Space heist (or, how to steal a planet)

Ben: … to an even-more-towering, 40-foot tall dome that, if you look up, kind of looks like Professor X’s Cerebro. Silver-screen panels arch over a black, metallic projector shaped kind of like an Imperial Probe Droid from Star Wars.

Talia Sepersky: So we’re going to be using our six projectors. You can see there’s one right there. There’s another one right over there. And then we’ve got two above the dome right there and two behind us here.

Amory: Our tour guides, captains, if you will, are two of my favorite former coworkers.

Talia: I am Talia Sepersky. I am the program manager for immersive theaters.

Jason Fletcher: My name’s Jason Fletcher. I’m an associate producer, which means I do 3-D animations and help run special events and planetarium in the omni. 

Amory: I’ve never known your actual titles, I would just be like, Talia, she’s the bomb. Jason, he’s the man. 

Amory: The Bomb and The Man dimmed the lights, plunging us into a void of darkness and then, they showed us the stars

Jason: This is like a video game of the universe, right? This is all real data, and Talia is controlling time. So this is where the Sun will be. 

Talia: Uh, this is almost four o’clock 

Ben: Can you show me tomorrow’s stock prices? 

Talia: No, I’m working on it. Oh well. 

And then, they took us to the stars…

Amory: Lift off, baby. 

Ben: We blasted out of the solar system, out of the Milky Way, out of outer space, and into a visualization of all the known galaxies in the universe.

Amory: It’s like a it’s like a Jackson Pollock painting, but every little drop of paint is a frickin’ galaxy. 

Ben: And also, it’s like super three dimensional. Like, you can see — it’s going to sound really dumb, but you can see this space. Do you know what I mean?

Amory: I think everything that is uttered in a planetarium unless Talia or Jason say it is just going to sound super stonery and bad. 

Amory: This was a detour. As was our brief stop to witness a supernova.

What we were really looking for was a tiny ball of ice and rock that, relatively speaking, is pretty close to home.

Ben: And, admittedly, a bit underwhelming …

Ben: It looks like a meatball. Or maybe like a matzo ball. 

Talia: Yeah. Could be a matzo ball. A moldy matzo ball. 

Amory: Welcome to Haumea, one of our solar system’s many distant planetoids, a dwarf planet. Talia projected an animated version of it onto the dome, spinning rapidly. A day on Haumea is just 4 hours long and its orbit is 245 Earth years, giving it a little more than 600,000 days in a year.

Ben: Haumea’s also a very old matzo ball, almost from the beginning of the solar system, billions of years ago.

This icy rock is pretty small. If Earth were a nickel, Haumea would be a sesame seed. You’d need an epic telescope to see it.

Amory: Are we in the Kuiper Belt, like where Pluto is? Talia: We are depending on where in their orbits the two objects are.

Amory: Haumea was the second dwarf planet to be discovered after Pluto, which was found back in 1930. But that is not why we’re here today.

We’re here because Endless Thread producer Dean Russell has a question.

Dean: When was this discovered? 

Talia: It was discovered … 

Dean: This is a trick question. 

Talia: Yeah, it’s a little bit of a trick question. It was discovered in the early 2000s. That is accurate as to the exact date of discovery. That is what the argument is about. 

Ben: A huge argument over when Haumea was discovered, or, more to the point, who discovered it.

Now, you may have never heard of Haumea. Amory and I hadn’t. And, so, it’s possible that you’re thinking, “Who cares who discovered this old, moldy meatball?” Fair.

Amory: But this argument that Talia referenced exploded like its own supernova years ago into this enormous philosophical debate that questioned the way science is done. A debate that is very relevant to just about everyone today.

Ben: And this argument also happens to be the tale of how a small pre-Twitter, pre-Reddit internet community may have sleuthed out the culprit behind one of the greatest robberies in modern-day astronomy.

Amory: I’m Amory Sivertson.

Ben: I’m Ben Matzo Ball Johnson. You’re listening to Endless Thread.

Amory: Coming to you from WBUR, Boston’s NPR station. And today, we bring you what you could reasonably call…

Ben and Amory: SPACE HEIST!

Ben: Producer extraordinaire, space nerd, meatball enthusiast, Dean Russell.

