Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Mike Brown, Discoverer of 2003 UB313...Planet 10?

Episode Date: August 15, 2005

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As he discovered Planet 10, Mike Brown this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. One thing's for sure, Mike Brown and his co-discoverers have found something bigger than Pluto and much farther away. I'm Matt Kaplan. but saves some enthusiasm for the other nine in this week's What's Up segment. Leading the news are one departure and one arrival. Discovery is back, safe and sound. The return-to-flight shuttle mission landed at Edwards Air Force Base in California on August 9 after 14 days in space. And the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is on its way to the Red Planet. Planetary Radio will be talking to someone from that mission real soon, we promise.

There are a couple of articles about the MRO at planetary.org. While you're there, you can also read about the first radar beams successfully bounced off the Martian surface, and, more importantly, the planet's subsurface by Europe's Mars Express orbiter. Emily is up next. Processed or raw, she likes those delicious Cassini images any way she can get them. I'll be back in a minute with Clyde Tombaugh, I mean, Mike Brown. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers.

A listener asked, I keep seeing references to processed and raw Cassini images on the web. What's the difference? Raw images are made from data straight from the spacecraft, and there can be a lot about raw images that's not perfect. For Cassini, there are many sources of imperfections in images that are eventually removed through careful processing. For one thing, the radiation environment in space includes lots of fast-moving particles called cosmic rays. When cosmic rays hit the camera's detector, they can make a bright spot or streak across an image

that looks a little like a shooting star. Also, when Cassini tries to look at the surface of Titan, the moon's smoggy atmosphere makes all of Cassini's pictures blurry. Interference from other electronics on the spacecraft cause horizontal banding across some images. And the cameras themselves, like all cameras, have a few blemishes. Bits of dust on the optics cause weird donut-shaped artifacts on some images. Finally, when the data from Cassini is received on Earth, bad weather can cause glitches and the loss of some of the data, leaving images that are partially cut off.

Nearly all of these problems, except data loss, can be fixed by trained workers performing careful computer processing. So why does Cassini even show these blemishy raw images? Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out. Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out. Mike Brown has a sunny office in the California Institute of Technology's Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences. We last talked to this professor of planetary astronomy not long after he and colleagues Chad Trujillo and David Rabinovitz, discovered and named Sedna, another body circling our sun in the remote Kuiper Belt,

billions of miles from Earth. Now they're back with a much bigger find, and I mean that literally. Mike is happy to tell you that it is the 10th planet in our solar system and the first one discovered since Pluto was found in 1930. So, Clyde, I mean Mike, congratulations. Thank you. Did you, have you discovered Planet 10?

We think so. We found something that's bigger than Pluto, and there's still a big astronomical debate going on as to whether to call it a planet or not, but it seems pretty clear to us that if we call Pluto a planet, if we find something bigger and further away, we should probably call that a planet, too. Tell us about this object that at the moment is about 10 billion miles away, or just for a bit of scale, 10 times as far as that other interesting planet, Saturn, that Cassini is spinning around right now. It's also about three times further than Pluto.

And the interesting thing about this planet is it has about a 560-year orbit. During that 560-year orbit, it goes from where it is now, three times further than Pluto, to a position much closer into the sun. It gets almost the same distance as Pluto from the sun in another 260 years. So Pluto, which has a somewhat eccentric orbit, is kind of put to shame in yet another way by this new, as yet officially unnamed body. In fact, there are two interesting aspects about the orbit that are different, that are similar to Pluto, but even more extreme. Pluto has an eccentric orbit, and this is much more eccentric. Pluto also has an orbit that's tilted with respect to the rest of the planets, And that's about 20 degrees for Pluto.

This one's about 45 degrees with respect to the rest of the planets. And you were actually just showing me a little plot on your screen behind us here of the amount of sky that you've covered. And it clearly indicates why this has been a fairly recent discovery, although I guess the object was first seen in 2003, hence the name. We've been slowly surveying the sky, and we started looking in the same plane that all the planets are, because we figured that's where we would find other planets. And as time has gone on, this has been going on for almost five years now,

as time has gone on, we've slowly moved further and further north and a little bit south from where the planets are found. And this one is, because it's tilted by so much, it took us this long to get to the location. But you're right. It is 2003 when those images were first taken. And because this object is so far away, it's moving so slowly that we actually didn't see it the first time around. Usually we analyze those images that we get the following morning, and we find everything that's in the images, and we go on to the next one. And so on October 22, 2003, I looked at these images, and we didn't see it. And only by going back in a much more careful analysis for things that are moving much

more slowly did we realize that we had missed it the first time, but we stumbled across this thing very, very far away. There's a great series of three images on your website, which I highly recommend our listeners to take a look at. And, of course, we'll provide the URL to that site. And it shows the motion of this object relative to the stars around it. And it was on one night, but it has to be said, this photo is of a tiny portion of the sky. That's right. We look at a huge section of sky every night.

