Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Mike Brown Lecture on Finding Planet Nine and his Journey to Redefine the Solar System

Episode Date: April 28, 2025

Win Extraterrestrial Metal: join my mailing list 💥 https://briankeating.com/yt 💥 Mike is an astronomer and professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). His groundbreaking discoveries of dwarf planets like Eris, Haumea, and Makemake shook up the astronomy world and led to the controversial redefinition of what constitutes a planet. Why was Pluto actually demoted? And is there a hidden Planet Nine lurking in the outer solar system? As a treat for all my members, Mike has graced us with a lecture on Finding Planet Nine and his Journey to Redefine the Solar System. Don’t miss out! Check out our full interview: https://youtu.be/_uwEc48NI8E Additional resources: ➡️ Learn more about Mike Brown: 💻 Website: https://mikebrown.caltech.edu/ 📚 How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming: https://a.co/d/9jQp3nt ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/ 🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast This channel is dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome everybody to a special audio episode of The Into the Impossible podcast featuring a lecture by none other than Professor Mike Brown of Caltech, the Pluto killer. Now, this is a clip from the full hour-long lecture that he gave at UC San Diego in February of 2025, which he graciously allowed me to record. And I put that along with the video, the slides, the interaction, and the Q&A on my YouTube channel. But the catch is it's only for members of the channel. that is people that pay a whopping 99 cents or more per month to support the channel and all the editing, processing, posting, hosting, hosting. It costs a lot of money to run this podcast. And the only thing I kind of get back for it in terms of remuneration is this slight amount of ad revenue that Google deigns to send me and some podcast episode revenue. And if you do listen and not skip the

commercial, so don't skip them. I use that. I just feed it all back. I don't make a profit. I don't get paid by my university to do any of this. So it's really a labor of love. And there's a lot more content coming from great geniuses on the show, including friends like Fred Adams and lecture, a special lecture, by Kyle Dawson, who's the past spokesperson of Desi, who seems to have proven that perhaps the universe's dark energy is not a cosmological constant. That will also be posted for members only. So enjoy the audio of this, but go over to YouTube and watch the video,

and you'll do that by just going to the member section, and you'll see the video for Mike Brown. We'll put a link to join the channel down below as a member. again, the lowest tier membership is 99 cents. The highest tier is $20 a month. And for that, whopping 20 bucks, you get to spend an hour with me each month, answering questions and reacting to your pet theories of everything or Planet 9 hypotheses or perpetual motion machine patents or mathematical treatises. So I do that not again to make money. I get paid, thankfully, even by University of California. And standards, I get paid slightly more than 20 bucks an hour. But it's a way

of separating the series from the non-serious. I get about two or three emails a week, sometimes a day, about these types of theories and alternatives and so forth. And I'm not gatekeeping. I'm trying to engage with the public as well, but I have to have some kind of barrier to my time, or I won't have time to do the job that I'm paid to do by the taxpayers and regions of the University of California, which teach to research and have some work-life balance on occasion. So there's a lot more like these coming. Mike Brown is a glorious speaker. You're going to love his talk. I know you enjoyed his podcast. The lecture is even better in some ways, if I don't say so much, myself because I'm not interrupting him. So please do me a favor. Enjoy these first 10 minutes or so of

the lecture and get a flavor for it and then go over there as you did for Dick Bond and will for people like Fred Adams and others coming up soon, Eric Weinstein and Kyle Dawson and many, many other speakers that we have. Go to YouTube, join the membership. You get access immediately. Thanks a lot. Enjoy. And I'll talk to you at the end. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, hell. So I'm going to talk about this search for this new planet, which, as you heard, you know,

Mike replaced the previous planet nine, which was not really clued on. It was never really a planet. This was an idea suggested to be by my daughter when she was 10. She was like, he was like, Dad, Dad, Dad, do you want to know how to get everyone to stop hating you? I'm like, Bert. I disagree with the premise of your question.

question. So I could, yes, please tell me. And she's like, you find a nuke? And you need no. And then shockingly, years later, we were looking for planets. There's at least one share here if anybody here. And one share right here, we sound like the name of the thing. If anybody cares. I don't know if anybody cares. Okay. So if you're going to talk about finding new planets in the summer system, it's best, I think, to go back to the last time there were no new planets and the last time there were no new planets would be something like 1780

if it were 1780 and if it were 1780 and right now you could go up look in the sky and you could see all the planets you could see mercury if you knew where to look most people had seen mercury by then probably how many people would see mercury good astronomy department

who has not seen mercury theorists Let's see Mercury. You can see Venus. Something like go out tonight, Venus is a little hard to miss. You can see Earth, right there for your theorists. Mars, easy to see tonight. Mars is like straight, almost straight overhead, beautiful. Jupiter's up there tonight. Saturn's up there tonight. And that's it. 17-8. That's the last planets that those were the planets that people knew about.

