Can I not talk about the Spaniards? I actually prefer to not mention them. These days I like to pretend like the whole thing never happened.
Well, OK, there's no denying they're part of the story. When we discovered the Kuiper belt object called Santa in December of '04, we went crazy—this was the brightest thing we'd ever seen. We didn't know how big it was at first, but we thought for reasonable and valid reasons that it was bigger than Pluto.
Less than three weeks later, in January of '05, we discovered Xena, which we knew was bigger than Pluto. It couldn't not be bigger than Pluto. And while we were studying these two in detail around Easter, we found another one, which we called Easter Bunny. It also looked like it might be bigger than Pluto, even though it wasn't. But at the time we thought we had three objects bigger than Pluto.
We were going to announce our discovery of Santa first because rumors had escaped. That way, everybody would think that Santa was the one the rumors were about and would be off our trail.
We were preparing to talk about it at a meeting in September in Cambridge, England. Then we'd announce the other two in October. There were three important reasons for this timetable. One, we wanted it to be during the school year because kids love this stuff. Two, we'd have time to prepare our scientific papers. You know, we actually like to do science on these things instead of just saying, "Oh, there's something out there!" And three, my wife gave birth on July 7, and I wanted to enjoy a little quiet time with her and the baby.
At the end of July, we went to an International Astronomical Union conference and talked about Santa, although we didn't say where it was, so there seemed to be no way you could find it.
But a few days later, on July 28, I got an e-mail from a guy working with us, who sent me an announcement on the discovery of an object and said, "Isn't this the object that you were talking about?"
It was. Somebody had found Santa. People in the International Astronomical Union were suspicious because the abstracts of our talk had gone on the Web. But when they asked me if I was suspicious, I naively told them no.
A few hours later I realized to my shock that we stupidly mentioned real codes that the computer spits out as soon as we find something. Santa was K40506A, which indicates that it was discovered in 2004 on May 6. The A means that it was the first object that we had found on that date. We had used K40506A to identify the object in our abstracts, and that was dumb. We should've just used the name Santa.
Turns out, unbeknownst to us, that if you went to Google and typed K40506A, you'd find yourself deep down in an inadvertently public archive of where one of our telescopes had been pointing. We didn't even know this archive existed, much less that you could actually get to it so easily from Google. Once you were there, you could figure out where we'd been looking.
The archive was not meant to be public. There was supposed to be one line of code in it to keep it private, but there was an error in that one line of code, and that made it available for the world to see.
Our Web server logs indicated that a computer at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucia in Spain had visited. The same computer was used to e-mail an announcement claiming "the discovery."
As soon as we realized what happened, we knew it would be very easy to find the other objects the same way. It was impossible to keep the other two secret.
It was Friday morning. When the sun went down that evening, anybody could point his telescope at the sky and say that he discovered the other two. So we had to announce their existence before sundown—the last Friday of July.
The space shuttle was up during that time, and they were trying to do repairs on the tiles. Every science reporter was at Johnson Space Center in Houston, but we called a press conference for four o'clock Pacific time Friday, which is the worst time to announce anything, and we had no scientific papers to back up our findings.
Our announcement was buried on page 18 of the Los Angeles Times. Nobody heard about it. The kids who love to find out about this stuff weren't even in school.
If the International Astronomical Union declares Xena to be a real planet, I hope there will be a chance for everyone to hear about it. But if they declare it not to be a planet, that's OK too.
The reason it doesn't matter to me is that if you start from scratch and do a scientific definition, the right number of planets is eight. As sad as I am for poor Xena, it's just not like the other eight. And Pluto is even smaller and less like the other eight. They're just not real, bona fide planets in the scientific sense.
But every time you find something, people get excited. When we found Quaoar, people were asking, "Is it a planet?" and we said: "No, no, it's not a planet. And, by the way, Pluto's not a planet either." Then we found Sedna. "Is it a planet, is it a planet?" "No, no, it's not a planet. And, by the way, Pluto's not a planet either." Same thing with Xena. Do we keep saying the same thing over and over? Or do we give up and realize that people just love Pluto?
