[I've been watching the moon, which made me remember a much earlier column that almost no one read. Forgive the rerun, but watch the moon!]

If your skies have been clear for the past week you might have been noticing -- as I have been -- the slow but unstoppable growing of the moon. There's nothing new here. It does essentially the same thing every 28 days, but it is still a show worth watching.

In my backyard I see this: each night as the moon moves further and further in its circle around the earth and we see more and more of the illuminated half, the moon is getting just a little brighter. In a few days, as the moon finally goes from just-barely-not-full to finally-completely-full, the moon will finally brighten its last incremental amount and it will be its brightest of the month, though only a little brighter than it was the night before.

This gentle brightening to a muted peak sounds prosaic and reasonable. But it is not true.

I remember once being out on a backpacking trip in the wild mountains inward of the Pacific coast south of Monterey. Some friends and I had hiked all day to make it over a range and down to the bottom of a creek where a little stream of hot water poured out of the earth making a tiny pool in which to soak sore legs and shoulders. We camped a bit away from the hot pool, ate a warm dinner as the sun was going down, and finally began climbing our way to the top of the little ridge separating us from the hot spring. We didn't even bother with flashlights in the dark because the full moon had made the entire woods faintly glow -- plenty of light to get around at night even in the dark of the wilderness. As we had almost reached the top, though, somebody silently flipped a switch and a blinding spotlight was suddenly tracking us from the ridge.

This was miles away from any roads or machinery down a long windy trail, so perhaps I could have reasoned my way out of the situation given a little time for relaxation, but, in the instant, I did what I think most anyone would do when unexpectedly illuminated by a spotlight deep in the woods far from where anyone or anything should be: I yelped. Loudly.

My yelping didn't affect the spotlight, which refused to flinch. It refused to flinch, I realized an embarrassed moment later, because it was no spotlight, it was the moon. It had been hiding behind the ridge until we had gotten near the top, and as we rose over one bump it suddenly revealed itself like the flip of a switch. My credibility as a young astronomer (I had just started graduate school that year) was seriously diminished amongst the friends who had seen me frightened of the moon.

Which is to say that the full moon is really bright.

The fact that the full moon is bright is perhaps not a startling fact, but what is startling is that if I had been coming over the ridge on my way to the hot pool and I had seen the moon a day earlier or a day later, I would never have mistaken it for a spotlight.

You don't have to take my over-tired-from-hiking-all-day's impressions for it. If your skies are clear this week as the moon is finally puffing towards full, go outside and see for yourself. Go out on Wednesday, two days before the full moon, and look around. Check out the barely visible shadows. See what fuzzy shapes you can make out in the distance. Look up and notice that the moon is definitely not fully illuminated, but it is getting close.

Go out Thursday. To really do the job right you should go out an hour later than you did the night before, since the moon will have risen an hour later. Look around. You probably won't be able to tell any difference at all from the night before. Same vague shadows, same fuzzy details. And then look at the moon. Definitely bigger, but one edge is still a little flattened. Tomorrow it will indeed be full.

Finally, go out on Friday, an hour later still if you can. Stare right at the moon, if your eyes can stand it. It does look like a spotlight up there in the sky. It is much brighter than it was just the day before. Look at the now-crisp shadows on the ground and the sharp details on the rocks and the plants that you can now pick out. Now go ahead, if you need to, and let out a little bit of a yelp. I'll be understanding.

What is going on with the moon? How can it get so much brighter in just a day? Who turned on the spotlight?

In medieval paintings, saints and anyone else holy are always depicted with a halo around their heads. Unlike modern halo depictions, which look like a gold ring hovering slightly above the hat line, these medieval halos appear more like a general glow coming from behind the entire head. Whenever I see one of these glowing medieval halos I think about how bright the full moon is.

I have a hypothesis -- totally without the benefit of supporting research, necessary expertise, or, likely, even minor merit -- that the medieval painters painted halos like this because they had seen such halos around their own heads. And I know what the painters saw, because I have a halo around my head, as well.

Here's another experiment to try. Go outside on a bright sunny day and start watching your shadow. Walk along until you find a place where the shadow of your head is falling on grass. Focus on your head shadow while you continue to walk, letting the background grass blur in you vision. You will gradually notice that there is a diffuse glow around the shadow of your head. It won't be around any other part of your body, and you won't see the slightest hint around anyone else's head. Point out your halo to any else and they will see precisely the same thing: a halo around their own heads and nothing around yours. Everyone is holy to themselves.

In reality what you are seeing is not some sort of corporeal representation of your own ego or a mystical aura of self-realization, but simply a literal trick of lights and shadows. When you are looking at the shadow of your own head, you are looking, by necessity, directly in the opposite direction of the sun. Stop focusing on your glowing halo for a minute and now focus on the grass itself. You'll notice that in the region where your halo is you will not see a single dark spot due to a shadow of one blade of grass on another. There can't be any shadows; with the sun directly behind you, any piece of grass that you can see can see the sun, so it can't be in shadow. Start looking away from your head shadow and you notice that you are now starting to see collections of tiny shadows, so the overall scene gets darker and darker even though it, too, is fully illuminated by the sun. Your halo is simply the total lack of shadows that can only occur when you are looking almost exactly opposite the sun. I've seen my halo from many places, on many surfaces: on grass or rough dirt or asphalt while walking, even on the tops of a forest full of trees while looking out of the window of an airplane flying low enough right before landing that I could pick out the shadow of the fuselage and see a beautiful glowing ring around. Anywhere you have sunlight and a surface rough enough to make millions of tiny shadows you get to glow the glow of the saints.

And so it is with the moon. When you look at the full moon you are almost looking at where the shadow of you head would be. The sun, though it has set over the horizon, is directly behind you as you face the full moon. If you could see down to the surface of the moon, you wouldn't see a shadow anywhere, not in the craters, not amongst the craggy mountains, but, more importantly not even at the finest scales of the rocky dust that covers most of the surface. The next day, when the moon is just past full, the shadows will begin to reappear and the spotlight will be extinguished.

It happens every month. It's just a trick of light and shadows. But, every now and then, I still look up at the full moon and think about saints and I feel a little bit of a yelp deep inside.

Last night, for the second time this decade, I got to have dinner and give a talk on the floor of the dome of the famous 200-inch Hale telescope at Palomar Observatory. It’s rare for anyone to give a talk on the floor of the 200-inch telescope, because Palomar, like every other large telescope around the planet, is used night after night after night looking at everything from the nearest asteroids to the edge of the universe. Few or no pauses are allowed for frivolities such as dinners and talks (in this case we got in, had dinner, gave a talk, and vacated the floor just as the sun was setting). So it was a treat when I got invited to speak to an intimate gathering of supporters of Palomar and Caltech – the university where I work and the one which, not incidentally, owns and operates Palomar – on the floor of the dome. It was even more of a treat because I had been the speaker at the last one of these dinner 8 ½ years ago, and it was particularly interesting to reminisce about what had happened in the almost-decade since then.

