Unexplainable - The hunt for a new Pluto

Episode Date: May 26, 2021

Something strange is going on at the outer reaches of the solar system. One astronomer thinks it might be a Neptune-sized ninth planet, and he’s on a quest to find it. That search is happening at an enormous telescope on the summit of Maunakea, a dormant Hawaiian volcano with a long astronomical and cultural history. But many Native Hawaiian scientists are asking: What’s lost in the pursuit of larger and larger telescopes? For more, go to http://vox.com/unexplainable It’s a great place to sign up for our newsletter, view show transcripts, and read more about the topics on our show. Also, email us! [e-mail] We read every email. Support Unexplainable by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. You might not know astronomer Mike Brown. but you probably know his work. They call me the Pluto killer because I killed Pluto, kind of. I really kind of feel like Pluto killed itself, but I was there and helped it along its way. Mike didn't start out trying to murder planets.

As a kid, he actually loved Pluto. How could you not love something like that? It was this fragile-looking little world that nobody really knew anything about. As luck would have it, right when his career got going in the 90s, tons of objects were being found out in the Kuiper Belt, this region where Pluto is out past Neptune. So I spent a number of years scanning the skies, searching and searching for big things out there. And really the straw that kind of broke Pluto's back was the discovery of ERIS. Eris is an icy world, a lot like Pluto, and it's pretty much the same size as Pluto.

So either ERIS had to become a planet or Pluto had to become a non-planet. But if Eris became a planet and Pluto stayed a planet, there were a bunch of other things that would have to become planets. As much as I would love to have been able to say, I found a planet, I found Aris, it's a planet. It really didn't make much sense. So the International Astronomical Union held a vote. Pluto got ignominiously dumped today. There are eight planets in the solar system, not nine, and not ten. Puzzles will be reprinted, planetariums repainted.

Now all the school books are going to have to change. So there was Mike, forever the Pluto killer, until he got a hot tip. My daughter came into me and said, she said, Daddy, Daddy, do you know what to do to stop everyone from hating you? And I was like, okay, first off, I disagree with the premise of your question. However, I would like to know the answer. So please tell me. And she said, you should go find a new planet. And then you can name it Pluto, and Pluto can be a planet again.

And I laughed and promised her I would go find a new planet, thinking there were no new planets to be found. But then, the dimmest flicker of hope. We started getting these hints that there really is something else out there and something else being a real giant planet that we think is still now lurking well beyond Neptune waiting to be found. Suddenly, Mike's got a chance, a chance at redemption. I don't feel like it's redemption,

As much as I feel like it is the logical progression of what needed to happen. Either way, Mike's got a chance to become a planet finder instead of a planet killer. I'm Noah, I'm Hassanfeld, and this week on Unexplanable, The Hunt for a New Planet 9. The hunt for a new planet 9 began in earnest with some mysterious data. In 2014, these two astronomers were going through astronomical survey data, and they found this weird clustering. of small bodies in the outer solar system. Science writer Shannon Sterone. And they wrote this paper and said,

you know, something really weird's going on here. Out in the Kuiper Belt, billions and billions of miles past Neptune, something was tugging these icy objects together, exerting a gravitational force. And they had no idea what it was. Mike, you know, keeps really close tabs on everything in the astronomy field and read the paper

and thought, ooh, something really weird's going on here. So he went to Constantine Bateek. who's a theoretical astrophysicist and said, do you want to do some crazy math with me and figure out what is going on here? Constantine was a graduate student of mine, actually 15 years ago, and he and I have a, we work extremely well together. They bicker constantly. It's not really that we bicker.

It's just that he's wrong and I have to convince him why he's wrong. But they agreed on one thing from the start. We desperately did not want to do. to have it be a planet. Saying that there's a new planet is dumb and wrong, and we know it's not true, so let's find something else. Finding a new planet is kind of like the holy grail of astronomy.

You know, it worked once when people saw that Uranus was being perturbed. It was not going around the sun quite the way it should be. Urbane Laverier used those data to say, oh, there must be a planet out there, and he predicted where it was. That's how Laverier found Neptune, but more often than not, these predictions end up being wrong. Literally only once in the history of the solar system has anybody been able to do that. And yet, since the time of Laverier, something like 35 or 36 other people have attempted to do the same thing. And every single time they've been wrong.

