Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - The Fascinating Hunt for a Mysterious Ninth Planet [Ep. 488]

Episode Date: April 20, 2025

As a listener of Dr. Brian Keating, you get a special 20% off discount. 👉 Head over to The Economist's website at www.economist.com/Keating to get started. What really happened during the controversy over the discovery of Haumea? Why was Pluto actually demoted? And is there a hidden Planet Nine lurking in the outer solar system? I’m joined today by none other than the Pluto Killer himself, Mike Brown. 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. In this gripping episode of Into the Impossible, Mike opens up about the ethical challenges he faced in his career, including the Haumea data theft that caused a massive controversy, the truth behind the demotion of Pluto, and the ongoing search for Planet Nine. — Key Takeaways:  00:00 Intro  01:26 How Mike killed Pluto  03:50 Defining planets 08:48 Being an astronomer  13:31 Controversy over the discovery of Haumea 29:56 The search for Planet Nine  39:14 Balancing high and low-risk research  43:43 Did Neil deGrasse Tyson kill Pluto?  44:34 Planet Nine’s effects on the solar system’s evolution  46:47 The relevance of exoplanets  52:52 Outro — 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  — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamavat Theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in? Must be 21 to enter. Welcome to a deadly episode of The Into the Impossible podcast featuring the Pluto killer himself, Professor Mike Brown. This is the astronomer who forever changed our solar system's map, tearing down childhood certainties, and rebuilding our cosmic understanding from scratch. From teaching geology without ever taking a geology course to hunting a mysterious ninth planet lurking in the outer dark regions of our solar system, Mike's career reads like a science. This scientific thriller.

Today we're asking some uncomfortable questions for this murder suspect. Was it really necessary to kill Pluto? Is there still a massive hidden planet some 5,000 times bigger than Pluto, haunting the outer solar system? And what happens when scientific discovery collides with public sentiment? Mike spent decades searching for Planet 9 after demoting Pluto, and the irony isn't lost on him. His detective work with the Subaru telescope has narrowed down the search to the constellation Taurus, potentially uncovering the fifth largest planet in our solar system.

Buckle up for astronomical controversy, scientific detective work, and the raw human journey behind reshaping our understanding of the cosmos. These are some of the deepest mysteries in the cosmos, and this is the Into the Impossible podcast. Mike Brown, thank you for making the trip all the way down from Pasadena. Great to be here. It's so nice to have you here. you're giving a talk today about entitled Planet 9 from outer space. It is obviously reminiscent of a famous movie that probably 99% of my audience is too young to know.

But the abstract, which is fascinating, astronomers have been predicting and searching for planets beyond Neptune for almost 180 years. That's how it begins. It's time to give up. Time to give up to search 180 years a long time to come up with nothing, right? And everybody who's been searching and proposing the existence of planets, they're always wrong. They are usually wrong for a sort of important. embarrassing. And you are known or you were known on the platform formerly known as X, now known as

Twitter. No, other way around. Was Twitter now as X? Pluto killer, but you're not on there. If you go there, you won't find Mike. You'll find him, but he's not active. But names, names are really important to you. Pluto. Mike, wouldn't have been simpler just to keep Pluto and then you wouldn't have to waste the last 20 years searching for this other planet. And we could have had nine planets. We already had it when you started. I never actually anticipated that the research that I did would lead to Pluto being demoted. I knew as soon as that the Kuiper belt was found, these objects beyond Neptune started being discovered. It was pretty obvious that that's what Pluto was, that Pluto deserved to be classified with those instead of with the planets. But I never thought that the astronomers

would have the guts to do it or that the public would go along. I never thought this was what I was doing. And yet, it was the right thing to do. Like, we now describe the solar system correctly, instead of this weird way where we had planets and this funny little thing called it a planet, even though it was part of this thing's here. So now we at least have it straight. Yes. Pretty happy with that. We have a fun game.

We're Jewish in our household. And there's always a temptation to find things that could be kosher but are not. For example, pigs, they have cloven hooves. This is very important for astronomical purposes with people. Pigs have cloven hubs, but they do not chew their cut. So one of my kids asked, well, what if you trained a pig to chew his cud? they need to have both of these so-called kosher symbols. Other ones are fins and scales for fish and other things.

And crustaceans, you can't get the shrimp on the Barbie anyway. What types of ways could a clever astronomer, a malicious astronomer perhaps, evade the current definition that was used to basically kill Pluto? What could we do, say, reshape the orbit? Let's talk first of all. What are the definitions of the planets? I know you're probably, you're not sick of this at all. But tell us the three characteristics. And then how could a malicious, malevolent, Constantine Batesgin, I figure, how could they evade these things for objects that already exists?

First, let's talk about the definition of planets. 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 speed. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive was 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. And the first thing I'm going to tell you is that the definition is dumb. There's a reason for that. We don't do definitions of classes of objects in astronomy very much. Like, what's a definition of a star? Star. You know what a star is, right?

And so there's some boundaries that, like, what's a star versus a brown dwarf? versus a something else. And that's okay. But we know, we understand the concept. Galaxies. Yeah, there are galaxies. There are dwarf galaxies. There are mega galaxies. But, and we understand. We don't have to have a three-part lawyerly definition that says, oh, are you a galaxy? You have this many stars. Oh, no, there's one fewer. You're not of the galaxy. Sorry, bud. You know, that's, we don't, we don't do that. So why, why did we have to do that in the solar system? And the reason, the only reason we had to do that in the solar system. We didn't have to. But the only reason it happened in the solar system is because it really was of public interest whether Pluto was a planet or not. The only reason there's a

definition is to answer the question about Pluto. And actually, at the time, it was to answer the question about Pluto and about ERIS, the object that we found that was more massive than Pluto. What is it to be? And so, you know, everybody wanted to know, is this a planet? Is this not a planet? What are we going to do? What's a planet? And so astronomers at the time felt the need to write a definition. So the three-part definition that I do not like and hope that everybody forgets as soon as I say it is that for a planet in the solar system, you have to go around the sun. You have to be round. You have to be round. Check. I'm there. And you have to have cleared your orbit. That's the one that people like to argue about because it's not very, very obvious what

that means. And then, you know, once you have a lawyerly definition, you get lawyers involved who are like, well, you know, we have this asteroid that might be about to hit the Earth. Clearly the Earth is not cleared its orbit or so it's not a planet. When you just like send the lawyers home and you realize that it's the concepts that matter. What those three things are trying to tell you is that in our solar system, there are a small number of gravitationally dominant objects that are different from the other things. And the ones that we know, there are eight of them and they are big. They're in circular orbits.