When I gave that first talk, in September of 2000, I was a young assistant professor at Caltech who had embarked on what I think it is fair to say was an audacious project: I was going to go find the 10^th planet. I had spent the previous two years systematically scanning a wide swath of sky using the seemingly ancient technology of manually slapping giant glass photographic plates to the back of a wide-field telescope, exposing the photographic plates to the sky for half an hour at a time, developing the photographic plates in the darkroom downstairs, and then looking at repeat exposures of the same patch of the sky to see if – perhaps! – I could find something that had moved. It was exactly what Clyde Tombaugh had done 70 years earlier that had led to the discovery of Pluto, but, no, I had the advantage of a much larger telescope and the use of computers to help analyze the final photographic plates.

At the time of the talk 8 ½ years ago I was in the third year of the project, where I was going back with a larger telescope to try to confirm anything that I thought I had detected during the first two years with the photographic survey. I told my audience sitting under the 200-inch telescope about what I was doing and about what I hoped to find. I told them about photographic technology versus the new digital cameras now widely in use. I told them about why I thought that after this third year I was going to have made that discovery I was hoping for and the 10^th planet would be in our grasp. It was, I daresay, a talk full of exciting promise.

It’s a good thing I wasn’t asked to give a follow up talk right away.

By the following year it was clear that my three year survey had found a grand total of absolutely nothing.

I told that story last night at the 200-inch telescope and everyone chuckled. They chuckled, of course, only because they knew what came in the years that followed. What came next? We scraped the photographic plates, installed experimental digital cameras, roboticized the telescope, and kept scanning and scanning and scanning. With the benefit of the faster and more sensitive digital cameras we slowly surveyed the whole northern sky and blew the outer solar system open.

Last night I showed my baby pictures from the past decade. I showed Quaoar, the first large Kuiper belt object that we found, the one named for the creation force of the local Tongva Native American tribe, the harbinger of larger objects to come. I showed Orcus with its newly named moon Vanth, and talked about its odd mirror-image orbit to Pluto. I showed Sedna, far beyond the Kuiper belt, in an orbit that takes 12,000 years to go around the sun, named for the frigid Inuit goddess of the sea, a beacon pulling us even further in the distant solar system. I showed Haumea, with her two moons Hi’iiaka and Namaka, spinning her was across the sky, I showed lonely Makemake, bird god of the Rapa Nui, the runt of the litter that produced the Big Three of Makemake, Pluto, and Eris. And then, of course, I showed Eris her, in all of her discord and strife, with her tiny moon Dysnomia circling her.

I really do feel like each one of these is like a child to me. And, like children, whenever the rest of them are not in the room, I will secretly tell you that this one is my favorite. They’re all my favorites. I can tell you stories about their little quirks, their odd habits, and a funny thing that this one did the other day when it thought no one was watching (did you know that the night before Namaka went right behind Haumea playing a little hide-and-seek with us? Silly little moon.).

Something else was particularly interesting to me about my talk 8 ½ years ago at Palomar. Something happened that day that I am certain I will never forget. I was inside the telescope waiting for the group of Caltech supporters to arrive, and finally hearing the knock on the outside door, I opened the door, and, as my eyes adjusted to the blinding outside light, I was greeted by the director of the group of Caltech supporters. She had worked on the Caltech campus for years, but somehow our paths had never crossed. I had certainly never seen her before. How do I know for sure -- you might ask. Trust me -- is my answer. I would have remembered. She walked in the door, and I fumbled my words introducing myself. Her name was Diane Binney.

Diane Binney doesn’t work at Caltech anymore, but she came on the trip to Palomar last night anyway. It was her first time back to the mountain since that time 8 ½ years ago when I gave a talk up there. She came to see old friends and revisit old places. And, since she hadn’t seen many of the people in a long time, she brought baby pictures of her own. She has a 3 ½ year old daughter named Lilah. Lilah has Diane’s last name as a middle name, but she gets the last name from her father. Me. Lilah Binney Brown.

My wife noticed, many years ago, that every time I walk outside at night, the first thing I do is to look up. For a while she assumed that it was because I had a telescope operating somewhere and I wanted to see the condition of the sky, the locations of the clouds. Then she realized that I would even do it when she knew that I wasn’t using any telescope anywhere. It’s just what I always did: walked outside, looked up. Finally, she asked me about it. My first reaction was: I do? But then, after awhile, I realized: I do. I am always curious about clouds and about clarity, but mostly I just want to make sure that everything is right with the universe, that all of the stars are in place, that the moon has moved to whichever new spot in the sky it should be that night, that any of the planets that might be up are where they are supposed to be.

Sometimes I get a bit of a jolt, even though I know it is coming. When I fly to Hawaii and go use the telescopes out there I look up at night and see, oddly, that Orion is almost straight overhead, instead of low in the south like it is supposed to be. At that point my eye always travels north to try to find Polaris, now dangerously close to the horizon. Then I take a glance as far to the southern horizon as possible and I see something unsettling: stars I don’t know. I might as well be in another universe.

For all of my traveling the globe to go to telescopes, I’ve only been south of the equator once, for my honeymoon. When I went outside and looked up there, it was an odd combination of familiar and bizarre. In the north, Orion was flying overhead, but upside down. The bright red Betelgeuse, which translates as armpit of the giant, should really be called kneecap of the giant from there. The moon was also much further north than I was prepared for and it, too, was upside down. It really did give me that feeling that I was standing on the opposite side of the world, that my head really was pointing in a different direction than when I was at home.

One of the reasons that I was surprised when my wife mentioned to me that I always look up is because I was a little surprised that everyone else doesn’t do the same thing. The grand vista of the stars and the planets is above us night after night, and all you have to do is to look up. Most people are shocked when you explain to them, for example, that you can look at Betelgeuse and you can look at Sirius, and you can see that they are different colors. They’re amazed to know that that bright light in the twilight sky is not an airplane but is indeed the planet Venus. They are truly floored when you suggest to them that they get out a pair of binoculars and look at Saturn – high over head in the sky these days and you can see the rings. Or the moons of Jupiter. All of the stuff is out there for the taking.

I was in New York City this past week to give a lecture at Sarah Lawrence College. To get to Sarah Lawrence I walked my way down to Grand Central Station in the late afternoon, stared at the board of departures trying to figure out which was the right train to take, bought my ticket at an automated dispenser, and then had a few extra minutes to kill before the train left, so I stepped back against a wall to watch the people go by. Everyone was in a hurry across the floor, trying to catch a train or make their way home. But somebody on the other side of the concourse was doing something that no one else was doing, so it caught my eye. She was looking up. Curious what might be attracting her attention, I did the same, and there, inside of the building, a hundred feet up on a huge dome ceiling, was the sky.

Not just any sky, a spectacular painted sky with stars in place but also the constellations drawn and the ecliptic and celestial equator drawn through! Orion (with a gleaming Betelgeuse in his armpit) battles Taurus the Bull in the heart of the flowing Milky Way while winged Pegasus watched high above. Castor and Pollux look, to me, like they are plotting mischief to the side.