Dean: Hello, hello.

Amory: Dean, where does this story start?

Dean: So, first, I just want to say, because this is a show about internet communities, the internet will come into play here … but it’ll be a minute.

Anyway, I came across this story a few months ago when I spoke with this guy.

Mike Brown: Offices need toys because you always just need toys. 

Dean: Mike Brown is in his 50s, wire-rim glasses, graying stubble. But Mike’s a kid at heart. His office in Pasadena, California, is littered with tchotchkes, RC cars, and elaborate toys.

Mike: It’s a catapult system that catapults cats. And you catapult one cat to the next catapult, which launches a cat, which launches a cat in this whole Rube Goldberg thing.

Ben: Science loves a good Rube Goldberg. Not real cats, though, right?

Dean: Not real cats. Anyway, Mike does have a job, which, honestly sounds more fun than playing with Rube Goldbergs. Mike is an astronomer at CalTech. And not just any astronomer, Mike is a planet hunter.

Mike: You know, if there’s a possibility of a planet out there to be found, somebody needs to go look.

Dean: Now, we know the solar system has eight planets, right? But, Ben, Amory, can you guess how many minor planets we have?

Ben: Relative minor? Harmonic minor?

Amory: Depends what you mean by “minor planets.”

Dean: What, you guys don’t know what minor planets are?

Ben: Oh yeah, it’s the opposite of major. It’s minor.

Amory: Oh god. Please tell us, Dean.

Dean: Okay, a minor planet, a minor planet is like an asteroid, or a comet, or a plutoid, or a centaur, which are kind of like an asteroid-comet hybrid, and, maybe most importantly, it includes dwarf planets, which, we will be talking about.

Amory: I’m going to say 7,024.

Ben: I’m going to say 7,025. I play to win.

Dean: Yeah. Okay. Well, Ben, congratulations. There are 1,170,640 minor planets in the solar system that we know about.

Amory: Price is Right rules.

Ben: Alright.

Dean: Back in the 1990s, this number was quite a bit smaller. In fact, the solar system was still kind of an enigma. We didn’t even know the Kuiper Belt — this donut-shaped band of rocks out past Neptune — we didn’t know that existed. But telescopes were going through a big technological transition and astronomers like Mike started finding things.

Mike: By the end of nineteen ninety two, I can’t remember the number, but there were probably two or three. By the end of the next year, there might have been a dozen and by 1997, there were maybe even a hundred.

Dean: When you discover something in the solar system, that is a big deal. Not only can that one thing tell us a little more about our solar neighborhood and how we all came to be … it can make your career.

Ben: Let me guess, Mike was pretty good at finding things?

Dean: Oh yes. And determined.

Mike: It was, it was dead obvious to me that if you scanned wide swaths of sky, you’d find something big.  

Ben: Well, wait. What does that even mean — finding a planet? How do you actually do that?

Dean: The simplest way is to take a photo of the sky. The next night, take another photo of the same exact patch of sky. Then, compare the two.

Ben: On my phone?

Amory: No, but I know this. I remember this. So, things that are really far away, like stars, appear to stay in the same place, relative to other stars. That’s why we have constellations. But things that are closer to Earth, like planets — those appear to move ever so slightly night to night.

And so let’s fast forward to…

Mike: December 28th of 2004. 

Dean: Mike’s in his office, no doubt surrounded by 2004-era toys.

Mike: You wake up in the morning, you start to look at your data. You don’t know that this is the day you’re going to find something that is going to be a major scientific discovery of the outer solar system. And boom. 

Dean: Mike and his colleagues find a wanderer. A big one.

Mike: This was the brightest thing we’d ever seen in the outer solar system. And this was, this was clear to us that this was the this was going to be a major discovery.

Dean: Mike’s team gave this thing a secret code name, just a long string of numbers and letters. A few years later, it would be given the official name Haumea, a.k.a. the matzo ball we saw at the planetarium. And Mike was psyched.

Ben: So, what do you do in that situation? Like, who do you call? Get me the president! Who do you tell? How do you announce your discovery?

Mike: You can do one or two things. You can announce it the second you discover it and say, “We just found something really bright in the sky.” And people are like, “Wow, what is it?” And…