Book 1 Post 2

I finished reading How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming over the weekend, and I've learned so many small bits of information about the astronomy world. Did you know that every telescope in the world is scheduled to be used every day, except Christmas? Michael Brown's memoir takes us through his life while at Caltech, one of the world's best institutions studying astronomy and makes his world of academia seem very casual. Brown's process of searching for new planets meant every day, he would take photos of a tiny portion of the sky, stitching it all together week by week to make progress on his search for another planet. At one point in the book, after sifting through more than 8,000 planet candidates, Brown found 27 that might be a planet and not a single one that was definitely a new planet.

My curiosity peaked in this book when Brown talked about Object X. Still not discovered, Object X or Planet X is the theory that there is one large planet that we haven't seen yet. Its orbit around the sun would take so long that humans haven't witnessed it through telescopes, and it would answer why most of the outer planets and Kuiper Belt objects orbit asymmetrically to one side - the Object X's mass on the other side would balance this. Unfortunately, as Brown was discovering more planets, he discovered another called Xena or Eris that led to the scientific community agreeing that Pluto was not a planet, but a large object in the Kuiper Belt. 

I chose to read this book because I've always been fascinated by astronomy and what could be out in space. We are also the generation that was learning about the solar system when Pluto was declared not a planet anymore, which helped create my interest in space. We are always disproving and developing physics and astronomical theories, which makes it one of the fastest changing fields in science. I'm intrigued by how much yet how little we know about the solar system and our galaxy. I believe we should be looking up into the stars to discover where we came from, not down into the ground. There are so many theories of the Big Bang, including gravitational singularity and quantum cosmology that we still need to develop to further solidify our knowledge of the universe. I dream of being part of this field and hope one day to help discover how the heck we got here.