And, with thousands of people streaming through the concourse, there was one – now two – people actually looking up to notice. It reminded me of, well, of Los Angeles at night, where no one bothers to look up.

Because the constellations were painted along with the stars, I concentrated on the constellations. They were what was new to me. When I look at the real sky, I look at the stars, and don’t think much of the constellations, since no one has taken the time to paint them in the sky. But here they were beautifully drawn with sparkling stars as highlights.

Something was a little funny, though. At first, since I was concentrating on those new drawings, instead of on the real stars, I didn’t quite get it. But then it hit me: Taurus is on the wrong side of Orion. Castor and Pollux are switched. And what is Pegasus doing high to the left instead of to the right? It was like the real sky, only backwards.

Backwards is not the same as upside down. Backwards is like a mirror. Backwards it like you never ever really see it anywhere on earth, or, really, anywhere else in the Universe.

My scientific, educational self was offended. What? They spend all of this effort to put the sky on the ceiling and they get it wrong?

The ceiling, though, was copied from artwork that was supposed to be illustrating what the sky looks like from outside the Celestial Sphere. Except for one thing: there is no such thing as a Celestial Sphere. The Celestial Sphere is what you would think was out there if you considered the whole night sky to be a planetarium with little points of light a small distance away. Imagine now that you can sit outside the planetarium and see the stars. This is what the ceiling at Grand Central looks like.

And then I went from slightly offended by the inaccuracy, to thoroughly charmed by the historical accuracy. Yeah, I thought. People really used to think that you could step outside and look in and this is what they would see. This ceiling is fantastic.

It is the International Year of Astronomy.

A few weeks ago I participated in a panel discussion with 4 other astronomers as part of the celebration of the Internation Year. The event was sponsored by, among others, Discover Magazine. In this month’s issue they have a [heavily edited] transcript of the discussion amongst the five of us from the event. I am proud to say that, in the [heavily edited] transcript, I got the last word from the night, based on a question from the audience. Discover Magazine gets the last word:

Audience: What are your hopes for this year’s International Year of Astronomy

Brown: If there is anything I can convince people to do, I want people to not just sit here and listen to astronomers and think about astronomy but to look at the sky. So what I want everyone to do where you walk out tonight is to look up. You’ll see Orion, you’ll see Sirius. Just look up at the sky for a minute and think about what’s out there. That’s what I want.

I was asked by a magazine to review Alan Boss's new book The Crowded Universe. They asked for a review that was a much an essay on the field as a review of the book itself, which made it a very fun exercise. The following is based on the review that I got to write.

Two hundred fifty years ago, Immanuel Kant, in his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, laid out a remarkably modern-sounding account of the state of the universe. Moons go around planets. Planets go around stars. Stars go around the Milky Way. The Milky Way and other galaxies (“other Milky Ways,” he called them) go around something even larger. The solar system had an understandable origin, and inevitable consequences:

The planetary structure in which the sun at the centre makes the spheres found in its system orbit in eternal circles by means of its powerful force of attraction is entirely developed, as we have seen, from the originally distributed basic stuff of all planetary material. All the fixed stars which the eye discovers in the high recesses of the heavens and which appear to display a kind of extravagance are suns and central points of similar systems.

To paraphrase: gravity takes stuff and turns it into stars surrounded by planets, and it has done so everywhere you see a star in the sky.

For the first 240 years after the publication of Kant’s assertion, this fact could only be verified for only a single star in the sky: the sun. In 1995 Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz announced the discovery of the first planet orbiting a star other than the sun. Now, fourteen years later, almost 300 stars are known to have planets around them. It is not quite “all of the fixed stars which the eye discovers,” but it’s getting close. Kant was substantially correct. It had been accepted since the 17^th century that our sun is not special, but is, instead, but one of many stars in the universe. Now, at the beginning of the 21^st century, it is clear that our planets aren’t special either.

Except that some of our planets are still special.

It is tempting to describe the many planetary systems that have been discovered in the past decade and a half as simply weird. Rather than the orderly arrangement of planets that we have here in the solar system, with small planets close, large planets far, and everything going around the sun in satisfyingly circular orbits in a common disk (each one of these properties is “inevitable”, according to Kant, and according to most astronomers up until late 1995), we have instead found planets the size of Jupiter that orbit their stars closer than Mercury, planets with orbits as elliptical as some of the comets in the solar system, and planets with separations from their central star far beyond even the most distant objects detected in our solar system. Weird, indeed. The only type of planetary system that we haven’t found, it seems, is one like our own. Nowhere out there has there been anything quite like the solar system; nowhere out there is another Earth.

But even this special position that our home planet holds is now in jeopardy.

Alan Boss’s new book The Crowded Universe tells the story of the development and launch of NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, which was recently launched from the earth to go into orbit around the sun. Kepler’s 3 1/2 year mission is simple to state: find the Earths. Kepler, along with a similar ESO mission CoRoT, will be the first to finally have a chance to tell us whether planets like the one on which we live are as common as Kant would hope or as rare as some astronomers think.

Boss weaves the story of Kepler (surely a must-read cautionary tale for anyone contemplating a life in NASA mission development) with the larger story of the entire, now booming, field of exo-planets. As someone whose astronomical career has spanned the period Boss discusses, I’m glad someone was taking notes. It is fun to be able to go back to those days when each new planetary discovery was an exciting event with multiple teams struggling to outdo the others with firsts. First planet at the distance of the earth! First transiting planet! First multiple planet system! With the current richness of the exo-planet field it is easy to forget that almost all of this is under a decade old.

Boss gives the insider story not only of the Kepler mission development and the birth and childhood of the entire exo-planet field, but, in a stroke of luck for us all, he got to play a intimate role in the definition of planets in our own solar system, and he gives what I believe is the first account of some of the inner workings of the International Astronomical Union committee that first started trying to figure out what to do with Pluto and Eris and the things that we now call dwarf planets. The demotion of Pluto was unassailably reasonable, but the events leading up to this eventual demotion were some of the more publicly comical occurrences in recent astronomical history. Reliving these moments is an excellent reminder that for all of their command of the physics of the universe around them, astronomers, being human, have the capacity for nearly infinite folly.

But for Boss and The Crowded Universe, Pluto is just a distraction, and rightly so. The meat of his book is the race for finding something like the Earth. Sitting in the middle of the events, it would be easy to get caught up in the day-to-day (or perhaps committee meeting to committee meeting) details. But Boss, while detailing the daily work of himself and other scientists involved in the field, never ceases to forget that we’re privileged to live in such at a time when a nearly-Copernican-magnitude revolution is unfolding.

Yet even if Kepler and CoRoT find an abundance of planets, the 250 year old Kantian revolution will not be complete. The planets that these spacecraft might find could be the precise size of the Earth and could orbit their stars at the exact distance of the Earth, but while an astronomer might be willing to call such a thing Earth-like, most people will still want to know more. Does it have liquid water? Does it have a recognizable atmosphere? And, inevitably, the only thing that really matters, could it – no: does it – support life?