They are not messed with by all of the myriad small things that go flitting around the solar system. There are tons of asteroids and comets and other stuff that just go in and out of the planets. They go flying everywhere. If they come close to a planet, they go ejected in some other direction. The planets don't care. They're the big bullies of the solar system. That's really all that definition is trying to say is that there are dominant objects that have cleared the orbits, even if you don't have to define what clearly it's me.

And this is for you. This is your gift. This is delivered by gravity. This is an honest to goodness fragment of a minor body. Yep, hold it up. Came from. Is this, is from the Cello meteorite in Argentina?

Campo to Ciello. Very good. You didn't even have to taste it. Good. Normally I taste. I give it to Joe Rogan. He, like, smoked it or something. That one is highly radioactive.

Campo to Cic. The field of the heavens. Now, you cannot get these anymore by exporting from Argentina. they've forbidden it. It's actually a crime. But you can get them if you are like Mike or me and you have a dot EDU email address. I give them away to my lovely audience on briancaiding.com slash edu. If you don't have an edu email address, try your luck at briankeating.com slash list. And that joins you up. You'll get information about the meteorites, even if you don't win. But the reason I bring these up is because these objects really are unsung heroes, I think,

of the solar system in some ways. And the planets, the planets that make the most sense and And the planets that seem to appeal most to you are these big giant gas giants, you know, the ones that were explored by none other than Galileo is my hero. We did the first ever audiobook of Galileo, the dialogue with Fabiola Gianati and many other luminaries to Jim Gates, Frank Wilczek. Galileo was no stranger to hunting for planets. I mean, he actually accidentally discovered Neptune, right? He actually saw it. Yes, right. He discovered is not quite the right word.

Right, right. He could have discovered it if he used the tools in your book. And what I love about your book is that you actually describe not only what it's like to be an astronomer on a day-to-day basis, but what it feels like. And you start off as a student, as a kid, actually, in Alabama growing up, right? And then growing up what fascinated you. But you talk about the tools, the technology, and so forth. This is a plate taken by the late great Margaret Burbage. I'm wondering if you can spot the planet.

I think I've just, no, there's no planet in that. It's a galaxy. She was teaching Vera Rubin how to do rotation curves back here in the 60s. Talk about what drew you, what kept you? in astronomy, through those long years, using the Schmidt telescope, using, using the tools that would later become your stock and trade, it was much harder back then, right? Today's kids like Petitians and stuff, they got it easy, right? You got it easy, you know, the Vera Rubin Observatory is going to do it all for you.

You don't have to do any of this stuff. But it's still, even though the technology has made it easier, the ideas that are the exciting part, you're exploring. This is a part of the solar system where no one has ever been before, nobody's ever seen before and you are trying to figure out how to be the first person do it. And when we first started with these photographic plates, a little bigger than this, 14 inch square photographic plates, you know, you would get one of these photographic plates and you can stick your eye up to them and it's, the universe is just an amazing place. These days again, you just call up

whatever your favorite website is and you can see all these pictures. We went back and found some of our old objects on old photographic plates and you circle it with your felt tip pen there and you lit there and you think, you know, these are the first photons from this object that we think ever got collected on the earth and you're the first person to see it. I like, there's, there is nothing more exciting than that, like sitting at your, you're sitting at the telescope. You're not, I'm sorry, you're sitting at the computer. You're not seeing the telescope. You're not seeing the photon, but you're sitting at the computer looking at these images coming in. You see this thing moving across the sky that no one's ever seen before. How can it be better than that? It's so

Bistro. I mean, I talk about that in my first book. I talk about how, you know, you can't feel what it was like to discover the Higgs boson or to discover, you know, to do a myriad of things in biology and anything else. But you can feel exactly what Galileo felt with a tiny telescope looking up at the moon on a clear night or Jupiter. You can see the same stars from Pasadena as he saw mostly. You can see the same four Galilean satellites. He named him after his funding agency. He was a pretty smart guy. But he got him into a lot of trouble and a lot of his work is dominated by what I would call and what Mario Biagioly, who's a historian of Galileo and Renaissance science and history of science, he calls kind of the patronage kind of almost like a griff that Galileo didn't release tools, even his friend Kepler, who's a contemporary of his, how to build the telescope, how to use the telescope, what he saw through it. He released kind of the instruction manual, the Sidurius and Nunchius. And I think it was smart. Mario makes the case that he was kind of being a little too clever and now get into trouble. But you had to run it with some Spaniards.

I want you to go over this subject. I know you, it's an amazing story. And I just want you to maybe, if you can, talk about how, as you described in the book, what Galileo would do to avoid the kind of prying eyes and this early espionage that took place in astronomy and how it still goes on to this very day. So let's let's talk about the Spaniards and the discoveries of the 2005, 2006 time period. It's a crazy story that if you told me the story or tried to, you know, I saw it on TV or something, I don't think I would leave it. We were deep in our survey of the outer solar system. Every night the telescope up at Palmar Observatory would open up, would scan a region of the sky. We would take three pictures over about three hours, look for something that was moving.

