2023 non-fiction, astronomy and autobiography. Mike Brown recounts his
role in the discovery of Quaoar, Eris, Sedna, Haumea, and other minor
planets. And how Pluto got demoted.
This is very light pop science. Brown mixes his descriptions of
his work (and the necessary explanations for the general public) with
accounts of how he met his wife, and particularly the infancy of their
child; the latter does at least have some relevance to the astronomy,
since the controversy over Haumea broke when the child was very tiny
and Brown was trying to concentrate on being a new parent.
But there's some decent meat in here too. Essentially all of these
discoveries were made by comparing existing sky images and looking for
moving objects, then extrapolating an orbit and working out where the
object ought to be at a greater remove of time. Sometimes the teams
got the chance to do some directed observation of their own, but the
vast majority of the work was checking someone else's archived images.
(I would like more detail of how the image comparison software worked,
but pop science. Fair enough.)
Brown's career also spans the astronomical shift to digital cameras,
largely removing the need for astronomers to be actually on site at
the telescope in order to get timely results. (But the early digital
sensors were necessarily much smaller than what could be achieved with
emulsion and plates, which in turn made them less good for sky
surveys; and some of them seem to have produced serious artefacts in
the images.)
As for the planetary status of Pluto, that's a relatively minor part
of the narrative, and mostly it's a tale of political shenanigans at
the IAU, with people trying to push their own preferred view of
things. The unfortunate truth is that Pluto is not an especially
distinctive object, so the more people make up new definitions of
"planet" to try to squeeze it in, the more they find that they also
have to include significant numbers of asteroids, and even Charon and
the Earth's moon, Yes, change is disconcerting and nostalgia is
tempting; yes, the current situation is far from perfect. Even so.
(If two options for change are being proposed, and you have only the
possibility of a two-way vote. the order in which the options are
presented becomes vital: voting for A, the status quo, against (either
B or C), then if the latter wins choosing between B and C, will
generate a different set of votes from "if A loses, B or C?" followed
by another on whether to switch away from A at all. Probably Arrow's
Theorem gets involved. Again this is the sort of thing I'd have liked
to see mentioned, at least in a footnote. The book has no footnotes,
alas, nor references.)
In short: it's fun, but very light. If you are put off by detailed
science, this book will not put you off. If you'd rather get into some
of the crunch, you'll be left as I was wishing it had been longer and
written in more depth.