And if you go back, I tried this. I'm not a real historian, but I went back. and tried to find anyone who had written about speculating about new planets beyond the orbit of Saturn before the next planet was discovered. I couldn't find anything. I actually don't think that people really have the idea that there might be new planets out there. Galileo had used his telescope to realize that there are stars that you couldn't see, that there are moons around things like Jupiter that you couldn't see, the rings you couldn't see.

But the idea that there might be planets that are unseen, I couldn't find. It doesn't mean that nobody had thought about it, but I couldn't find it. So it took an accident, a very careful accident, William Herschel, who built the best optical telescope at the time, and he was using it to map out the sky. He would, you know, look through his big telescope, which had the barrel as big as a house. He put down, here we work star, star, he dried them all down. And when he got to, what turned out to be Uranus, it was fuzzy. He had the first telescope that probably had like arc second-ish resolution, everything before that probably was like a five-arc-second smear or something.

And a planet like Uranus would just look like any other star. He recognized it as something weird. Weird is okay. Even then, you know, people knew they didn't know what they were, but there were planetary nebulae. There were galaxies. All these things were known fuzzy objects in the sky. So he assumed it was just one of those. He came back the next day and he was careful.

It came back the next day, star, star, and that fuzzy thing went from here to here. As soon as you see the fuzzy thing go from here to here, if you realize it's not a star, it's not a galaxy, even if you didn't know what a galaxy was. At the time, it's something in our solar system.

It's something that's moving against the background stars. He was very excited. He kept on tracking it. Herschel did not think that it was a planet. A couple of people jumped up and down like, you just found a new planet. And he was very reluctant. to call it that for a while. He thought probably comets. People knew about fuzzy comets in the sky.

And I think they even knew about comets whose orbits went beyond the orbit of Saturn. It was moving very slowly. So it was clear to move beyond the orbit of Saturn what it was about. People knew about those. And so he thought, yeah, maybe it's a comet. I'm not quite sure what it is. At the time, the idea was, well, you need to find its orbit. It's either going to have a cometary orbit like this or it's going to have a planetary orbit, go on a circle around the sun. And it had only been observed for a little bit, so nobody quite knew what to call it. Herschel eventually, even before the orbit was known, Herschel eventually got convinced to call it a planet and decided to name it George.

Didn't stick, but it was the original name of George. George named after King George. Who didn't like King George is the name of the planet? Who liked it the least? Americans did not care in 1780 so much. It's the French. The French, the French were like, no, no, no, no. So that didn't stick.

And eventually it got to be Uranus, as we know, and sort of love it and make fun. But when the orbit was still not well known, because it only been observed for a little bit of the time. So it was tracked, and it was tracked. And it really, the final understanding of what its orbit was came. It came from Alexis Bubbard. Alexis Bouvard has more titles than media. I'm kind of jealous. They also wrote this very exciting book,

Tables of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. And in these tables of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, he figured out where Jupiter and Saturn were supposed to be based on their mutual gravitational perturbations, not just an ellipse, but the perturbations during the ellipse. And then he figured out where Uranus should also be. And it's not a little bit of half. But it's this kind of stuff that we all kind of, I think this is your homework problem.

Somebody started you're working on that homework problem. I think there's perturbations of Jupiter and Saturn. And then this is the theory for where Uranus should be. And he did something really interesting, which is if you go to the discovery of Uranus, 1781, and you can see every date he has after that, people observed it, And this other column is the, I'll zoom in over here, actually, if I can do that. This other column is the discrepancy between his theory and where it was observed at the time. So it's good, not great.

But the really full thing is it is went backwards in time. It was discovered in 1781. It was observed by somebody else cataloging the stars in 1771, who cataloged it as a star, but didn't go back the second night to look. The telescope wasn't as good. It wasn't identified as a fuzzy object's naval attack. And then you found that, then he realized, oh, it was also Cadillant 10. And all the way back to 1890 was the first time Uranus was hadlong.

It was Flamsteed, famous for people who observe stars. Flamsteed observed it in 1690 and was in Taurus. It was a 22nd star in Taurus at the time. It's 22 Tori. If you go look at your stars and Taurus, there's a 20, there's a 21, there's a 23, there's a 24. There is no 22 Tori because that's actually Yarnas. So alternative name, if you get tired of hearing Uranus all the time.

But the other and easy thing is... It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today.

Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. So, He did you go back. That's pretty cool. Go back all this time. Going back all that time gave you enough arc that you could see. It's really in a circuit orbit around the sun. This is planet.