So Mike and Constantine tried to come up with any other solution to explain this weird gravitational clustering going on at the outer edge of the solar system. They spent a year writing a list of what could be forcing these objects to cluster in the Kuiper Belt. And, you know, was anything that ranged from, well, they just clustered on their own. Maybe it's a coincidence and we can explain it away. Maybe there was a black hole. Or a star passed by and kind of put them together or mess with their orbits. They crunched the numbers and their math ruled out every option.

We tried everything. And we then said, okay, okay, okay, well, we'll try a planet and see how well that works. And the planet, not surprisingly, the planet worked exceedingly well at explaining what we were looking at. It even explained other strange observations that had stumped astronomers for a long time. And so finally, in 2016, Mike and Constantine published a paper. They announced, you know, we've done our work, and there's nothing else we can possibly think of that aligns with the gravity and the math that we have, we think this is a planet. We think this is a giant planet in the outer solar system that we've not discovered yet.

Not a borderline planet, a huge one. A large planet, as big as Neptune. A new planet nine. But it's not enough to say that planet nine should exist. Mike and Constantine still have to find it, which is hard because planet nine is really far away. It's very, very far. It's pretty much for our brains, unfathomably far. Here's one measurement that could help with the fathoming.

It took over a decade for a Voyager probe to get past Pluto's orbit. Planet 9 could be over 10 times further, and it's hard to pinpoint something that far away. It's kind of like taking, you know, a little black grain of sand and throwing it on the beach. That would be a little hard to find that one in the sea of all the rest of them. And that's the problem with Planet 9. It's, sometimes I think about what they're trying to do, and I don't know how they could ever find it. So to have the best chance of ever finding this grain of sand and a sand stack, they needed one of the most powerful telescopes on Earth. And to do that, they needed to use the Subaru telescope, which is run by the Japanese government, and it's located at the top of Monakea in Hawaii on the Big Island of Hawaii.

Mount Achaea is a dormant volcano, and its peak is absurdly high. It is 14,000 feet up. It's above the clouds, significantly above the clouds. I mean, if you think about when you're on an airplane, 10,000 feet is when you get your Wi-Fi. This is 14,000 feet up. You already have your food service by the time you get to top of Mount Ekaia. Shannon actually traveled those 14,000 feet above those thick clouds all the way up to the Subaru telescope on the top of Mount Achaea to witness the hunt for planet nine firsthand. You know, we woke up at like 11 p.m. and ate fruit loops in the middle of the night and got in the car to drive up to the mountain in the dark. And it sounds a little cliche, but going to Mount

Okaa sort of feels like going to another planet. It was just bizarre. With every bit that we drove, it felt like I was transcending into some foreign place. There was less oxygen. It was darker. The only thing I can equate it to is if I imagined just diving deep into the ocean in the opposite direction. Like I shouldn't have been there because it wasn't meant for me, but it was spectacular. Every inch we drove up, that mountain, there were more stars. and being in complete darkness like that

makes you realize how much light there is from the galaxy, from the other stars. And so kind of moves between not being able to see your hand in front of your face, it's that pitch black to seeing the arc of the Milky Way and seeing more stars than I knew existed in the sky. We parked and the wind hit me so hard that it slapped my body.

onto the car. You're in the sky. It was completely overwhelming. It was just, how am I here? They get to the top, and Shannon follows Mike and Constantine into the enormous dome that is the Subaru telescope. They go up an elevator, past a little room with a fridge and coffee, and into the observation room, full of equipment and monitors. The computer screens that are sort of displayed around the control room look almost fake in that they're covered with pictures, of galaxies and gorgeous, big spiral, just ridiculously beautiful galaxies. And every 30 seconds, the telescope takes a picture. The camera shutter makes a noise as it opens and closes.

And then when the picture is successfully taken and the data is collected, it kookoos like a bird. So basically what they're doing is they're taking pictures of the sky in the direction where they believe Planet 9 is. Every 10 pictures or so, they analyze the data. All right, give me some numbers. 7515. It's like a creepy radio number station where Constantine sits and reads. 7517.48. You know, 4125, 2.3.