That morning, I would have the data transmitted down to me, and we would look for things. And we would look for things. Mostly the computer would pick out the first round, and then I would vet the next round of things, and then occasionally find found real ones there. And there was this one period that was just an amazing period in my life where we found,

over the course of about three or four months, we found three of the four largest objects known in the outer solar system. So it was a couple days after Christmas it was this object now known as how maya. We called it Santa. We always have code names as that was Santa because it was found enough for Christmas.

A couple days after New Year's, there was ERIS, which is the one that's more massive than Pluto, which codename Xeno, Warrior Princess, and says, of course that was the code name. And then just a couple months later was why I found right after Easter was Easter Bunny. Which is now Maki-Maki. And we had been finding ever-increasingly large objects, and we were good. Our rule was we, from discovery to the first scientific publication, we had our rule that had to be six months. We could not be any slower than that. We just, because we thought it was important to get that information out there.

But we also thought it was important to learn something, learn something about the object so that our first announcement was not just, gee whiz, we found something. But, hey, here's an object. Let us tell you about it. Here's a story. And these always got pretty big press coverage. So we wanted to be able to, you know, tell a story. What's it to, in part to avoid, you know, what your former colleague, Richard Feynman said, you know, the problem of being the biggest fool yourself and avoiding. confirmation bias? Was that part of it? Not in that sense, because at no point was there

any worry that the object didn't exist. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Once you see one of these objects in the Outer Solar System three times and then you go observe it two more times, like it's there. There's no question of making sure you're Right. At that point, we know it's there. But we knew we had one chance to get attention from the public for the outer solar system. And we wanted to tell a good story that people resonated with. You know, every, just just the chance that they would wake up in the morning, open up their newspaper and learn something cool about the outer solar system and be excited about it. You know, as opposed to opening up their newspaper and somebody says, yeah, we found something at 52AU. Can you convert that to millions of miles, please? So, you know, we would tell the story about how. it got there, why we named it, and the names were important for those reasons, too.

So this is the long version of story. So we were doing this, and we were being very fast. But we did have people mad at us for taking six months to announce things. There is a subculture. Yeah, there's a subculture in the solar system, and for good reasons, where announcements get made immediately. You discover something you announce immediately because it's a comet that might be disappearing, or it's a near-earth asteroid that might destroy the Earth tomorrow. ears. Yeah. Like, yeah. So, so you need to announce those quickly. Make sense. These objects did not matter. They were not going anywhere, but we were still trying to be in a hurry. But there were people who were still mad. And so we got a lot of pushback that we ignored mostly from, from,

from those astronomers. In July of 2005, several things were going on. One, we had discovered three of these. This is tough. We had, where our six-month limit was coming up on the first one we found, and we have a paper almost done, and it was super interesting object. It was shaped like an egg, like a squashed egg, rotating once every four hours. It had a moon around it, so we knew how massive it was. It was about a third, the mass of Pluto. Just like, and it was covered in water ice.

If you looked at the spectrum of it, you could see the reflected light was precisely that of the water ice that you would get out of your freezer. And yet it had the mass of something that was a rock. So it was clearly like, like a thin layer of ice with a rock underneath, like the world's worst Eminem, I think is what it was. So I was finishing this paper to announce this.

And the other thing going on at the time was that my wife was eight and a half months pregnant. I took a day off to finish writing this paper. And she went into labor. Of course, that day, probably that day. As I really think I would have finished the paper the next day. I think it's really true because it was like just anyway, shooting as labor. I sort of dropped that project and started this new project. Yes, exactly.

For a couple of weeks. Smart, man. And in the meantime, one of my graduate students, one of my postdocs was going to a conference and he was going to talk about this object. And he had written an abstract. He used the name. We had a real code name was Santa, but we had like a computer generated name based on it when it was discovered. So it was like K-05-12s. It was something about the day anyway.

I don't remember what it was. But you put that in the abstract title. I'm like, why would you use it? It's an arbitrary thing. Why would you use that? Who knows? I woke up one morning when my daughter was 20 days old to a email from Brian Marsden,

who was the director of the minor international astronomical union, Minor Planet Center, which is where you send all your... That's right. One of my proudest accomplishments is getting this asteroid named after my mentor Jim Simons. And you read, if you will, for the camera, Mike, who is the discover of asteroid that is now...

The discover of the Ves of an occide Tombaugh. Nice one. Now, the connection is, of course, the discovery of Pluto. Right. Which is not a planet. The floner planet. That's right. So we got this name for him, and we have one for Marilyn, his wife. He was very proud of it, except he asked me immediately when I told him about it,

being the hedge fund tycoon that he was, and especially with futures, he said, do I have mineral mining rights on the asteroid. And I said, if you can get there, if you can get there, the answer is yes. Absolutely. So amid these two big bang moments, you know, that you're having. So, so I get this email from Brian Larson, he's like, as a professor and a podcaster and a scientist exploring the boundaries of knowledge in the lab, I crave independent sources of knowledge and wisdom wherever I can find them. One of my go-to sources is the economist. I've been reading it literally for decades. The economist consistently delivers independent journalism for

independent thinkers like you and me. But the best part for me is that their science coverage is nothing short of extraordinary. Just this past week, I was captivated by their deep analysis of the recent claims of quantum computing breakthroughs that could revolutionize how we process information, exactly the kind of forward-thinking coverage that I discuss on the podcast and that I crave to expand my own intellectual horizons. The economist's rigorous approach cuts through the noise and BS in a way that you can truly trust. And what sets the economist apart as their simply science weekly newslet, It's a subscriber-only exclusive benefit. Each weekly edition delivers beautifully written explorations of nature, technology, the cosmos,

the human body, and all this comes alongside stunning scientific photography, selected and curated by their editors. I don't just do science. I love to explore complex ideas. The Economist analysis is a perfect compliment. It provides the insight and clarity needed to navigate challenging intellectual terrain with confidence. And to get everything the Economist offers, the Economist is offering a special 20%

discount just for viewers of the end of the Impossible podcast. To claim the special 20% discount, visit Economist.com slash Keating. Your pursuit of knowledge shouldn't end when this podcast ends. The economist insurers that doesn't have to. I had been talking to him, and he knew that we had some things, and we were talking about how best to announce them, because it was coming up soon. And he's like, I just got a report of this object. Is this one of yours? And I was like, that can't be something. Who's, no one else is doing a big survey like this. And I look at it. It's a list of positions in the sky where it was detected. And I look and I'm like, oh, yeah, that's, that is Santa. That's our object now known as Howeia. And, you know, my heart just sinks. And I feel terrible that somebody has found the scooped you. They scooped us. And he was like, well, what, what do you want to do about it? I'm like, well, I mean, they discovered it. This is the way science works. You can, if you're holding onto something and somebody else announces it before you do, they're the discover.

