed an e-mail from Brian Marsden-gatekeeper of the solar system-with whom I had interacted on all of the other discoveries. He found the Spanish discovery suspicious, coming the same day as the name K40506A had appeared in public. He wanted to know if there was any way that the Spanish could possibly have been able to figure out where Santa was simply from knowing the name K40506A.

No chance, I said. It would be as if I'd decided to nickname some city somewhere in the world Happytown, and simply hearing the nickname, someone had picked up a globe and pointed to the right spot. No chance whatsoever, I told Brian.

Around midnight I started working on the second part of my plan. I wanted to make sure that no one thought I was going to stake a claim. I wrote directly to the discoverer, an astronomer named Jose-Luis Ortiz.

Dear Dr. Ortiz-Congratulations on your discovery! We found the object, too, about six months ago and have been studying it in detail for the past few months. It has a few interesting properties that you might find interesting. Most interestingly, it has a satellite, and the orbital solution gives a system ma.s.s of about 28% of that of the Pluto-Charon system. It's still probably the biggest KBO around but it has a sufficiently high albedo that it is not quite as big or ma.s.sive as Pluto. I've got a paper describing the satellite that, ironically, I was planning to submit tomorrow. I will forward the paper to you as I submit it.I am sure that I will get inquiries about your new object from different people; is there [or is there going to be] a website describing your survey or your discovery that I can point people to?Again, congratulations on a very nice discovery!Mike A critical a.n.a.lysis of my e-mail suggests several things. First, I repeat the word interesting interesting a lot when I am tired. Second, I was amazingly generous for someone who hours earlier had been trying to figure out how to turn back time and claim the discovery. If Ortiz had heard the stories that we were going to put up a fight, he must have been quite relieved to get this friendly e-mail congratulating him on his discovery. Third, I pa.r.s.ed my words very carefully. We "found" the object, but Ortiz had "discovered" it, and I repeatedly called it "your" object. But I was not 100 percent straightforward. The claim that we were planning to submit the paper the following day was now true, but it hadn't been true until we'd learned of this discovery. Overall, when I look back on this e-mail years after the fact, I am proud of myself for having written it. a lot when I am tired. Second, I was amazingly generous for someone who hours earlier had been trying to figure out how to turn back time and claim the discovery. If Ortiz had heard the stories that we were going to put up a fight, he must have been quite relieved to get this friendly e-mail congratulating him on his discovery. Third, I pa.r.s.ed my words very carefully. We "found" the object, but Ortiz had "discovered" it, and I repeatedly called it "your" object. But I was not 100 percent straightforward. The claim that we were planning to submit the paper the following day was now true, but it hadn't been true until we'd learned of this discovery. Overall, when I look back on this e-mail years after the fact, I am proud of myself for having written it.

Lilah was awake for a late-night feed, and it was my turn. She drank quickly and went back to sleep, not aware that anything in particular was going on.

I had one more task that night before going to sleep. I needed to finish the paper about Santa. I dug out my notes from twenty days earlier and tried to remember what else I had left to do. Very little, it turned out. In only a few more hours, I had tidied up the ma.n.u.script, finished one more calculation, uploaded everything to the website of the scientific journal, and pressed "submit." The paper that was supposed to accompany the announcement of the existence of Santa was on its way, though it was now a paper describing an object called 2003 EL61 that had been discovered by someone else. I linked the paper to my own website so it could be found by all and crawled to bed as Diane was getting up to feed Lilah.

I didn't sleep. Brian Marsden's question about a link between "K40506A" appearing publicly and the Spanish discovery kept circling in my brain. Still, I couldn't imagine how the name K40506A could be used to discover Santa. Finally, I got up, went back to my computer, and googled "K40506A." First up were the stories now appearing overnight about the discovery. Second were the t.i.tles of Chad's and David's talks. Third was something strange: a list of objects that had been observed by a telescope in Chile one particular night in May, including an object called K40506A. And it told where the object was.

What was this?

The address of the webpage was long. I went up successive levels of the tree and finally realized that the list was a record from a telescope in Chile that David had been using to watch Santa; the list was not even from the telescope itself, but rather from an astronomer at the University of Ohio who had built and kept track of the camera that the telescope used. And one of the seemingly innocuous things that he'd kept track of was what the camera he built was looking at and when.

I looked further and realized that if I fiddled with the Web address I could change the table to display different nights. The object K40506A appeared again, but now with a new position. A slight panic rose in my stomach. I kept fiddling with the Web address and kept getting the object's coordinate on different nights. K40506A kept moving. Knowing where the telescope was pointing on successive nights as it tracked K40506A was as good as knowing where K40506A was on successive nights. And with successive nights of knowing where it was, it was only a small leap to knowing everything.

I didn't think anyone would have gone to such lengths to steal the positions of Santa, but I suddenly had a new worry. On one of those nights when David's Chilean telescope had watched K40506A, it had also watched K50331A and K31021C. I recognized those codes, too. They were Easterbunny and Xena. This was bad. Because the name K40506A was publicly involved in an astronomical controversy, people would certainly certainly google the name, just as I had, and they would see a May position of K40506A. Some would take it a step further and fiddle with the Web address as I had and find even more positions of K40506A. Some would even notice that other similarly named objects-K50331A and K31021C-occasionally appeared on the lists and wonder what they were. Some would track them down. And some would be aware enough about what it all meant to calculate positions in the sky. They would suddenly know exactly what and where Xena and Easterbunny were. google the name, just as I had, and they would see a May position of K40506A. Some would take it a step further and fiddle with the Web address as I had and find even more positions of K40506A. Some would even notice that other similarly named objects-K50331A and K31021C-occasionally appeared on the lists and wonder what they were. Some would track them down. And some would be aware enough about what it all meant to calculate positions in the sky. They would suddenly know exactly what and where Xena and Easterbunny were.

In the middle of the night, I sent an e-mail to Chad and David warning them about all of this and asking if they knew how to get the information off the website in Ohio. I then wrote to Brian Marsden and told him the news, too. You could could use the name K40506A and a little Google sleuthing to figure out where it was. I then explained to Brian that while I was not paranoid enough to think that Ortiz had done this to find Santa-it was inconceivable that any astronomer would actually be that underhanded-I was use the name K40506A and a little Google sleuthing to figure out where it was. I then explained to Brian that while I was not paranoid enough to think that Ortiz had done this to find Santa-it was inconceivable that any astronomer would actually be that underhanded-I was definitely definitely paranoid enough to think that now that Santa was out of the bag, someone would eventually find our two other objects the same way. I then told him about Xena and Easterbunny. I told him that our goal was still to wait a few months until we had scientific papers prepared on these discoveries before announcing them. paranoid enough to think that now that Santa was out of the bag, someone would eventually find our two other objects the same way. I then told him about Xena and Easterbunny. I told him that our goal was still to wait a few months until we had scientific papers prepared on these discoveries before announcing them.

Finally I went to sleep. I slept through two successive Lilah feedings for the first time in twenty days.

When I woke up, I told Diane everything that had happened that night. I had coffee. I bounced Lilah around the house a little bit. Then I checked my e-mail again.

The press was fascinated, both by the larger-than-Pluto part of the story and by the astronomer-fisticuffs part of the story, even though neither was true. I kept pointing people to the webpage.