The answer to these questions will take decades or more to answer. Kepler and CoRot are simply first steps along the way. In the meantime, we can perhaps take solace from Kant:

I am of the opinion that it is not particularly necessary to assert that all planets must be inhabited. However, at the same time it would be absurd to deny this claim with respect to all or even to most of them.

It took 240 years to prove him mostly right the first time. With a little bit of luck and a little bit of perseverance and, as Boss shows, a lot of the day-to-day work of astronomers around the world, the final step might come just a little bit faster.

No, that’s not going to be the name for the satellite of Orcus. But it was suggested a surprising number of times, and it did make me laugh every time I read it.

When I decided, on a whim, to throw open the naming of the moon of Orcus, I thought I’d get a few suggestions here and there and make a quick decision. More than 1000 suggestions later I’m a bit overwhelmed and thoroughly torn. There were good names, silly names, scholarly names, names of people’s pets and wives and girlfriends (never husbands or boyfriends, though, which is interesting). Names came from came – not surprisingly – from Etruscan mythology, but also Norse, Aztec, Greek, Hindu, and many more. There were references to current media in all forms, there was word play, and there were made up names that simply sounded good (or at least someone thought they sounded good).

After sorting through all of the suggestions, as few interesting names/themes stand out.

First, many attempts were made to fit in to the Etruscan origins of Orcus itself. I will admit that these always had the inside track in my mind. We’ll get back to this in a minute, but first, some of the more popular names and themes that I had not originally anticipated:

Disney-related. With Orcus being described as the anti-Pluto there was some sentiment to pull in Disney mythology instead of Etruscan mythology. I’m not opposed to the general idea of moving beyond ancient mythology, so I thought about these. But the problem with all of these names, I felt, was that there was no connection to Orcus, only to Pluto.

Dungeons and Dragons related. Unbeknownst to me, Orcus has been a major figure in the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons for the past 30 years. To be fair, though, the phrase “unbeknownst to me” is not exactly true. It really should be “unremembered by me.” My father bought one of the original Dungeons & Dragons sets for my brother and I back in 1976 as a way of keeping his nerdy science fiction loving boys occupied during weekend visits. I will admit to having been an avid player throughout high school. It was a great outlet for a nerdy science fiction loving boy. And though I haven’t thought about it in nearly 30 years, I got sudden senses of nostalgia from all of the D&D related suggestions. I thought of those first few times sitting with my brother and my father (my sister thought we were all crazy) in his apartment trying to figure this stuff out.

But, but, but… Could I really give a name that will stick around for years (hundreds of years? thousands of years? I have no idea) based on a fantasy game that has only been around for thirty years? Would astronomers in 200 years look back on a name like that and think it was a quaint anachronism or just kind of dorky? Maybe. The connections to Orcus are good, even if the mythology is recent.

Tokien related. Many people noted that the word “Orc”, the foot-soldier bad guys from Lord of the Rings, is said to be derived from Orcus (possibly by way of Beowulf) and suggested related names. I should have the same flash backs to nerdy-science-fiction childhood for these suggestions, but I don’t, and I suddenly realized why. Those flashbacks memories seem to keep being overrun by replaced mental images of Elijah Wood and friends running around New Zealand.

There is the same concern about ephemeral popular culture, though these days Orcs are pretty mainstream. But, still, the connection is to the potential origin of the word Orc, as opposed to being to Orcus himself. Somehow, again, that seems not quite right to me.

Silly related. Perhaps the biggest laugh I had when reading these came from someone suggesting “Mindy.” Mindy, of course, was the counterpart to Robin Williams’ Mork. Who was from Ork. The other surprisingly common silly suggestion was “Fiona.” As in, Fiona, bride of Shreck. Shreck, of course, is an Ogre. And then there was – frequently! – “otulP” as in Pluto, backwards. Surprisingly, the more appropriate “norahC’ as in Charon, backwards, rarely showed up.

Un related. People, don’t even start with me. Colbert? Seriously? When people were talking about my discovery of Eris did Stephen Colbert have me on his show? No, he did not. He instead had Neil Tyson. When Pluto was demoted from planet to dwarf planet did Stephen Colbert have me on his show? No, he did not. He instead had Neil Tyson. When Neil Tyson wrote a book about the demotion of Pluto did Stephen Colbert have me on his show? No, he did not. He instead had, well he had Neil Tyson. People, I have this to say: Stephen Colbert is dead to me. And I don’t mean “dead” in a “now-that-he’s-dead-and-in-Hades-hanging-out-with-Orcus-I-can-name-the-satellite-after-him” sort of way, either.

Whale related. Orcus sounds an awful lot like Orcas, as in the “killer whales.” The name Shamu was a shoe-in here, but I liked better the names of the real-life Shamu’s real-life children. Someone even suggested that the name be related to Orcas Island, the largest of the San Juan Island off of the coast of Seattle. It is a well kept secret that part of the appeal of the original name “Orcus” for this Kuiper belt object was that it sounds like the island. My wife Diane lived on Orcus Island through her high school years. We go back to visit as often as we can. The name was a small present to her. She has, of course, thoroughly forgotten about this by now. But I could indeed revive her memory by naming the satellite after something related. One summer while we were visiting and playing our typical game of “let’s pick up a real estate guide and fantasize about houses we can’t afford” I became enamored of this one house that was on a tiny island just off of Orcas Island. You have to go back and forth to Orcas by motorboat to get your groceries, visit your favorite coffee shop, or walk more than 200 yards at a time. I talked about it all the time and how much I would love to have a house on an island like that. Diane became worried that I might actually be serious. I have, in the past, lived in odd places like sailboats and cabins in the woods with no running water. I might have it in me. I think that just to keep Diane a little on her toes, it would be fun to remind her of this time and name the satellite “Crane Island.” But, really, Orcus is not Orcas. And not even Shamu. So I sadly have to pass on this one.

Finally, we get to the more ancient mythology. As I admitted earlier, my heart was always here, though I was willing to consider these other themes.

Overall, the suggestions of and votes for Greek, Roman, and Etruscan mythological characters exceeded all of the other suggestions by a large amount.

The top contenders were Prosperina (a Latinized version of Persephone, wife of Pluto), Vanth (an Etruscan goddess associated with the dead), Phlegyas (a boatman for the dead), and Cerberus (the three headed dog guarding the fates)

At this point, I believe it best to revert to the analysis offered by readers here.

From Sovay:

• Vanth and Charun are traditionally paired in Etruscan iconography, so her association with Orcus forms a nice parallel to Charon and Pluto; in keeping with the satellite's unclear origins, Vanth's role is not cut-and-dried (she is generally accepted as a psychopomp, possibly a benevolent counterpart to the demonic Charun) and where Orcus and Charon can be traced into other mythologies, Vanth is attested only in Etruscan; and if she accompanies dead souls from the moment of death to the underworld itself, then of course her face is turned always toward Orcus.

From JohnD

• I suggest "Cerberus", the many-headed guard-dog of Hades. The name has been used elsewhere in the Solar System and the constellations, but not for a semi-planetary body, so I think it would still be allowed. And Cerberus was, in Virgil's words,

  "Orcus' warder, blood-besmeared,
  Growling o'er gory bones half-cleared
  Down in his gloomy den"

  so a classical connection with Orcus.

