Astronomer who demoted Pluto watches in wonder
PASADENA, Calif. — Sitting behind a desk littered with space rocks and textbooks, CalTech astronomer Michael Brown barely has time to manage a few bites of pizza as he juggles media interviews.
He's been in high demand this week as the New Horizons spacecraft snapped the best images ever of Pluto, giving it, for the moment, attention worthy of a Kardashian.
Brown is the astronomer who takes the heat for demoting Pluto from planet status and putting it in the dwarf-planet category. He didn't act alone. The decision was made by a majority vote of members of the International Astronomical Union in 2006.
But he certainly stood out. Brown's contribution was the discovery of more than a dozen objects in an area of the outer solar system called the Kuiper Belt. One such object, Eris, a body larger and more massive than Pluto, sealed Pluto's fate.
The IAU was faced with the choice of either adding Eris and a handful of Brown's other new objects to the list of planets or demoting Pluto and creating a new class of dwarf planets. They chose the latter. Brown says he was actually surprised by the move, originally thinking that "astronomers would just take the easy cop-out and just add more planets."
Nearly a decade later, the planet debate has been re-ignited for some nostalgic sky-watchers as Pluto has temporarily skyrocketed to celebrity status. Not so, for Brown and his colleagues who point to Pluto's highly elliptical orbit, tiny size, and it's path through the solar system which crosses Neptune's orbit.
Brown says public reaction to his role in Pluto's demotion has ranged from angry e-mails written by school children to "obscene phone calls" in the wee hours. He takes the matter lightly and even shared the calls with his students, who he says were "laughing too hard to explain" to him the foul names he was called. He has even published a book titled Why I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming. He says in recent days the book has moved up the ranks on Amazon.
Despite his Pluto-killer status, Brown remains an expert on Kuiper Belt objects of which Pluto remains a member. He spent part of Wednesday waiting for NASA to release the first close-up images taken by its New Horizons probe of Pluto and its moon, Charon.
Just minutes after telling Paste BN that he expected Charon to be heavily cratered, the first images revealed quite the opposite. Charon was incredibly smooth. But that's science: Making predictions, getting results and then reassessing some of your assumptions.
As for the prospect of reassessing Pluto's planethood? Brown says "there's no chance…because it makes no sense."
Photos: See amazing images of Pluto