How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike BrownMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Despite being a fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson, I very much more enjoyed this memoir of the Pluto reclassification compared to The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet. Tyson seemed to stumble into affairs after a presumptuous New York Times article about an exhibit and brought in outsider things I don't recall, like the American discovery of Pluto making the public cling to it. Brown, however, is well-known in the scientific community for his surveys for distant objects orbiting the Sun. His team has discovered many trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). Particularly notable are Eris, the only TNO discovered that is more massive than Pluto, and is one of a number of dwarf planets in the Solar System; 90377 Sedna, a planetoid thought to be the first observed body belonging to the inner Öpik-Oort cloud; and 90482 Orcus. Eris (previously known as Xena) and its moon Dysnomia all figure in here highly. This is because Brown reflects back on a career mining the Kuiper belt for planetoids before Pluto was controversial and we had the classification "dwarf planet". Brown recounts juggling all the controversy while his daughter was born and growing and he discovered apparently underhanded dealings against his claim on another TNO, Haumea.
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