If you hold your hand out at arm's length and put it up against the sky, that's about how much sky we look at. And the amount that's seen on this little picture is, I think, 0.1% of the amount that we see per night. I would probably recommend to our listeners as well that they go to the website to learn more about this object with, as you say, the unfortunate and temporary name of 2003 UB313. But give us a thumbnail description. First of all, its size, which is one of the things, that is leading you to believe that it is, yes, a planet. It's definitely bigger than Pluto. and we know that for sure.

We don't know exactly how much bigger it is. We have some observations from the Spitzer Space Telescope at the end of this month and from a few other telescopes, including with luck the Hubble Space Telescope, and that will nail down the size for sure. My best guess is that it's about 25% bigger than Pluto. And you've been able to learn more than that, apparently, because you have some speculation about the composition of this new planet. Yeah, one of the ways that we study these things once we find them

is by looking at the light reflected off of them, the sunlight that reflects off their surfaces. And everything that is on the surface has a different signature in this reflected light. And if you look at Pluto, for example, the light that reflects off the surface shows that the surface is covered in nitrogen and methane, frozen solid nitrogen and methane. And when you look at this new planet, you certainly see the methane, so it looks a lot like Pluto. We haven't yet determined if there's nitrogen on the surface, but we're looking very hard

for that over the next couple of months, too. So in some ways, this is a slightly larger twin of Pluto, at least composition-wise. There is a lot more that we could say about this new planet, but what we can't talk about is its name, because that hasn't been determined yet, although you certainly have some suggestions and the recommendation that you've made to the International Astronomical Union, which I'm going to bet you're not going to give us a scoop here and tell us what that is. I'm not going to give that one away. But actually, at this point, I'm not even sure if that one's going to be used. It's all going to come down to whether the International Astronomical Union

declares this to be a planet or just another large object out past Neptune? It would be interesting to see what they decide. They have been trying to make a definition of a planet for several years now, and they knew this sort of thing might be stumbling along, and they really should have gotten around to it a little earlier. But that will be interesting to see. And if they call it a planet, what I have been told is that they will want to name it in the Greco-Roman tradition like the other planets. And if they call it not a planet, then as the discoverer, I'll be able to name it.

There are some rules that I have to follow, but I'll be able to name it in a much more broader class of objects. But if it is a planet, you will possibly still have some influence over that name? That's a really good question. I wish I knew the answer to that. Actually question. I wish I knew the answer to that. Actually, I really wish I knew the answer to that. And there has been speculation that if it's a planet, then it is purely the prerogative of the International Astronomical Union to make the name. If it's declared a planet, actually what I would like to do is to get a lot of public input

into what the right name should be. And so we've been considering the right way to perhaps have some sort of naming contest or naming something where we get everybody together and say, hey, you know, this is our generation's planet. Let's come up with a good name for it ourselves. What a wonderful and very generous idea. I will say personally, I hope that's what comes to pass. I think that'll be quite fun, actually.

I guess we're not going to see it called Planet Lila, though. It will definitely not be Planet Lila. Well, we're going to tell you why it won't be Planet Lila, but why that would have been a lovely idea, especially from Mike's viewpoint, when we come back from a break as we talk a little bit more about 2003 UB313 with its primary discoverer, Mike Brown. We're in his office at Caltech, and we'll continue in just a minute. This is Buzz Aldrin. When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of humankind's great adventure in the solar system. That's why

I'm a member of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest group. The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars. We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets. We sponsor the search for life on other worlds, and we're building the first-ever solar sail. We didn't just build it. We attempted to put that first solar sail in orbit, and we're going to try again.