You're a better man. I mean, I would get my lawyers in but it's just the, I mean, it's just the way it works. And I'm like, I felt, I felt bad.

But I also felt like, oh, no, these guys are going to announce it and they don't know anything because they had just put positions, they had just put positions like from the couple days before

and then gone back and found it in old data. You knew the spectrum and the water ice and we knew about that moon. We knew about the mass. We knew it. So they're going to say it's bigger

than Pluto, which is not. It's because it's highly reflective. So they're going to think it's bigger. than Pluto. So I wrote to them that morning. I said, congratulations. I actually have this email. I read this email back to myself. I'm like, oh, my God, I am, sometimes I could actually be like a gentleman.

Super nice. Wow. If anyone ever just declares that I'm always a jerk. I'm like, nope, only 99% of the time. Look at this email. Is that proof? It says, congratulations on this discovery. You know, amazing. I want to let you know so that, you know, when you make the announcement. I want to let you know, we have a spectrum of it because we found it back here. We have a spectrum of it. It's got water ice. It's got a rotation period of this. And its mass is this. So it's only about a third, the mass of Pluto, super interesting object. I also said in this email, let me know when you come up with a name because we'll want to name the moon, which we discover, so we get to name the moon. We'll want to name the moon, something that follows in whatever theme you come up with. I do have to say, because I have a lot of young people that

listen to us podcast, a lot of young scientists in training graduate students, postdocs, in addition to 21 Nobel Prize winners. But the scientific ethics is not taught. We just don't teach it. I don't know. I don't remember being taught at Caltech when I was there as a postdoc. But the point being, there comes a time in every graduate student's life when they'll have some crisis, some crisis of confidence. Are they doing the right thing? Should they do something else? They'll have some issue that will come up. And it's not always as big as this. But going through this without any training, the integrity to do that is very rare. You're joking. You're joking about yourself, but it is rare. So can we teach that to our students? Is it important to have

I mean, the medical school teaches ethics, the business school, the law school teaches ethics. Why don't scientists teach ethics? It's a really good question. I mean, it comes up more often than you would guess as a scientist and even as a graduate student, as a young scientist. I am often having these conversations with my students about, you know, let's step back for a minute and think, is this really the right to doing and should we do this? But it's not, there's no There's no guidebook. There's no handbook. Just like being a parent, right?

So getting back to the story, the reason that this story takes in a really devilish twist is because of what happens next, right? Yeah. I think I'd get another email from Brian Morrison. This is now Friday morning. I'm operating on two hours of sleep in the past 20 days. Baby rest.

Yeah, I get another email from Brian Morrison. He says, what about these other two? Are they yours also? And I'm thinking, oh, my God. What's going on? It's a ridiculous story. And these three objects, we had been tracking with an automated telescope in Chile, just to learn about them.

And that automated telescope, the data were not publicly posted, but the logs were posted that had the names and the locations. And one of the names was K-05-20, whatever, that name that my postdoc had publicly posted. And somebody had Googled that name, found the website that had. that had the logs and then realize... Saveable. Realized the positions where we've been looking. And once you don't have to know the object,

if the position that we point to is our precise... To the arc second. Every single night for three months, you know the orbit of the object as well as we do because that's how well we know the orbit of the object. So that's... So Brian realized that somebody had submitted all of these as discoveries that day.

And I was like, he's like, what do you want me to do? I'm like, um, hold on. Let's hold on. So this is not like I have independently discovered it. This is like I discovered your website that had it on it. Right. So I'm like, hold on.

Let me figure out what to do. And we decided on Friday morning, I decided to go to my office for the first time in two and a half weeks. And I went to my office and I was talking about it. Like, we need to do a press conference today and analyze these objects. On a Friday. On a Friday afternoon when there was some crisis at the international space station and some presidential, some, all these things.

Like, it's, raining and pouring. It's when you announce that, you know, you, that you stopped being your wife or something. I don't know. So,

so I called people at JPL. Like, we need to do this right now. And they're like, well, we can't, we can't, we can't wait for the sun to go down. These positions are not all there. So if somebody actually went to the sky and got an image of it and said,

I found it, that it just gets a little complicated as to what this means. So, like, we have to do it before the sun goes down. I mean, the sun was already down in that places. But so we had to do right then. So we did. We did it.

We put together a press conference on a Friday afternoon on almost no sleep. My niece was staying with us at the time. And I called her up. I'm like, Lauren, bring me a blue shirt and a toothbrush and a brush. Let that be a lesson out there. Yeah, I always be prepared. Now I have it. Now I have is absolutely true that I do.

And we announced it right then. And it was exciting, you know, like on Good Morning America on Monday morning. And mostly, as far as I found now, I've learned because Diane Sawyer's middle name is Lila, which is the same is my daughter's name. And so my daughter was the first time my mother always ever saw my daughter was on Good Morning America. So it was all very exciting and everything was good. And like a couple weeks later, I got an email from, kind of forget his name now. Spanish. No, I got an email from at Ohio State who ran the telescope, the Smart's Telescope in Kashil.

And he said, I have found something weird. I'm like, okay, what? He said, well, the day or two before this announcement came out, I was looking at the logs for this telescope, and somebody sort of went through and not hacked, but went and found the URL and changed the last word and like went through and basically viewed every, downloaded and viewed every log that you had pointed at.