Doing things. plants should do. And it was the only thing that wasn't quite doing, it didn't quite fit the theory perfectly Bouvard was what we would call today the preeminent astrophysicist of its time. You all know those people. They're all the same. They say, my theory is perfect. The observations are wrong. Do better observations. You know those people, right? Conceasing, you know what? So there's perfect. And so astronomers like, oh, being that okay, I'll go back and do better observations. And so

starting at about 18th, 19, they really started observing Uranus very carefully to make sure it was that their observations were not messed up. And in 1890 to about 1840, observations kept coming in, and it was not

in the right place. And Bouvard, you know, he's good enough to know that he needs to have a little bit of wiggle room. And he, He says down here, there's an alternative theory. Probably not true, but there's an alternative that maybe there's something else out there talking along at Uranus.

By 1840, this was amongst the astronomical community. I think, as far as I can tell, again, I'm reading, trying to read old books and an article as an understand how people were thinking, which is not always easy. By 1840, it was widely accepted that there was another planet beyond Uranus. I say this because in some sense, I feel like we're in 1840 right now. And so I widely accept it may not quite be true. But all the evidence was in it at 1840 that there was another planet.

And people understood that there was another planet and it needed to be found. It's just that nobody knew how to find it. And so, in know, 1845, Urban Nourriere sat down, did some calculations using these data, literally these data. He was at the same observatory there in Paris. using these data to try to figure out where this perturber was, he made some very questionable assumptions, including believing that he knew the semi-major axis, which was wrong and a couple of other things. All of his assumptions turned out to sort of cancel, and he came up with a

prediction of where this should be. He sent it to the observatory in Berlin. They opened up the telescope, and that very first night, they found what we now call Meptim, which is to me, I mean, this remains one of the most amazing stories of kind of discovery and prediction, and there it is. And it was, there was a lot of luck involved. And if it had been 50 years early or 50 years later, his calculations were actually wrong and he wouldn't have found it and not gotten quite so famous. But worked out for him? He's not complaining.

Okay, let's go back here. And at this point, people got very excited about the idea of new planets compared to 1780 where no one thought about new planets. suddenly you could find a planet as it was called for the very, he was the astronomer who found a planet at the tip of his pencil. And he got very famous. His statue was still in Paris, right at the observatory, staring up straight at Luxembourg Gardens,

very pretty spot to Hadry Statue, trying to reserve a spot in that set. He was very small as in a spot. His name is inscribed in the Eiffel Tower, one of 50 people whose names are supposed to be there, a lot more there at these days. People were like, I want to get famous too, and they started predicting planets.

left and right and left and right. And we recounted recently, and there's something like 34-ish individual predictions of planets, additional planets in our solar system, based on some sort of observation. And of those 34, they've all been wrong. And of those 34, most of them have been wrong and kind of embarrassingly wrong.

So the most on the embarrassing, but what should have been embarrassing, but turned out to be not embarrassing. One is the story everybody knows. And that's the discovery of Pluto, of course. Pluto was found when it was expected to be planet X, which was more massive than Jupiter. But it turns out, you know, Pluto, as we know, was just this tiny little thing and this crazy orbit that goes out beyond the orbit of Neptune, dips inside the orbit of Neptune. We saw it to be huge at the time it was discovered only because people were looking for something huge because they thought they were. perturbation still left to explain of Uranus and Neptune.

There aren't. Uranus and Neptune are exactly where they're supposed to be, but it turns out there were actual bad data. LeVarie was, Bouvard was not entirely wrong about the astronomers having some bad data in there. I'm embarrassed to say. Okay, well, there you go. That's the first 10 minutes or so, Mike Brown's a glorious lecture on Planet 9 for

Matterspace. I hope you enjoyed it. And if you did and you want to see more, hear more, go to, my YouTube channel, YouTube's Dr. Brian Keating, and sign up, subscribe, of course, but join as a member. You'll see a link to join his channel member. There's videos just for members. Go over there. You'll see the entirety of the talk, Q&A, and everything else, and his slides as well. And you'll hear it from his own voice and recorded it with a little bit extra love and care. So I hope you'll do that. It can be yours for 1999, as high as 1999 or as low as 99 cents per month. And it's a way of showing

me that you guys are interested in me and all the effort that I put into making these videos, audio, and other generative podcasts. Don't forget to subscribe to my Monday Magic mailing list. I write about all these episodes, upcoming cool things in science, in the heavens, phenomena, displays of glory in the night sky, and around the world my colleagues and I are getting the privilege to conduct. So go to Brian Keating.com slash list to sign up over there. And don't forget to subscribe, follow the podcast, Leo rating, review, et cetera, et cetera.

That really does tell these algorithms which govern the creation cycle and how much attention we get for my guests and so forth. It's really important to do that. So I do appreciate that. You can also reach out to me on Twitter or Insta at Dr. Brian Keating. And with that, I wish you a very happy weekend, weekday, or whenever you're listening to this podcast, wherever you may be in two dimensions or more. Brian Keating signing off for the End of the Impossible Podcast. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's

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