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He's a professor of planetary astronomy in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at the California Institute of Technology, Caltech. He also is very, very likely the discoverer of our solar system's 10th planet. Or if somebody decides Pluto isn't our 9th planet, or maybe our 11th planet. And a lot of that has to do with, as he addressed in the first part of our conversation, the fact that there is no good definition of a planet. You do address that on the website, and you talk about the sort of historical and sociological background for the naming of planets,

and that within that sort of rationale, that's another good justification for this being Planet 10. Yeah, it's actually very interesting. If you were to try to make a scientific definition of planet, which is what scientists try to do a lot, you would have a very difficult time, in fact an impossible time, coming up with any definition that gives you nine planets. It's very easy to come up with a definition that gives you eight planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto becomes just, well, we used to call it the largest member of the Kuiper Belt, but now we have to call it the second largest member of the Kuiper Belt. And it's very difficult to come up with any way to make Pluto a planet. However,

for 75 years, people have called Pluto a planet. And people love Pluto. When you try to stand up and tell people that really there are just eight planets and Pluto isn't one, and I've done that many times, so I know, when you do that, people look at you like you're a big cosmic bully. And you're trying to get rid of their favorite underdog. And what I've realized is that the word planet, even though we scientists like to think that all these words we use are scientific words, the word planet is not a scientific word. The word planet is a cultural word that's been around for 2,000 years,

whereas modern science has been around for a couple of hundred years. So when I finally realized that, I learned to accept Pluto as a planet and at the same time realized that it's an easy definition now. Let's just call Pluto a planet and call anything bigger a planet also. The last time you were on the show, we were talking about another of the discoveries you and your colleagues made, and that, of course, was that funny red body named Sedna. But Sedna, you would say, is not a planet. Well, scientifically, again, Sedna and this new object, 2003 UB313,

it would be very crazy to try to come up with a scientific definition that split right between the two. It said Sedna is not a planet and this new one is. But if we're going to make a cultural definition, let's just draw the line at Pluto and say, to be a planet, you have to be special to be a planet. And let's make it hard. Let's make the bar a little bit high. And you have to be bigger than Pluto. And that way, maybe in our generation, there will be one or two more, but they're not going to be 20 more. I think everyone would get kind of bored with planets if there were 30 planets in the solar system. I mentioned your colleagues. Could you talk about them for a second and their role in this discovery? Yeah, the other two people

involved in this long-term survey that we're doing are Chad Trujillo, who used to be here at Caltech and now works at the Gemini Observatory out on the Big Island in Hawaii, and the other one is David Rabinowitz, who's at Yale University. And each of them plays a very important role in the survey. Chad has been taking the lead in studying the reflected light from these objects, as I was talking about earlier. And David has been helping with finding the objects,

tracking them down once we first discover them, helping to figure out their orbits. And most importantly, David was one of the people who helped put together this very large camera that's on the telescope that we use that really is what lets us do the survey. I remember, I think, in our first interview, you talked about that camera really being key to this. We couldn't do what we do without having that camera. It's a 180-megapixel camera, and it covers more sky at once than any other camera on

an astronomical telescope in the world. 180 megapixel? It sounded more impressive three or four years ago. Now it's only getting to be moderately big. It still sounds pretty good compared to my 3.1 little digital camera at home. You had to make this announcement officially a little bit sooner than you probably would have wished.

For one thing, it got in the way of your becoming a dad. Not becoming a dad. That worked out just fine. Okay. Nevertheless, things didn't go exactly as you had planned. Yeah, it was really actually quite a mess. The announcement of this new planet came on the last Friday. It came in the afternoon of the last Friday in July,

which is, I'm convinced, the time you announce something if you want to make sure nobody on the planet hears about it. And the reason we had to do that is really quite a sad story. We had been following this object since we first discovered it in January, and we'd been following it to make sure that we knew as much of the story as we could tell when we finally announced it, such as what it's made out of, where it is, how big it is. that we knew as much of the story as we could tell when we finally announced it, such as what it's made out of, where it is, how big it is.