From Tim:

• My suggested name is Prosperina. Sources differ, but as far as I can tell, Orcus and Dis Pater (the origin of ‘Dis’, which of course we see as the capital of hell in the Divine Comedy) were synonyms for the same godProsperina was the Roman name for his wife, and you will know her as Persephone, doomed to live for 4 months in hell and for 8 months in heaven because of her consumption of a single pomegranate seed. I like this because I imagine this little moon captured and dragged out on Orcus’ great elliptical orbit, destined to wander far from the plane of the planets for all eternity, a little icy queen of the void.
  Gosh, I need to go and have a cup of tea to cheer me up now.

From Matthew:

• Pluto was god of the underworld in Roman mythology, and Charon ferried souls across the river Acheron in early Greek and Roman mythology. Pluto has his equivalent in Orcus, being used as an alternative name for Pluto, and having separate connections to the underworld. Charon, too, has an equivalent in Phlegyas, ferrying souls across the river Styx. Since the Kuiper belt object Orcus can be considered the anti-Pluto and therefore is named due to this relation, it seems fitting to name the first moon of Orcus in a way that fits the connection between Pluto and its first moon, Charon. This, of course, would lead to the name Phlegyas being chosen for “S/1 90482 (2005)”. In addition, Charon, in mythology, seems to be completely connected with the underworld with no indication that he ever existed apart from it. On the other hand Phlegyas does not enter the underworld until Apollo kills him for burning his temple. If Pluto and Charon formed out of a giant collision, as is believed, then Charon's entire lifetime is linked to Pluto. However, if Orcus captured its moon,which may be the case, then it would have existed before its connection with Orcus. This is even further correlation between the connections in mythology of Pluto to Charon and Orcus to Phlegyas and the objects in our solar system. So, to be true to the connection between named objects in the solar system and mythology, as well as to the connection between Pluto and Charon and Orcus and its first moon, I propose the name "Phlegyas" be given to the object “S/1 90482 (2005)”.

And so finally I have to chose, after all of these good names and great discussions. And so. And so. And so…..

Prosperina has a great connection to Orcus, but she is more strongly associated with Pluto than with Orcus. I like the idea of keeping Orcus and Pluto distinct. Cerberus suffers from the same problem.

I am strongly drawn to Matthew’s description of Phlegyas, in particular the strong link to the mystery of the formation of Orcus’s moon. That’s good. Really good. I was almost about to say OK, let’s do it, but I got stuck. Phlegyas is being punished for burning down Apollo’s temple after Apollo killed his daughter. He now wanders Hades reminding people to respect the gods. Are kidding me? If Apollo ever came down and killed my daughter he would get much worse than just his temple being burnt down. And when I went to Hades I would not talk about respecting the gods. Every time I read his story I just get mad. Maybe putting Phlegyas in space releases him from his punishment in Hades.

And finally Vanth. I will tell you this: Vanth got the most votes. It was never my intention that this become an election, but, if it had been, Vanth would be the winner. The appeal to me – and to everyone who voted for Vanth I would guess – is pretty clear. Vanth is one of the few purely Etruscan deities, and a chthonic one at that. She is a psychopomp. I mention these last two facts mainly because I had no idea what they meant until I looked them up (she is an underworld god who conveys dead souls, is what it means). She likes to hang out with Charun, a name which derives, unsurprisingly, from Charon, which makes a nice parallel. And while she’s associated with the underworld, she is a guide rather than an avenger. She awaits the dead and brings them to their new home.

Vanth doesn’t do nearly a good a job of telling the potential story of the formation of the satellite of Orcus, though. So until yesterday I was still unsure. But yesterday while reading about Vanth and reading about Phlegyas, I stumbled across a picture of very nice fresco at the tomb of Anina. Vanth is waiting for the dead, as she is often depicted. It even appears to me that she is silently crying while she waits. Admittedly, I might be misinterpreting, but still, the tear made me think of my sister, waiting for my father – guiding my father – as he took his last breaths.

In a solar system filled with Apollos (asteroid #1862, discovered in 1932) who might kill your daughter, Zeuses (asteroid #5731, discovered in 1988) who might abduct your daughter (or your son, for that matter), Tantaluses (asteroid #2102, discovered in 1975) who might feed you his son, or Erises (the largerst dwarf planet, discovered in 2005) who might start a world war, wouldn’t it be nice to have someone who weeps for the dead? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a guide to light the way?

So it will be Vanth.

The citation submitted to the IAU has to be short and can only hint at the richness of everything that has gone on here. It will read:

S/1 (90482) (2005) Vanth

Discovered 13 Nov 2005 by M.E. Brown and T.-A Suer.

Vanth is a daimon in Etruscan mythology who guides the dead to the underworld. She often appears on tomb paintings and sarcophagi where she is depicted with wings and a torch, and she is frequently shown in the presence of Charun, a guard of the underworld. Name suggested by Sonya Taaffe.

Thanks to everyone for participating. Having gone through all of this, I realize that naming a moon was perhaps a bit too constraining, as the theme was already in place. Next time perhaps we will try to find a name for one of the many many other objects out there that are deserving and for which the field is wide open. As always, stay tuned.

I find Paris disorienting.

First, I missed an entire nighttime. When my wife and I arrived at the airport to embark on our vacation it was a southern California late afternoon. When we landed – first in Zurich – it was a Swiss early afternoon. Somehow I had missed an entire fast-forward cycle of the sun setting, the stars rising, and the sun rising again, all in the space of about 4 hours. When I first closed my window shade and then closed my eyes on the airplane – somewhere over Salt Lake City, I think – I made a mental note to be sure to try to open up and see the sunrise – over Greenland, I guessed. But even for the fitful sleep of a bumpy airline seat the sunrise came too quickly. When the thought to open my eyes and look out the window finally solidified sufficiently inside my head we were already over Ireland. I slid the window shade open a tiny crack to take a peak and the entire darkened airplane cabin was blasted with late morning glare. My wife, still attempting to sleep in the seat next to me, added her own glare to that of the sun and I quickly closed the shade. By the time we landed in Zurich and then finally continued on to Paris the sun was already on its way down again, but, still, I feel like a lost nighttime in there somewhere. Nights are precious things, and one should not lose them lightly.

If losing a nighttime were not disorienting enough, I believe that the streets of Paris are uniquely designed to make me lose my sense of direction. I pride myself, most of the time, with having a finely tuned sense of direction. I tend to be able to get from point A to point B by dead reckoning, no matter how many twists and turns and detours are along the way. So on the streets of Paris my general navigational strategy is to take a look at a map to see where we are and where we would like to be, and then I head off in what seems to be the correct general direction knowing that I will get to where I’m going. But the streets of Paris are tough. It’s not just that they aren’t oriented along a north/south axis. It’s not even that they aren’t oriented along any single axis. And it is not even that the streets sometimes curve. It’s that all three of these occur in small quantities. A street that I am on starts out general north-northwest, which, in my head, I probably think of as “northish” and then the street slowly, imperceptible turns west or even perhaps a little south. I then take a left turn onto a street which I think of as going westish when, in fact, it is more like the north-northwest direction I was originally headed. Do that a few times and there is no telling which way you are really going.