7518. And they do this all night long. Oh, wait a minute. crap, I have right. I thought I'd have done them all. 75. These numbers are basically measurements of how blurry the images are. If it's too windy or cloudy that night, the numbers get higher, and the images start to become unusable.

This is unusually bad. And even if we were staring right at Planet 9, taking pictures, we wouldn't see it. But when the images are clear, that's when the real work begins. Okay, so what we have here, this is a single field. This is what the telescope sees. Constantine pointed out a few different dots that look like. stars. Yeah, so what are we looking for? We are looking for objects that are very dim. Like, look at this one. They could be stars, they could be galaxies. Yeah, this is, this is probably a galaxy.

They're also faint enough that they could be planet nine. And we record where they are. And when we revisit them tomorrow, we revisit them the day after tomorrow, provided the weather is good, we will check to see if these dim objects have moved. They need to make sure they can tell the difference between a dim star and planet nine. A star way out there won't move much from one night to the next, but a planet will slowly inch across the sky. So Mike and Constantine track all these dim little dots to see if one of them is moving the way they'd expect planet nine to move.

And if it moves just enough, maybe that's planet nine. They do this over and over, every night. As much as they can at any time. telescope that they can. And it's not just new data coming in. It's going through decades of telescope astronomy surveys to find Planet 9 in that data. And, you know, there's these moments where Constantine and I kind of stare at this picture and kind of you can see in just a flash of a moment this existential, we're looking for the faintest

one of those. Like, what are we going to do? what are we doing here? How is this going to work? How in the hell are you going to find it? They still haven't found Planet Nine. I asked Mike if he ever felt like giving up. Yes, yes and no. Yes, because, I mean, come on. They're trying to find this one grain of sand on an entire beach. But Mike's still hunting through telescope data, crunching numbers, and sorting through dim dots of light.

I mean, this would really be the third new planet found in human history since the ancient times. And that's about as fun as it gets. I can't wait until the day somebody finds it. I hope it's us, but pretty much anybody finding it would be a pretty exciting day to see what's out there. Coming up after the break, Mount Achaia and the cost of finding what's out there. It's all about you. And when you fly with Virgin Atlantic in their upper class cabin, they take the VIUIA. treatment to the next level.

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Just be sure to leave room for dessert. Their mile high tea with all the little cakes and sandwiches is a showstopper. Go to Virgin Atlantic.com. to learn more. We're back on good morning Pluto, and a very good morning it is for our guest. Pluto is a planet. Wow.

How about that? I love it. Unexplainable, we're back. Before the break, the hunt for planet 9 took us to a telescope at the top of Mount Achaea, and then out to the icy reaches of our solar system. But let's come back to the telescope for a minute. Subaru is one of 13 telescopes that have been built on Mount Achaia. There's so many up there because the top of Mount Achaia is both above the class.

and also extremely dry, which makes it a pretty ideal spot to get a clear view of deep space. So for over a decade, a group of universities and scientific organizations has been trying to build a 14th telescope. It's called the 30-meter telescope, or the TMT. For many Native Hawaiians, it's a problem. There have been protests over the TMT, a case even went to the Hawaiian Supreme Court. The reasons for their anger and frustration are complicated. But a good place to start is just the place itself. Mount Akea. So Mount Akea is the tallest mountain here in Hawaii. And so, believe it or not, we get snow every now and again right there on the peak.

But it's not fluffy like the snow up in the mainland, but nice and icy. Kuwahi Hiroishi is a reporter at Hawaii Public Radio. Mauna Kea is the home, of course, of our snow goddess, Holy Oahu, and for families for centuries. They would make a trek up to Monacoia to hide or plant their umbilical cords or their piquo. I would say that it is thought of as a sacred

place for some Native Hawaiians and ever more so for Native Hawaiians who have lived in the area for centuries. Okay, so Coovei, when did Mount Akea get its first telescope? So in the 1960s, a tsunami

really devastated the economic center there in Hilo, where I'm from. And astronomy and the proposal for building a telescope really appealed to those at the time. And so the development began to happen pretty rapidly throughout the 60s and 70s, but really with no long-term vision of what that would mean for the mountain and also not too much regulation. And was there any opposition to these older telescopes? So at the beginning, there was really no process or opportunity, I'd say, in terms of environmental oversight that the state would offer. Until I want to say about the 90s, in 1998, the state did an audit. And the audit really revealed that there was no conscious effort to really come up with some sort of comprehensive management plan for the mountain.