And he said, I thought that was weird. It was before the announcement happened. I was like, oh, that's weird. I don't understand what's going on. And he's like, so then I went and checked out where it was. And it was in Spain. I'm like, oh, man. And then he said, and here are the IP addresses.

And I had been corresponding with these guys. And we could trace it. It was first the IP address of this grad student who had been working with the guy who announcement. And then a little bit later it was the IP address of the guy of the advisor of the advisor and you know you can kind of picture what probably happen i mean what probably happened is that the grad student saw this abstract and like weird i wonder what that is googled the name and it comes up he does actually come up in that one thing and it came up as a log and then realize

that he could find all these things and then told the advisor and then again you know here's where maybe a little bit of ethical training would have been a good thing to do rather than announce that they had discovered it. I think it's also true that they were doing a search in the sky for these sorts of things, but they never, they never had found anything. And I think they might, it's, it's not impossible that they actually had data that showed it. They just didn't know how to process. Oh, come on, Mike. So I couldn't help when I was listening to the book on audio, thinking of that famous line from that great scientific and philosophical giant Scooby-Doo. And says, we would have gotten away with it if we weren't so greedy, right? They would have gotten away if there's just one object.

But to claim all three? So they didn't claim the other two. Oh, who did? Same technique. So they claimed the first one and said they had discovered it. And then an amateur astronomer in Germany who was mad at us already because of the whole hiding object and works with them. I'm sure they told the guy there and he went and figured out that you could find these other

and he's the one who submitted those two. They claimed that they had discovered it in good faith and that just happened to be that the day before they were going to announce it that they found the website and accessed it all and confirmed that it was there. Right. And like, okay, am I likely true? What would have been the right response? The right response would have been to have said, oh, wow, we just found this too.

And you probably contact the person and say, hey, what you did. We see that your K-25 blah, blah, blah, is the same object here. We were going to announce it. I mean, we're going to announce, who knows, at some point, but you certainly don't pretend like you never knew that this was all, that you had accessed all these data on the web. And so, I mean, obviously, they just, they just, they know. never actually found right i just they just did this it's interesting part of the the end of this story got to be a big stink their their institution disavowed them they disappeared off the web page

for about a year another back they're still they're still working active in the field have never really gotten any pushback for for having done it or anything else and so now these three objects you already give the names they're known as minor bodies or dwarf planets which is also a pretty And that a great name. I'm sure a lot of people are unhappy with that for Pilovicories. Plants are the ones that fit two of the criteria. They go around the sun and they're around. We actually had a word for that before that we used.

These rest, called them spheres. You know, spheres. I had one here. It's their minor body. We actually used the word planetoid for a long time. Which is good. It's sort of, you know, it's like asteroid. It's a planet.

Meteoroyage, right. I think that's a much better thing. But these are all official. official dwarf planets. And then there's another whole issue on official versus unofficial door plan. Make every get-together chill. This Memorial Day, get up to an extra $1,000 off select top brand appliances like LG. Plus, get free delivery at the Home Depot. Tackle pool towels and camp laundry with a large capacity washer.

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So if you take Pluto and you add the entire asteroid belt, that's the massive ERIS. Wow. Yeah. So there's Plyto, there's ERIS, there's Maki, which is crazy object. And how may I, which is the most crazy object out there. I love these things. It's like your children.

They're all my favorite. That's right. That's what I'm going to say. I say, well, you know, I'll ask, Mom. What's the four of us brothers? And which is your faith? She's like, oh, that's like asking me to choose.

Do I like my left hand better than my right? And I say, Mom, you're a lefty. You're left handed, okay? We know the truth. She just doesn't want to say it. So Planet Nine has gone. Immediately there's Pluto's gone. So we have eight planets.

Now you're on the hunt on the hunt for Planet Nine. Now you're working. Not back down. I'm saying right now. Now we are. Let's fast forward because I do want to cover the topics of the talk and get into some hard-hitting hardball questions. From two professors, one is it goes by the name of Constantine. And I'll just get into that.

When he sat in the hot seat that you are now in, you feel the heat, don't you much? I asked him, the three-body problem is insoluble. How are you doing your theoretical wizardry? We can't even solve the three-body problem. How many objects are in the Kuiper Belt or, you know, Kuiper-Belt-like objects? How can he possibly do what he does?

So first I want you to kind of steal man what he does, the kind of theoretical predictions, is this all just computer mumbo-jumbo, you put in garbage, you get out of garbage, or is there really something behind what he does that we would classify as true hearts, Yeah, so I'm going to start to when we first started looking for planet. Thinking about planet, what we really were thinking about is why are some of these objects at the very edge of the solar system?

Why are they all aligned? They all have orbits that go swing off in one direction. It's an interesting thing. It's the sort of thing that it's the sort of thing that forever, anytime anybody sees anything slightly weird in the outer solar system, they jump up and down and say, it must be a planet. And we did not want to be the 34th and 35th astronomers jumping up and down and saying that there was a planet. That's 180 years. Right. Like everybody else.

So, and we knew there weren't any other planets out there because that's just kind of a dumb idea. There was another planet. We all knew there are no other planets. So we started trying to do some calculations to understand what else could do that. And those calculations are really, you sit down and you write down some, you do the physics, you do, you do approximations because you can't solve. perfectly for everything, but you can solve for the general gravitational forces, how things interact, and you can write down the equations, and you can see what happens. And we did that. And we usually when I say write down equations and I say we, it's Constantine while I watch. And nothing works.