The first night we arrived, jetlagged and awake at midnight, I thought it would be fun to walk down to the Seine to see Notre Dame lit up at night. Point A: our hotel. Point B: Isle de la Cite. Direction: north-nothwest. After about 45 minutes of walking in the bitter bitter cold (ok, I live in southern California, so the fact that it was only a few degrees above freezing qualifies as freezing for me) we stumbled out of some small twisty city streets directly into the Pantheon, which was indeed spectacular all lit up after midnight. I’d never been to the Pantheon before and didn’t quite know where we were. I finally got out the map. We were a block from our hotel. Point A to Point A in just 45 near-freezing minutes. My wife gave me a similar glare to the one from earlier that morning.

Paris is a city to which my wife and I have both been a few times, but which we do not know well. We’re staying in a part of town which I have never visited. Our college French is rusty. An after flying for 12 hours and missing a full sunset and sunrise and finding myself unable to make it to one of the most obvious landmarks in town and struggling to remember the French phrase for, say, “Excuse me, madame, but do you know why I seem to keep walking in circles?” I feel very very far away from home in Pasadena. Looking at the globe you can see just how far it is, as I kept explaining to Lilah, our 3 ½ year old, who wanted to understand exactly where we were going to be (a place she calls “Parisfrance”) while she stayed home with her grandparents. “Parisfrance is really really far away Daddy. If I were on the airplane I would have to fall asleep.” A wise girl, I think.

But then, still trying to straighten out my post-midnight rambling route, we hit a slight opening to the sky and the clouds clear a bit and there, a bit low in the sky in about the direction we’re heading is a bright star and a little backwards question mark of fainter stars. The constellation is unmistakably Leo. The star is Regulus.

“Let’s turn around” I say to my wife. “We’ll be going in exactly the right direction.”

It’s the same sky. Pasadenacalifornia or Parisfrance look out into the same night and lie underneath the same stars. Fly 12 hours, miss a sunset and sunrise, forget the language if you want, but Regulus will still be there. I used Regulus once to get myself unlost while driving in New Jersey trying to figure out the direction of the shore (my friend in the car with me couldn’t figure out why I pulled off the road, stuck my head out the door, and looked up, before making a U-turn, but that was the best you could do pre-GPS navigation) and used it to find Notre Dame.

I’ll show it to Lilah when I get home. “Hey Lilah, that star is called Reguls and I could see it from Parisfrance” and she might find it wonderful and mysterious and amazing that you can see the same thing from such different places. Or she might ignore me and say “Daddy Daddy I’m going to draw a picture of a ghost for you” or who knows what else. But I will remember that it is wonderful mysterious and amazing that that’s the same star that showed me which direction to turn on a tiny street after midnight in a big city halfway across the world.

[next week: a name for Orcus's moon. I haven't had a chance to read any of the suggestions yet (being on vacation in Paris), but I see that there will be many many to chose from. Stay tuned.]

“S/1 90482 (2005)” is really not much a name as a license plate number. As does a license plate number, it tells you pretty much everything you need to know to identify the object in question. “S” is for satellite. “/1” means it is the first discovered. The “2005” at the end tells the date of discover, and the “90482” tells whose satellite it is, but only by yet another number. This number refers to the 90482nd minor planet (in the old terminology; no one quite knows what the new terminology is, but the numbers keep coming) to be officially recorded. That object is more commonly referred to as the large Kuiper belt object Orcus. We don’t ever call the moon of Orcus by its official name of S/1 90482 (2005). Instead, around here, it is referred to mostly as “the moon of Orcus.”

It’s time to change that.

Not all of the Kuiper belt objects known and number have names, and, as I have written here earlier, I think most don’ t need them. It is OK to consign them to semi-anonymous license plate numbers if they are never really going to be thought about as more than one of the crowd. But a few special objects get studied and talked about and written about enough that need not so much just names, but also personalities. Orcus was one of those objects. Its personality was quite apparent from the beginning.

We discovered Orcus in early 2004. At the time it was the 4th largest known Kuiper belt object, though by now it has dropped to something like 8th. The most interesting thing about Orcus to me was that it appeared to be the anti-Pluto.

Pluto has what was originally thought to be a peculiar orbit. It circles the sun precisely two times for every three times that Neptune goes around the sun. Though it took astronomers a long time to realize it, this peculiarity is not a coincidence. Neptune’s gravity so dominates the region of space where Pluto is that Neptune has herded Pluto into this very special orbit. Pluto is not the only one that Neptune is pushing around. We now know of hundreds of similar objects in the Kuiper belt, including, now, Orcus.

Pluto’s orbit has a few other interesting features to it. It is so elongated that, for a brief time during its revolution about the sun, it actually comes close to the sun than does Neptune. So does Orcus. When Pluto comes close to the sun, though, it is never actually close to Neptune, partially because at that point in its orbit it is high above the disk of the planets, hitting the most extreme spot of its tilted orbit. Just like Orcus.

In fact, if you look at the orbits of Pluto and Orcus (and I encourage you to do it if you never have; check out the extremely cool orbit plotter at JPL but you'll have to zoom out to find Orcus), you will see that they are nearly identical except for 2 things. Their elongated orbits point in nearly opposite directions, and, right now, Pluto is nearly as close as it ever comes to the sun while Orcus is nearly as far away as it ever comes. In fact, because Pluto and Orcus are forced by Neptune to have precisely the same orbital period, they will always stay in opposite phases of their orbits.

Orcus is the anti-Pluto.

Several years ago, when searching for a name for what was then known only as 2004 DW, we decided to concentrate on the anti-Pluto aspect of the object’s personality, and we came up with Orcus. In the version of the Orcus myth that I like to tell, Orcus was, essentially, the early Etruscan grim reaper, collecting the dead and bringing them to the underworld where another god – Pluto – ruled. As the Etruscan mythology was incorporated into Roman mythology and blended with Greek mythology, Orcus lost his separate identity and Pluto became the master of all of the functions of the dead. Orcus became in some ways simply an alternate name for Pluto, but it also remained a slightly more evil and punishing incarnation of Pluto. In that incarnation, the Latin word Orcus was the origin of words such as ogre and orc.

In my new mythological/astronomical view, Pluto the Kuiper belt object is now named after that earlier version of Pluto, before the Romans came along and swept everything together. And Orcus is his counterpart, destined to eventually be pushed aside by the rising Pluto. Orcus seemed a very appropriate name for this new object in the Kuiper belt.

About a year later, while looking carefully at Orcus with the Hubble Space Telescope, we realized that it had a moon. In the past year we have been studying the moon of Orcus intensely and are in the final stages of writing a scientific paper on all of the interesting things about this moon. Which means it is time to stop calling it “this moon” and give it a proper name. But what?