And so when we talk about adding another telescope to this history, especially for those who do consider Mauna Kiatri's secret, it kind of prompts that question of whether or not we should add another telescope to the mountain. So let's talk about the decision to add another telescope to this mountain. Tell me about the TMT, the 30-meter telescope with its gigantic 30-meter lens. Well, when a 30-meter telescope first came to Hawaii, that was around 2009 when Monacoa was selected as the primary site for what was going to be this next generation telescope, right? So 10 times as much light-gathering power as the Subaru and 10 times more resolution than the Hubble,

they came in pretty excited, sort of roused up the science of the community. And later on in that process, we began to see some pushback from environmentalists and also the names. Native Hawaiian community. It's an accumulation of just decades of folks feeling like they haven't been heard. And this lack of involvement that stems back to the 60s, as we had mentioned, hasn't been resolved. Yeah, I was speaking with a Native Hawaiian scientist, Keolu Fox, and he was also telling me about this long history. Yeah, so it's not new, right? I mean, this is kind of the straw that broke the camel's back. So this is sort of just another attempt to build scientific infrastructure without building consensus with indigenous community members.

Yes, but also the environmental impact after years of having development on the mountain is really something that's hard to reverse. There are, I believe, two or three telescopes that are no longer active on the mountain and are set for decommissioning but have not yet been decommissioned. I mean, we're talking like build stories down into the earth and disrupt a whole number of things, soil and burial remains. So I think a lot of Native Hawaiians are saying, listen, you need to take your garbage down before you want to build something new. And then also, you know, when you think about the indigenous population, the Native Hawaiians not having a say in this process, that's something that I think has really only in the last 30 or 40 years become an issue that could halt or even make projects pause in a sense to make sure that they are a part of that process. And the 30 meter telescope, this massive new telescope project, it did end up getting paused after Native Hawaiian started speaking out in large numbers. How did that all go down exactly?

So back in 2015, the 30-meter telescope received a notice to proceed, but the permits to build were questions, and that found its way all the way through the Supreme Court in Hawaii. And after several appeals, they got another notice to proceed in 2019. And at that point, the protesters managed to have a blockade on the mountains so that none of the machinery could go up. Thousands have barricaded the road leading to the summit of Monakeha on the Big Island. People who are sleeping in cars, some of them even sleeping on hardened lava here.

And we've got eight or nine people that have chained themselves to a grate in the road. So far, 35 people have been arrested on the Big Island, many of them the community's elders. And that's called for a month. And law enforcement was eventually pulled down from the mountain during the winter months. and the protesters husband left. At this point, the lack of consultation over the years is really built up to the point where I don't think any one single entity could come in

and have the Native Hawaiian community sort of forget about the past. So that trust, I think, has been broken, and it's something that I don't think even the 30-Mood telescope can make happen. It's not like every Native Hawaiian is against this telescope, though, right? I saw this civil beat poll from 2019, and it showed that 48% of Native Hawaiians opposed the TMT, and 44 support it. So it's almost split, right? Right.

I think it's a lot more nuanced. And I've seen this. And when I went to report on the protest, you've got folks in law enforcement, family members, going ahead and then arresting their grandmother. So it's not as clear cut as Native Hawaiians versus. astronomers, it is a lot more nuanced. Yeah, I spoke to this native Hawaiian engineer, Brilyn Onodera, and she works at another telescope in Hawaii, and she definitely supports the TMT. Not only does the TMT represent this continuation of Hawaii being involved in astronomy and

like being true to those traditions, I think that the TMT also has a lot to offer in terms of educational opportunities, career opportunities. And we do live on an island. So the understanding of having to work this thing out is very real because eventually we all have to live together in the same community. It has been kind of difficult. I have lost, like, a friend or two, thanks to all of this. And some people get really emotional about it

because it is an emotionally charged situation and it's kind of hard to deal with that sometimes. For those, especially Native Hawaiians, who are in favor of the TMT, what kind of things have you heard from them? Definitely the benefits of job opportunities, high-paying jobs in astronomy. Up on the mountain, it's not just astronomers, you've got engineers, you've got the techs that have to keep the telescopes going, and the investment in STEM education on the island, which is something that TMT has done a lot to help with. They are making an effort to train more of the local community to become astronomers and to be working in these telescopes. TMT made a huge move to funnel money into education efforts.

