Mike Brown, Astronomer Pushing a Ninth Planet, Is the Guy Who Helped Demote Pluto - The Daily Beast

The scientist championing the naming of a new ninth planet, Caltech astronomer Mike Brown, is the same one who got the old ninth planet, Pluto, removed from the list that teachers teach and students memorize.

“He’s wrong about Pluto,” planetary scientist Alan Stern, the principal investigator on NASA’s New Horizons mission, which sent a probe past Pluto in 2015, told The Daily Beast.

Alan Stern, the principal investigator on NASA’s New Horizons mission, which sent a probe past Pluto in 2015, says Brown is “just wrong” about the demoted planet.

The Pluto kerfuffle “has actually created a divide between scientists and the public, and sends a terrible message—particularly for these time—that science is done by fiat on the basis of authority,” Mark Sykes, director of the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona, told The Daily Beast.

The planet Pluto is pictured in a composite of four images from New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager in July 2015.

Then, in 2005, Brown and his team detected another object in the Kuiper Belt, one that was much bigger than Pluto.

“After we discovered Eris, and realized that Eris is more massive than Pluto, you’ve got to do something,” Brown told the BBC in July.

Rightly suspecting there were more planet-like objects out there in the Kuiper Belt, he appealed to the Paris-based International Astronomical Union, the leading association for astronomers and other planetary scientists, to reconsider the definition of “planet” in order to prevent the accepted list from growing by dozens or more—an expansion Brown at the time described as “ridiculous.”.

“I think the IAU’s demotion of Pluto was questionable,” Steve Maran, a former NASA astrophysicist, told The Daily Beast.

“I think that Pluto as an example of a large Kuiper Belt object is so much more interesting than Pluto as this very weird planet at the outer edge of the solar system, unlike anything else,” Brown told Space.com in 2010.

Brown told The Daily Beast recently that he hasn’t changed his mind about Pluto.

Brown has certainly moved on—to another something spinning along the Kuiper Belt that he thinks is more deserving of planetary status than Pluto.

Caltech astronomer Mike Brown briefs the media about a potential ninth planet.

Their complaint is that lots of objects out there in the Kuiper Belt also warrant the label—just like Pluto.