While this was going on, somebody hacked into one of our computer sites, and there's a lot of debate about the exact word. Hack might not be the right word. But got into one of our computer sites that told where the object was. And at that point, that person could very easily take their own telescope, go point at that object, and say, the next day, we discovered this object. So as soon as we found out we'd been hacked, we had to have an announcement before the sun went down. And so that happened on a Friday afternoon. And life has been hectic since then. How about the media interest in this? It's been quite extreme. A little bit less than Sedna, interestingly, and it's because of that

Friday afternoon at four o'clock. And so there are a lot of people who still haven't heard the story that we have found this thing out there. I think people will hear it more over the next month when we finally get that concrete size measurement. Right now, as I said, we're a little uncertain. It's bigger than Pluto. It might be 25% bigger. It might be 50% bigger. But when we get those observations from this whole armada of telescopes,

we can then definitely say what it is that we have out there. Just a couple of minutes left, Mike. What else is out there waiting for us to discover it moving against the background of stars? This is, of course, what keeps me going every morning I come in. Even though we've made these big discoveries, our survey is still going on. I come in every morning and look at the data from the telescope from the night before. We've covered almost all the northern hemisphere, so there can't be too many things hiding in the north. We're trying to, in the next year, get on a telescope in the southern hemisphere

and cover that down there. But that's why I say that I don't think there will be too many other of these larger than Pluto objects left hiding out there that we'll find in the next couple of years. However, in the next couple of generations, as telescopes get better and we can see further and further away, I think there probably will be some more even further out there. And these regions where Sedna lives and where well beyond the sun, well beyond the other planets in the sun, I think that there will be things, and we've been predicting that we'll find things eventually up to the size of Mars in those regions.

But that's not for us. That's for the next generations. Well, there is this one more topic I want to bring up. We did say that we would provide the address, the URL for your website, which gives a terrific explanation and status report on the work that you're doing, not only with 2003 UB313, but these other Kuiper Belt objects. But there is a link there as well. Well, there are a lot of very entertaining links, but one of my faves, and in fact, my colleague, Emily Lakdawalla, wanted to make sure that we got this in because she's become a big fan of your site for your daughter, Lila. Not to be confused with your planet, Lila, which even you admit would not be something you'd submit as a name for this new

planet. No, on that Friday afternoon, when we had to quick have a press conference, we also had to quick have a website, and we had to quick have a name for the website. And so I hadn't slept much the night before because Lila had been up all night. Without much thought, I just quick wrote Planet Lila on the website address and not thinking that anyone would notice, which, of course, was stupid on my part. And so immediately speculation went around that Lila was going to be the name of the new planet. So I had to put a link on there explaining that, no, actually this is just my, at the time, three-week-old daughter. She's up to five now.

And in fact, Lila was supposed to be my project for the next couple of months. We've been analyzing her sleep patterns and looking for statistical correlations. That was how I was going to keep myself occupied while I was at home. But this planet stuff has kept me a little busy, too, these days. Well, I also recommend that people take a look at the Lila website. Careful analysis being done by a very proud scientist father. And we're out of time. Congratulations both on parenting a planet and a beautiful little girl.

Thank you very much. Mike Brown has been our guest. He is a professor of planetary astronomy at Caltech, and we are in his office. We've been talking about Planet 10. I'll be back with Bruce Betts and this week's edition of What's Up, right after this return visit by Emily. I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A. Raw images from the Cassini spacecraft can be full of blemishes

that could be removed with careful computer processing. So why does the mission show people the raw images at all? To keep the public involved. It takes a long time and human effort for those careful processing steps to be performed to remove all the blemishes and make the pictures pretty. In the meantime, the Cassini mission is automatically outputting every single image that the spacecraft takes directly to its website without human intervention. Thanks to the internet, the casual observer can ride along with the mission seeing every single

picture, often less than 24 hours after it was taken. Scientists are torn about this, of course. They would like all of the work done by their spacecraft to look its best, to be free of warts and blemishes, and to be processed to show Saturn and its moons to their best advantage. But in the interest of sharing the real-time excitement of the mission with the public, they have agreed to output every single image from the spacecraft directly to waiting viewers on the Internet, warts and all.

Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Time for What's Up with our own planetary scientist. It's Dr. Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. What's up, Bruce? What do you think of Planet 10? Planet 10!

Planet 10 from outer space, not Plan 9 from outer space. Planet 10 from outer space. It's exciting. They're finding a bunch of stuff out there. And as a dad, you know, I can tell you, I think it's the coolest thing in the world that here's a guy who may have discovered the 10th planet, and he's just as excited, if not more so, about his five-week-old beautiful little baby daughter. I would hope so.

Well, exactly, exactly. But not necessarily. No, you're right, you're right. No, that is pretty cool. So it's exciting. All right, now what else is up? No, you're right. You're right.

No, that is pretty cool. So it's exciting. All right. Now, what else is up? Well, Planet 10 is up, but we've also got some of the other nine approved planets. Yeah, and they're much easier to see. They are much easier to see. You will not need advanced, although I'm surprised you can actually see it with advanced amateur telescopes.

