Planet gives city native star turn
Grissom grad has 'nerve-racking' wait to announce find
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
A Huntsville-born scientist is behind the discovery of a possible 10th planet in the solar system.
Dr. Mike Brown, with the California Institute of Technology, actually discovered the yet-to-be-named planet in January with Chad Trujillo, of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, and David Rabinowitz of Yale University. However, they had to wait to get time on the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes to confirm their findings.
Then, the news about the planet broke Friday - ahead of schedule.
An announcement was planned for perhaps September or October, but the information had been put out on the Internet with lists of telescope observations.
That meant anybody who knew how to decipher the information could train a telescope to the right place and claim the discovery.
"It's been such a nerve-racking process. It was a very long wait to start with, and we had to beg and borrow time" on Hubble and Spitzer "the best we could," Brown said Monday. "If somebody else out there had looked in the right place, then we would be reading about this in the newspapers right now, and our work would have been rewarding personally but we would have missed out" on the discovery.
Initially, it was reported the information was hacked, or stolen from a computer, but Brown believes the abstract was just placed on the Internet ahead of an official announcement.
The new planet has a code name - 2003 UB313. The name Brown and his team chose for the new planet has yet to be approved by the International Astronomical Union, which confirms astronomical discoveries.
"I can't say because of the approval process," he said.
Brown, Trujillo and Rabinowitz first photographed the planet with the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar, near San Diego, on Oct. 31, 2003.
The object was so far away that its motion was not detected until they reanalyzed the data in January. In the last seven months, the scientists have been studying the planet with other telescopes to better estimate its size and its motions.
Brown also took part in the discovery of Sedna - a small planetoid object on the edge of our solar system - in late 2003.
UB313 is about 9 billion miles from the sun and orbits once every 530 years. Located at the edge of the solar system in a rocky field of objects known as the Kuiper Belt, the planet is larger than Pluto, Brown said.
"In many ways it is the brother of Pluto," Brown said. "We know the surface is made of a similar material" as Pluto's. Pluto is composed of mostly ice and rock.
The new planet has an atmosphere that is more than likely frozen to its surface, Brown said, because it is so far from the sun.
"We will have to wait another 230 years or so, when it moves closer to the sun, to figure out if the atmosphere 'melts' away from the planet," Brown said. "Of course, I don't think I'll be here when that happens."
A Huntsville native, Brown, 40, "grew up feeling the rumble of those Apollo rockets every morning," he said.
"Really, the space program was all I knew. I thought that fathers were people who worked on rockets because all my friends' fathers did," he said.
Brown took his first astronomy course at the University of Alabama in Huntsville while still a senior at Grissom High School. Following graduation in 1983, he studied physics at Princeton University, "but I always had a love for astronomy, and that just never went away."
Brown went on to work at Cal Tech almost a decade ago and started a survey of Kuiper Belt objects in 2000.
"Like most lives, it's been a series of coincidences that placed me where I am today," he said. "If you had asked me a decade ago if I would be working on discovering planets, I wouldn't have believed it."
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