There's no, there's just no way to get these alignments going on in any way that we could come up with. And we spent probably a year trying to come up with these alignments. And then I think we both just like ashamed of ourselves. It said, I mean, it could be a planet. I mean, it's like that she fishishly. And so we wrote down those equations and they're not that hard to write down for the general behavior of how it would make kind of a thing like this. And it works really well. And then once you do that, the general physics equations involve some approximations that you have to check on. And so that's where the computer modeling comes in. And then you just do big massive dynamical simulations

where you put in all the planets and you put in a planet and you let them interact and you see what happens over four and a half billion years and it mostly follows those simple approximations that you made in your calculations

but the details are different and you check to see if the details work out and that's how then you carry forward is mostly with the computer simulations to try to understand okay if we change the planet from being this massive

to a little less massive or a little further away a little closer or in a more eccentric or Clyde, like how do those affect exactly what goes on in this part of the solar system? That's how we're really learning what it is we're looking at. Constantine was sitting there. So he has, you know, what does it say? You know, one good turn deserves another or turnabout as fair play or foul play.

I forget all these platitudes. But he asked me to ask you, bro, literally, this is constant. I'm channeling him like, bro. I will see in the Russian accent. No, I would say doing my best imitation. He says, bro, what about the systematic? though. T-H-O, he spells it. So my answer to him would be like, look, dog. The first and still the biggest public signature that there's a planet out there is these, these objects whose orbits

all line in some direction. And interestingly enough, you know, it's interesting. When we first proposed this planet, we assumed that within days some other astronomer somewhere would have an alternative explanation. Astronomers are great at explaining things. You know, You show them a plot and you say, can you explain this? They're like, yes, this is exactly what I predict because this, this, and that's, you're like, oh, no, I'm sorry, that's upside down. I show you the plot this way. This is what I meant to show you.

And I'm like, that's even better. It means this, this, this, this and this. So, I mean, explaining things is easy, easier. And so we assume there would be explanations. And there are none. There are, I mean, it has like some half-baked physics explanations. But of the physics, of explaining why you would have this gone on. But technically in the cameras and the telescope, so look at the

played again. Were there things back, you know, and the good old days, you know, before Instagram? I mean, were there tools, techniques that don't cross over, that don't translate from your days, you know, licking the photographic films and the meteorites or whatever your geologists do, and developing things in the dark when you were graded student up

at Berkeley? What, you know, kind of tools, techniques don't transfer through, what things are common between these enormous cameras on giant mountaintops? Or are they just so radically different? It's almost like two different sciences. I feel like it's all the same. There's the technology is different. the science is the same? Like, okay, the technology of developing a photographic plate and scanning

it and getting into your computer is different than getting a digital image in and doing that. But it's all the same. It's all the same stuff. And so that gets you back to the sort of what the systematics that he was talking about. It's all the systematics of do you really, are you really seeing what you think you see? And, you know, as an astronomy, we call it observational bias. If you were to look west one day a week and you saw the sunset. You couldn't really conclude that the sun sets in the west because it could be that it only sets in the west one day every week and you don't actually know what happens the other six days and you only look that way. If instead you looked everywhere over the course of the week and you only saw it in the west, then you know that you actually

have something going on. And the suggestion, the only other suggestion that really has been put forward about Planet Nine is that we essentially did that, that we only looked in one direction and we see these objects pointing it off in this direction and we we didn't look any other directions. And interestingly enough, we did look in the other directions too, shockingly. We're not actually as dumb as you might think. And so, I mean, but it is, it's a reasonable question to ask and you have to calculate the statistics because in astronomy you deal with clouds and this and that. So you have to make sure that you have, you understand the statistics of where you've looked compared to what you've seen. And the statistics are good, but it's still something

that people like to argue about. Because it's the only other, man, it's really the only other explanation. And it's just wrong. We have the statistics now very solidly in our favor that these things are aligned like this. And unless somebody's going to come up with another explanation for both this alignment and the five or six other things that we have also seen that really matter. Unless somebody comes out with those explanations, they're like, there is no better explanation than a giant planet that we still have in the outer part of the space.

See, now, there is no alternative. of this time is different. So here's what I'd say. Yeah. It sounds weird to say, look, the previous 34 astronomers were all wrong and you shouldn't listen to them, but you should listen to us. Those goofballs. Because we're right.

In our defense, the previous 34 astronomers were all wrong and we're right. So you solicitors. That's right. So you should. We should listen to us for a reason. You are right, and we're going to find it. Another question comes from my friend and two-time guest on the podcast, Professor Daniel Green, who's professor here, theoretical physicist. I'm still on X, okay?

I'm on Blue Sky, too. I've only been called a Nazi once since going a Blue Sky. But you can ask questions. You can interact with Mike over there. A Pluto killer over there, too. Soterkiller.com, because you can make your dot-com address. Okay, cool. So you got a little merch.

Get some merch over there, some swag. If you go to that, that would say. No. So you can ask questions of me at both locations now. I don't discriminate. But one of the best places is on YouTube where I'll be taking questions. But Daniel, my friend, my professor, colleague here at UCSD, in your book, how I killed Pluto and why it had it coming, he explained.

It is a love story. It is. I mean, seriously, you talk about your love for. But I wanted to have that a colon 11th and my publisher would not let him do it. Well, if Mark Manson can write, everything is after, you know, a book about hope. You explain how you started your search for new planets in part because the 10-year expectations at Caltech are so high, but then he didn't find anything until after getting tenure. I would love to know how he balanced high and low risk research to make that possible.

That's a really good question. I wouldn't say that I started it because tenure expectations are high. I mean, maybe. You were expected to do exciting big science, but it's also I started it because, like, I could go explore the outer part of the solar system. And it's absolutely true. In the time before tenure, I spent a lot of time on these old photographic plates at Palomar, years taking these plates, developing,

I did not do the developing, there were people who actually knew how to do this, and scanning them and looking for things that are moving. And in those years leading up to tenure, I found precisely nothing. And my tenure committee, they're like, it's okay. It's all right. I find nothing.