And part of that effort was the Akamai Workforce Initiative, where they put Hawaii students in STEM jobs. So that's how I ended up getting an internship with the Keck Observatory and then also getting an internship with the Inouye Solar Telescope. and that's how I got hired as an engineer. These are things that haven't happened in the decades prior by those that are already on the mountain. You know, you said earlier that this is all more nuanced than just Native Hawaiians versus astronomers. But the way I've seen this conflict presented a lot

in the media has been even bigger than that. It's been this idea that this is about Native Hawaiians versus science. So I asked Kailu and Briolin what they thought about this. I think we need to. to step away from this culture versus science narrative because it's just not true. The idea that you had all of these goofy, clunky boat models in the West, and my ancestors had already understood that by creating a catamaran,

we could displace weight over surface area, that we utilize bird migration patterns, wind and weather patterns, the celestial sphere to navigate at night. By any reckoning, this is the scientific method. Astronomy in general, I think, is merely an extension of Hawaiian practices and traditions. We studied the sky, and now we want to study more about the sky, using modern tools to see beyond what we can physically see with our eyes. One thing that really frustrates me is how we couch and create these hierarchical assessments of what science, data, and observation are. They'll say, oh, this is traditional ecological knowledge.

No, it's not. It's all science. So, so Kouvehi, what do you make of the whole science versus tradition framing? It's an attempt to simplify a very complex and nuanced issue. It's not just Native Hawaiians, and it's also not just scientists. There are astronomers on both sides of the island. There also are Native Hawaiians on both sides of the aisle. So what is the right framing? Is there a right framing?

I don't think it can be simplified to just one particular issue or interest. It's this culmination of decades of not being involved. And I don't know what can be done to reverse those decades of not consulting folks. The state has really been struggling with trying to figure out how to manage all of those concerns. and we've gone through so many iterations of working groups and trying to bring everybody in to talk about it. But I think really at this point, it's really hard to figure out what the light at the end of the tunnel will look like.

When I talked with Shannon Sterone, the science reporter from the first half of the show, I asked her whether she thinks there's a sense within the scientific community that if you're acting in the name of science, you don't need to justify yourself. that you can just say, oh, this is a super tall mountain, and tall mountains are the best place for telescopes, and telescopes are good for science, so case closed. Yeah, it definitely feels that way. That's very accurate.

There's enough of science that feels that way, that the discoveries will be worth it. And I think that really is just in the eye of the beholder, because if you are the first person to detect a alien life or something using that telescope, do you think it's worth it, the sacrifice of building it on the mountain? There's always going to be people who say yes and no. Science is vital.

Astronomy is vital. But approaching that necessity with thoughtfulness and respect to where we're putting those instruments is just as important, you know, as the answers we're trying to get. This episode was produced and co-reported by Noam Hassamfeld and by me, Baird Pinkerton. When we reached out to the 30-meter telescope for comment, they sent a really thoughtful statement. And here's just a part of it. Quote, we have worked steadfastly over the last decade-plus to engage the community in finding a path forward on Monacaa. We recognize, however, that the situation in Hawaii is complex and that ultimately the debate about whether or not to move forward with the construction of the 30-meter telescope on Monacaa is about more than just this project, end quote. We had editing on this episode from Brian Resnick and Meredith Hodnott.

Noam wrote the music and Christian Ayala handled the sound design and the mixing. Thanks, Christian. Manding Nguyen, backchecked this episode, and Liz Kelly Nelson is the VP of Vox Audio. Thank you to Katie Kamala Mella for her help and to Shannon for sharing voice memos from her reporting. Shannon has a beautiful text piece about Planet 9 that you can find on long reads, or if you sign up for our newsletter, in Tint, we will have a link to it there. You can find a signup link at Vox.com slash Unexplainable. Please, please, please, feel free to send any thoughts you have to Unexplaintable at Vox.com,

send us theories about Planet 9, send us ideas for names, when, slash, if they find it. And if you have a minute to leave us a rating or a review of the show, we'd really appreciate it. In the meantime, Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. And we'll be back in your feed next Wednesday.