Here’s where you come in. Send me suggestions! I’ll submit the best suggestion to the International Astronomical Union on Sunday, April 5th (about 2 weeks from now) with your name as part of the official citation (if you want it to be).

If you make a suggestion I would like to know not just what the suggestion is, but why you think its appropriate. As you can tell by now, this is the part that matters to me!

To help you out, let me tell you some of the other interesting things about the satellite. It has about a ten day orbit around Orcus, in a tight precise circle. We suspect – though can’t yet prove – that Orcus and its satellite have their same faces locked towards each other constantly, like an orbiting dumbbell. Only one other Kuiper belt object and satellite are known to do this. Who? Pluto and Charon, of course.

The origin of the satellite of Orcus is confusing. Pluto and Charon are thought to have formed in a giant collision. Haumea clearly had a shattering blow to disperse moons and other family members. But small Kuiper belt objects are thought to acquired moons by simple capture.

Orcus is right in the middle. Was the satellite from a collision or a capture? We had hoped to answer this question by observations from the Hubble Space Telescope. If the satellite had looked just like other known collisional satellite, we would have been pretty convinced. It doesn’t. Unfortunately that tells us less. We can’t rule out either. We have some ideas of new Hubble Space Telescope observations to try to tell the difference. For now, though, we’re just confused.

While the scientific paper will have more details and calculations, that will be the gist of it, and those properties are all you get to know to try to discern the personality of the moon of Orcus and to try to pull out the right name.

You can send suggestions as comments to these pages (http://www.mikebrowns planets.com in case you are reading this elsewhere) or simply email me (mbrown@caltech.edu ), but please put “Orcus” in the subject line so I don’t mistake you for a potentially business partner from Nigeria.

Good luck. S/1 90482 (2005) is counting on you.

My father was a rocket scientist. Well, OK, not precisely. More specifically he was a rocket engineer. Or, more precisely still, he was an engineer who worked on the computers that went into space and navigated the rockets. He worked on the Saturn V that lifted Apollo astronauts toward the moon, he worked on the Lunar Module, which touched down on the moon, he worked on the Lunar Rover, which drove astronauts around on the moon. All of this before he was 30 years old.

I never remember him talking about it at all, talking about what it was like to send men to the moon, to be involved in such a tremendous adventure, but, ten years ago, in the little farming town on the edge of the Mississippi River where he grew up, I had a conversation with one of his friends from those days, and he told me that they all felt like they had lived in a magical time. After the Apollo missions ended, they all later worked on the Space Station and more mundane things like the ticket-taker on the BART trains that I used to take when I was a graduate student living on the San Francisco Bay. But nothing in their lives was ever quite like a being a bunch of thirty-year-old kids living in northern Alabama having the blind optimism to think that if there was a rocket being built they knew enough to put the computers together to make those rockets bring people to the moon. And back. And then actually doing it.

I wish I could ask him about it, but that opportunity is a decade gone.

Being the mid nineteen seventies, he had a marriage and he had three children – me, my older brother Andy, my younger sister Cammy – all before he turned 30, and we all lived in what now seems to me like a huge house in northern Alabama. Being the mid nineteen seventies, the marriage didn’t last. He moved to an apartment across town, then to Maryland, then to North Carolina, then to Houston, and finally, for his last few weeks, back to North Carolina to stay in the house of my sister.

In those last few weeks my brother and I were there at my sister’s house, too. I was in the middle of my third year of being a professor at Caltech and I was still trying to get on my feet. But, that quarter, I simply canceled my class midway through and gave everyone in attendance an “A.” Oddly, I had no complaints. I then flew across the country to meet my father and my sister and soon my brother and we all stayed in North Carolina for a while.

It was too late then to say much. He was mostly groggy from the pain medication. But we talked some about what was happening in all of our lives. Though he never would say such a thing directly, I think he was proud that I done well enough at school to land a job being a professor at Caltech. I remember complaining about some of the more mundane aspects of the job to him and having him softly glare back and whisper: “do you know how lucky you are?”

I told him about a new project I was starting that I was quite excited about. We had just started using an old telescope at Palomar Observatory to make repeated wide-field observations of the night sky in search of particularly large objects in the outer solar system. I told him that I was certain there would be things larger than Pluto out there to see and that I really hoped to be the one to find them. He always liked long-term plans and was happy to see that I finally seemed to have one. “But what if there isn’t anything out there?” he asked, in his always not-quite-so-encouraging way. There will be, I said. I’m sure there will be.

We talked about the long term relationship I was in that, though I didn’t know it at the time, was within a month of finally falling apart. I told him why the relationship was hard and not going so well. I remember perhaps the only words of relationship advice he ever gave me: “There shouldn’t be any fighting. Find someone you don’t fight with.” Though the words resonated with me, my father’s accumulated lifetime credibility in this realm was not high. So I filed the advice away.

He died a few days later. It was ten years ago today.

I’ve missed not having a father for the past decade. I feel we were still, that late in both of our lives, getting to know and understand each other, something we had never had much of an opportunity to do when I was younger.

But, today, I am thinking of the things that I wish I had the opportunity to show him over the past decade. I don’t have much in the way of spiritual beliefs about any afterlife, but, if there is one, and the deceased person can pick his form of communication with the corporeal world, I am pretty sure that my father would pick the web. When he first got cancer nearly 20 years ago he immediately took to the then-new internet as a means of educating himself and everyone else about everything to do with the cancer, the treatments, the options. It’s the sort of thing that everyone does routinely these days, but, back then, it was still quite novel. So if he’s out there anywhere, I like to think of him hooked in through some vast astral server. So this is for him, vial HTML, which he first introduced me to:

Dad –
A lot has happened in the past decade that I think you’d have been proud to have heard about, but there are three that I really wish I could share with you.

Remember that project I told you about ten years ago? The one that started looking over vast swaths of sky for things that moved? The one where I thought I would find another planet? Well, it took a few years before it began paying off, but it has been a pretty spectacular ride. There were indeed things out there to be found. One – so far – was even bigger than Pluto. I wouldn’t have guessed at the time, but all of it caused a big shakeout in the solar system leading to the new decision to recognize only 8 planets. That’s a pretty big change from your lifetime, where Pluto was a planet when you were born and Pluto was a planet when you died. I think you would have enjoyed watching the changes happen. And I sort of suspect that, though you would never actually say it directly to me, you would be somewhat proud of me. I’m sorry you weren’t around to see it.

Some other big news of the past decade: you were right about relationships and fighting, I think. Who would have guessed that? It took me another four years after that conversation, but I did find that person you were trying to guide me towards. I got married to Diane six years ago. I know that you were perhaps always convinced that no one was ever good enough for one of your kids, but, I have to admit, I think you would be charmed. I look at the picture that was taken on our wedding day sometimes, the one that has Diane and me and my brother and his wife and my sister and her husband and their two kids and my mother and my step-father and I wish that you were in the picture too. It would have been a bit awkward, these extended family things always were, but the awkwardness would have been better than the empty spot that I now see every time I see that picture.