But the important thing is to turn that into a scientific result. And so what you need to do is take that, do a careful calibration, and, you know, explain what your limits are to what there could be out there. And it's the correct thing to do. And I didn't do it. I didn't do it because at the same time that I was failing to find anything with the photographic plates, we had gotten the first primitive digital cameras, CCTV cameras,

and started putting them on this telescope at Palomar. And I realized I could either spend the next year or two calibrating this survey where I didn't find anything, or I could do a hundred times better survey and find this. And so I'm just going to ignore my tenure committee's advice. So I've wanted out the wonderful highly, you know, integrity, mark of high integrity that Mike exhibited in this interaction with the Spaniard and the Germans. But this is an example of what I would call survivorship buys. I mean, you were successful. You are brilliant and not everyone's a Mike Brown. So don't do that. Don't take this advice. It's not financial advice. It's not tenure advice. So does it look.

Like, this was me if there had not been anything there. Right. To Cotto Bar, you didn't build that. I knew it was going to be, yeah. I knew it was going to be that. I mean, I did know. It was going to, like, I knew that at that next level, we were going to find. Yes.

And I didn't know what we were going to find. Okay. Next question comes from someone by the name of DeepSafe, prevent, protect, preserve. I was actually going to call on my kids that. He or she, I can't, I can't think of it. I thought, NDT, Neil degrass Tyson killed Pluto. How do you react to him claiming it as he does everywhere? He and I have a schick.

He will say it was my fault. He will say, what is, I have an harder weapon. We haven't, we haven't actually had to, I haven't had to talk about this a long time with him. So now I've forgotten exactly how we do this. But basically, he sort of says like he was, he was the sheriff and put out the search warrant. And I was the posse that brought him out of something. But when he's, when he's feeling a little bit of heat, he will definitely blame me for it. And when it's feeling a little bit.

But he's, I mean, he's, he is very clear with what happened. And he was important part of having that conversation start. And I'm not sure it would have happened the way it did had he not had started having that conversation. Yeah. And there's no one better to kind of bring it to the masses. Yep. Yeah, he's a multi-time guest on the show. I'm going back on his show in a couple of weeks.

I'll bring him your regards in a meteorite. Question from YouTube from dystopian profit. That's actually pretty good. I want to be friends with protect, preserve, defend. Do you think plant X, planet X, has been around since the early solar system? And if so, what effects could have had on the solar system's evolution? Yeah. Great question.

So first off, we don't call it planet X. Planet X was actually a theory of... Vulcan, right? The Vulcan was from Leveria. Leveria. Yeah. We'll also discover Neptune, Arv. Yeah, discovered Neptune and then did the one bad thing.

Never name your planet before you discover it or you'll never discover it. So Vulcan, he called a Vulcan? It didn't exist. Didn't exist. There is no name. Fine. So, but by Planet X, Planet X was a theory of Percival Lull, who was looking for a planet, eventually Lowell Observatory found Pluto, but he thought there was a giant planet out there.

That was his actual theory. Doesn't just mean generic planet. This is planet nine. It's our theory. Yes. We get to name our theory planet nine. The first part of the answer to the question is we don't know the answer. We don't know if it's been there forever.

We don't know how it got there. But that doesn't mean we don't have theories for how it got there. The prevailing theory for how it got there is it formed in the Uranus Neptune region. It got scattered out early in the solar system. And it's been lurking, waiting to be found ever since that. Now, does that tie into this definitional thing again? because, you know, if it's round or if it's, you know, an object that's round now may not be around tomorrow. If an object or, you know, what if it was round if it's 10 times the mass of Jupiter, but it has a chunk cut out of it because of a hit contact with an asteroid.

I guess the more... When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsor jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75-sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. A relevant question is clearing out its orbit. I mean, what if it hasn't cleared out of its orbit, but in a million years, which is a blink of a car, as Neil deGress Tyson would say.

you know, it's the cosmic clock. It's, or Carl Sagan would say, actually, but Neil would ape him beautifully. Tell me, I mean, something that is a planet, could it not become a planet harkening back to the earlier, you know, the parochative question I led off with? You know, can the pig learn how to chew its cut? And I think the answer, it shows you why

lawyerly definitions are not the right way to do these things, right? It's just not the right way to do it. Yeah. It is true that in the way that we know this planet exists is because it's cleared most of its orbit, and we see the parts that have not yet been cleared, and they will be cleared in a billion years. So we see that process going on.

So it certainly fits that. But you have to know the whole orbit, and then once, I mean, the orbit is relatively accessible, I guess, but to know that it's cleared, do you have to scan the entire orbit? I mean, how does that we? Do we literally have to see that there's nothing there?

Yeah. I mean, because we can, we can see its effect and calculate that it's where it is now. And we don't, we don't care if it's cleared its orbit in the sense that, like, nobody's like, oh, damn, we can't remember if it's cleared its orbit.

Right. It might not be plant. like, oh yeah, it cleared it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now we're back. It's just, it actually has. Like, there's a, there's a simulation that I'll show in my talk today. Yes.

Where we start with this huge body of objects out there. And they're almost all gone by the end of four billion years because it's clear that it's sort of orbit cloud. This is just what's going on. So what else has it done? It's, it's been clearing its orbit out there. Oh, a really interesting thing into this slightly deep dive into the physics of it. If you take a planet and that's, that's a little bit less than the mass of Uranus or Neptune,

but you put it 10 or 20 times further way out there. it actually carries more angular momentum than the rest of the solar system. So it's the most angular item. And it's at a slight inclination to the solar system, which means that it is processing the solar system around, but it's not processing the sun. So it is changing the orbits, the orbital plane of the whole solar system and not the sun.

So that's maybe part of the reason why, according to us, the sun is tilted by about, I can't remember the number of six or seven degrees compared to us. Maybe it's the work tilted to the sun. To the sun, right. As a planet nine. Just like, usually I say it doesn't do anything, but it actually does. It's actually a cool little effect that we thought about it.