Mike mentions that on his website, yeah. But you can see, for those who want to just go naked eye or play with binoculars or small telescopes, see the traditional planets. You've got Venus and Jupiter low in the west after sunset. Don't miss these coming together, getting closest together on September 1st. They're extremely close. Before that period, you've got Jupiter above Venus,

and after that period, Jupiter below Venus as Venus continues to climb night to night. And Jupiter continues to set. But another one that's getting awful darn bright and going to be competing within the next three or four months is Mars. And Mars is rising around midnight in the east. And you'll see it high in the sky before dawn. And it is now, it looks like a very bright orangish star. And Mars is not going to be quite as close or quite as bright as some people have been hearing on the Internet.

Yes, let us dispel the Internet rumor which is being flung around the Internet, which is basically a modification of what this case was in 2003, when we did have the closest approach of Mars in tens of thousands of years, literally. But the internet is also in some cases added an interesting modification that it would be as large as the full moon. Mars is never large enough that with your naked eye, you can resolve it as a disk. It will be very bright, but not as bright, not as close, and definitely not as big as the full moon. Although that would be awful cool, it's not going to happen. Wouldn't that be fun?

That would be fun. Now, I think we're going to have to go there, I guess, to get that. But you can find out if you're interested in more than this or want to send technical replies back to people who harass you with those emails, go to our website. It appears a couple places. We've got a story posted right now on Mars and also in Emily's blog.

There's someone rushing right now to our website to check that out. They've got lights and sirens on. It's a code three to planetary.org. Okay, what else do you have for us? All right, we've also got this week in space history. We've got a bunch of famous launches that happened,

not the least of which was Viking 1 in 1975. So 30 years ago, since Viking 1 headed for the red planet, became the first truly successful lander on the surface of Mars. And two years later, on the same date, August 20th, Voyager 2 was launched, headed out for what would turn out to be a glorious tour of all of the giant planets. Also 1982, I know this is just so much, but we had the second woman in space, who was, of course, Svetlana Savitskaya. Interesting, it was 19 years after Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space and about a year before Sally Ride became the first American in space.

So on to Random Space Fact! We talked about how you determine a planet, and it's kind of an nomenclature thing, kind of like how do you determine who an astronaut is. Well, the U.S. Air Force defines it as getting over 50 statute miles in altitude, and there are 443 people who have done that. The Federation Aeronautique Internationale, FAI, defines it as over 100 kilometers altitude, and that takes out several of the X-15 pilots, giving you 437, 434 have flown in orbit. We're going to have to get to the trivia contest quickly. There's so much going on in the skies.

There is. It's exciting, and on in the skies. There is. It's exciting. And we ramble a lot, too. On the trivia contest, we ask you, what was the... Sleep, of course, what neither of us are getting enough of. Who was the first person to sleep in space? How did we do, Matt? A lot of people got it right.

A couple stuck to Americana and said Gordo Cooper, Gordon Cooper. But the real first person to sleep in space, according to our winner this week, Michael S. Newell of Calgary, Canada, is or was German Titoff. German Titoff, who had a whole bunch of other

firsts that were mentioned by some of the other listeners that we won't go into, but he did it on August 6, 1961, when he spent an entire day in space. First guy to do that, too. Gordo Cooper was the first person to snore in space. Interestingly. Little known fact. Disgustingly, yeah. Moving on to our trivia contest for this next time around, you can win a fabulous Planetary Radio t-shirt. The Keck telescopes in Hawaii, there are two of them now, amazingly, 10-meter telescopes. They are made up of a number of hexagonal segments rather than one large mirror.

How many hexagonal segments make up each of the Keck telescopes in Hawaii? So how many per telescope? Per telescope. How many per telescope? Well, there you go. How do they enter? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to email us your answer. And get that to us by the 22nd of August at 2 p.m. Pacific time. August 22, Monday at 2 p.m. Pacific time, you will be eligible in this latest trivia contest. And I'm looking forward to next week's

when we get to open those new and hopefully humorous names for the crew exploration vehicle. But that's next week. For now, everyone go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about how you could rehydrate raisins. Thank you. Good night.

That's going to be helpful in space, I'm sure. Well, you know, you pack them really tightly to head to Mars. Yeah, he's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here on What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Where else?

Have a great week everyone