There’s one more thing I wish I could show you. Her name is Lilah, and she is a 3 ½ year old bundle of silliness, stubbornness, curiousness, sweetness, and talkativeness. It is part of the mythology from my childhood that you were not particularly pleased about having that third child, but when it turned out to be a baby girl you pretty quickly got over your misgivings. I think you would like Lilah, and I think it would be pretty hard for you to hide. She asks about you sometimes. She asked about you this morning, even. “But Daddy, who was your daddy?” and I tell her about you. “Why did he die?” she asks. I explain about being sick, about having cancer. She understands a little, but, clearly, only a little. “Do you get another daddy when yours dies?” No Lilah. You never do. You never, ever, do.

What Lilah doesn’t yet know is that you don’t want another daddy when yours dies. You just want yours back. And when you realize that that is never going to happen, you at least want a chance to tell him a few things. And you hope that he has some chance of listening in, at least every ten years or so.

I was reading the business section of the Sunday New York Times this morning – something I do only when it is still a little chilly outside and I am not quite motivated enough to get on my bike and head up the nearest mountain – and I got engrossed in an article about how ten or so billion of dollar had been given to this or that bank and how much of it had evaporated. The main thing I thought was “Ten or so billion dollars. That’s really not that much these days.”

It’s true. A year ago the loss of that much money would be front page of every newspaper, instead of buried inside of an analysis in the business section. We were all getting used to such numbers that only hundreds of billions – or perhaps trillions – matter much anymore.

It reminds me a lot of the Kuiper belt.

Almost seven years ago we discovered our first truly large object in the Kuiper belt. It was given the license plate number of 2002 LM60, but we quickly named it Quaoar, after the creation force of the Tongva Native American tribe indigenous to the Los Angeles basin, in homage to the fact that the discovery was made by us right here in the Los Angeles basin. Quaoar made the front page of most major newspapers (except, amusingly, the Los Angeles Times).

At the time of the announcement of the discovery, the most important thing that we knew about Quaoar was that it was about half the size of Pluto. It was thus likely bigger than anything that had been found in the solar system in the past 72 years. The main part of the story that newspapers honed in on was, of course, whether or not Pluto should actually be called a planet. My very favorite quote, published in the Birmingham, Alabama newpaper, quotes me saying “Quaoar is a big icy nail in the coffin of Pluto as a planet.” Pretty good quip, I thought.

The hunt continued.

The next year we announced the discovery of Sedna, both larger than Quaoar and on a distant elongated orbit that made it more distant than anything else that we had ever found. Explaining that odd orbit has been a task I have been trying to continue to this day. I still don’t know the answer, but the mystery made the front page of Discover magazine.

The hunt continued.

A year later we hit the jackpot, with the discoveries of Haumea, Eris, and Makemake. With Eris being larger than Pluto and eventually providing the silver bullet into the heart of Pluto’s planethood, it received a lot of attention.

The hunt continued.

After some time we started all over again, looking specifically for really super distant things like Sedna. We found a lot of things, but only one thing really far away. It wasn’t as far as Sedna, or even as far as Eris, but it was indeed the third most distant thing we had ever seen.

By now we understood the distant Kuiper belt to know that, basically, we should never see it. The only reason we ever see things is when they are brighter – or more reflective – than they are supposed to be. The only reason that things are more reflective than they are supposed to be is that they are big. The only thing that made sense is that this new thing we had found was big and reflective.

We nicknamed it Snow White.

The survey that found Snow White was specifically looking for quite distant things like Sedna; things that would help us better understand the beginning of the solar system.

Snow White, we finally learned, was not like Sedna at all. It was just a normal Kuiper belt object found slightly far away. Bigger than most, but otherwise, as far as we knew, unremarkable.

What to do?

Our normal policy is to delay the announcement of particularly interesting Kuiper belt objects until we have prepared a full scientific paper on them. Snow white perhaps deserved the same treatment. It is big; big is inherently interesting. But… we had nothing interesting to say about this one. It has a typical Kuiper belt object orbit. Its reflectance spectrum shows nothing particularly unusual.

It’s just a big Kuiper belt object. Perhaps even the 5^th largest one known. It probably fits between Sedna and Quaoar in size. A few years ago it would have been front page news. Now? Yawn. Nothing.

A few people have written me asking why the press has been so kind as to ignore Snow White. But don’t blame the press. Just blame me. We didn’t even write a press release to warn the press that there was anything interesting to write about. Because, in the end, I couldn’t think of anything interesting to write about.

It’s just a big Kuiper belt object. I don’t think that it individually tells us anything particularly new about the outer solar system. Quaoar was a good signal that Pluto’s demise would come soon; Sedna was a sign of an entirely unknown distant population; Haumea and Makemake and Eris were each scientifically rich in the things they taught us about what it is like to be a tiny icy body.

Snow white? Well, it’s just a big Kuiper belt object.

Someday we’ll learn more. Perhaps it will have a moon. Perhaps our quick look at surface composition overlooked something particularly interesting. If so, we’ll be ready with a bail out: prepare a full scientific paper, maybe even tell the press this time and use the opportunity to educate the public, once again, about what is fun and interesting out there at the edge of the solar system.

Friday night my wife and my 3 ½ year old daughter Lilah picked me up at work to go have some dinner. When I opened the car door, Lilah, who it appears was about to explode from waiting to tell me something, blurted out “Daddy, daddy, daddy LOOK!” and pointed off to the west with an excited look in her eye. I followed her finger to a spot above the horizon where a thin sliver moon was shining down with Venus just a finger width to its right. “It’s Venus and the moon,” she breathlessly exclaimed, “and the moon is little but it is pretending to be full,” her words to describe the ghostly outline of the full moon seen in the background of the bright glint of the crescent moon.

“Daddy daddy daddy do you remember when we saw Venus and the moon and Jupiter, too?”

I do indeed remember that. That moment was the December crescent moon, three full lunations ago. It was also the moment that I like to think of as the final episode of the first season of Mike Brown’s Planets. Like any self-respecting TV production, I’ve been taking a summer hiatus. It’s just that my hiatus occurred during southern summer rather than northern summer.

I’m not sure what TV production crews do during a hiatus but we’ve been pretty busy here at Mike Brown’s Planets, doing a bit of science. You’ll get to hear all about it in upcoming installments. Some of the highlights upcoming include:

• Name a satellite of a Kuiper belt object! I’ll tell you about the Kuiper belt object and its satellite and then I’ll take suggestions of what to name the satellite (and why). The best suggestion will get forwarded to the IAU as the official recommendation.
• Life, death, and the Kuiper belt.
• More and more and more moon shadows. Last season readers here were the first to hear about the ongoing shadow crossing of Haumea by Namaka (and why they are both important and cool). Much much more is to come (and you can read more about it in an ongoing technical blog intended more for research astronomers, but, nonetheless, occasionally entertaining)
• My father, rocket scientist, RIP
• A (slightly belated) look forward at discoveries that might be made in 2009 and a look back at the 2008 predictions to see how many, if any, came true.
• Why Pluto is still not a planet and should remain that way.
• Things in the sky that make me smile.

Stay tuned for Season II!