I want to talk about, you know, some of the work that you started off with, which is looking for volcanoes on I.O. and all sorts of moons. What's the status there? And actually, before I do that, if you'll indulge me for, you know, changing the subject, in question, if we knew for sure that true exoplanets had no life on them, that were alone, that were it, do you still think the search for these objects, including the types of objects like Planet 9, has scientific, moral, cultural relevance? Or, you know, is it really hinging on the fact that, okay, we know we're going to find life one of these days? What do you think? I think, I think,

I know it's not your feel, but no, but I think you're absolutely right that, uh, the, the idea of life drives a lot of what we think about, um, when we think about exoplanets. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm thinking back to a early stage when I was, we were discussing a potential telescope in space that would try to look at planetary systems and there was a debate on the team between like if you found one that looked potentially earthlike would you just devote the rest of the time that the telescope was in space to staring at that planet to learn to us for it

or would you keep on looking to learn the diversity of things like that? And I was like, no, I want to understand the architecture of planets systems because I love the understanding how planets got there how things get in the outer parts, the inner parts, everything else. And most of the other people were like, no, we would stare at that one Earth-like fire. So it's a strong current of what a lot of people are interested in. And I think it drives why the field of exoplanets is so large. And why, for example, going to Mars is one of the big things that we do in the solar system.

And what's next going to Europa? Would it be like maybe going to Enceladus or like might be? But if you think about it, even in our solar system, it's not the only things we do. We are sending missions to Venus to understand not life living down at a thousand degree. Although some Sarah Seeger past gas claims Fosby. But that's not too. Okay. We'll do the debate next time.

But it's not why we're sending missions. No. We're starting missions to learn about the planet. We understand how planets work, because that's interesting. We're sending missions to asteroids to understand, you know, sampling asteroids. tasting them. Hasting them to understand the chemistry. And it's the chemistry that does lead to life.

It's true, but not like we're going to find things that are out there. So if you took away that equation, I think it would, the field would get back to being smaller. But I think it would still be there. I think there are a lot of people who are interested in. I love understanding the diversity in the architecture of planetary systems. It'd be cool to find something where there was life, like how exciting. Yeah, of course. But it's not the main.

It's not the reason that I think it's cool. It's not the reason that I think even studying, I study Europa. I don't read. Study Europa because I think I'm going to find buds on it. Although if they're there. They're there, they'd be even better. Let me know. I'll be the second to know, right?

Or some Spaniard will be the second to. Talk about pickle. Pickle. A planetary ice chemistry laboratory. My hobby, my hobby lab is, yes, the planetary ice chemistry laboratory. Our logo is a pickle with planets inside a pickle jar with planets. You're a geologist, as a son that I understand. I'm actually an astronomer.

I'm not even a geologist. I now live in a geology department. Yeah. But I'm an astronomy. You agree with an astronomy. I think about astronomy. Kid. You were a way to go to sleep at night.

You know, this is, but I love geology. I love what, I mean, again, that's kind of my hobby, too. I love these hobby things. But as an astronomer, interested in chemistry of things in the solar system, the way, you know, you're looking at objects in the outer part of the solar system, and their conditions are different from anything that's on the Earth. And so they're often different from thing that's been done in the lab. And the way you make progress is you go do an observation,

you find something interesting. And you often, you'll go talk to somebody who has a lab, who studies these things in the lab. And you say to her, like, this is weird. I don't understand what this is is. But maybe it's because this is happening. This is happening at this temperature. And this kind of radiation, can you reproduce that in the lab? And does that work? And she'll say, you know, that's a great idea. And I can probably get an experiment up and running to do that in like five years. And that's like, I'm not patient enough for that kind of things. And so I asked my department chair, and to his credit and discredit both, he's like, okay, you can have a lab. Start making a lab.

Wow. Forgot how nice it was to be a cat. It's weird. And then I was like, we started getting it up and we were starting to make things going. And the only reason it got enough funding to get going through this first couple years is that I don't. asteroid. Jim Simons, the Simons Foundation, funded the first five years of this lab. And that's, it's, it's so much fun. I not only am not a chemist and didn't have a lab. I had never actually been in a lab. And didn't know what I was doing. I decided not to give you a lab tour later on my

labs. It's really, I mean, I literally did not know what I was doing. We had to learn it all. And we learn, we do differently, doing things differently than other labs, as we learned, you know, we just thought from scratch, how would you best do this and sort of solve problems in different ways, making measurements different ways, very specialist. It's so much fun. It is fun. It's fun to get to play and not worry about things like tenure or publications in age indices or, you know, this has been a great joy. Your book is phenomenal. It teaches you not only what it is like to be an astronomer, you know, data, but what it feels like, what the challenges are.

Raising a family, growing up, and it's obvious you're a mentor to many, many, many, because of your humanity and that you prioritize the things that you only get one kid, right? Yeah, I mean, some of us have more, but you only have one kid, right? You know, we only have one set of parents, right? But the way that you describe, what are the actual day-to-day challenges like, along with the hard science? I love the hard science, but I also like some of the memoir aspects of it, too. Mike, I have a tradition here to ask one question inspired by the namesake of this podcast or the name giver of this podcast, Arthur C. Clark. A little bit about Jupiter and its moons and, you know, some shenanigans going on out there. But he said many things.

He said, for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert, I could drop that on my department chair every so often. He also said, the only way of knowing the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. That's the name of this podcast. That's where we get it from. I want to ask you, what would you do? You have 20 seconds with a 20-year-old Mike Brown. You get to go back in time, go back to Berkeley, wherever you were at that time or just around 21, 22. You get 20 seconds.

What do you tell them to give them the courage to do as you've done to go into the impossible? I would tell him to explore and have fun and don't worry how it's going to work out. That's awesome. That's, I mean, that's the right answer. That's awesome. Mike, thank you so much. It's been a joy. So much fun.

Now that we wet your appetite for true scientific discovery, I want you to dive deeper, and you can do that by clicking here on this member's only video, or Mike dives deep into the search for Planet 9, and doesn't shine away from all the pitfalls and perilous wrong turns that it's taken along the way. Click here for that, and please do join as a member. Your membership helps me keep this channel growing.