Day 9: The Hunt for Planet X
This book review of The Hunt for Planet X, by Govert Schilling, appears in slightly different form in the Arizona Daily Sun. Even though I wrote it, it remains under copyright with the paper for two months. I reprint it here with permission, thanks to the editor, Randy Wilson.
Govert Schilling signs books at the AAS meeting, photo by Jim Bennett
The Hunt for Planet X
I liked Govert Schilling the minute I met him, in early January at the 213th American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach, California. He’s a tall, lanky guy who seems too young to be in his 50s. His gait is jaunty, his hair often tousled, and when he introduced himself to ask questions at the press conference, he didn’t rely on fancy publication names to bolster his credentials, although he’s been published prodigiously and has won international awards: “I’m Govert Schilling, from the Netherlands,” he would say.
And so I was a bit torn between fondness and jealousy when the press release turned up at the conference announcing that he’d be signing copies of his new book, “The Hunt for Planet X.” My own first book, “Pluto and Beyond,” was published a couple of years ago. As it turns out, they follow different trajectories. My book focuses on Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, chronicling the discoveries of its other astronomers before and since Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto there in 1930. Schilling’s book goes on a wide-ranging hunt for the mysterious Planet X that fueled Percival Lowell’s obsession – and to this day has not definitively been found.
Schilling’s journey takes readers on a wild ride through the solar system, skillfully shedding light on various fascinating topics as he goes. He handily explains techniques, planetary anomalies and discovery histories in a style that will be easily digestible for non-scientists. Spectroscopy, for example, is a technique to analyze the chemical composition of an object based on the light it reflects. As a common astronomical method, it frequently requires explanation by science writers – and it can be a real mouthful. But Schilling literally brings his explanation home: “The ‘Pluto photons … end up all over the Earth,” he writes, “in the oceans, the deserts, the tropical rainforests, and in the backyards of the readers of this book.” Then he goes on to explain, without much fuss, how scientists categorize those photons in order to describe Pluto’s atmosphere.
And for people who would like a refresher course in planetary geography, Schilling delivers. His understanding of history, coupled with the latest discoveries, yields a modern-day primer of solar system dynamics.
“Planetary satellites are much more diverse than the planets themselves,” he writes:
Io, one of Jupiter’s moons, has dozens of active sulfur volcanoes. Europa, a little farther away from the giant planet, is an ice world with cracks and fissures and a deep ocean beneath its surface. On Saturn’s large moon Titan it rains liquid methane gas. Enceladus has water geysers with which it sprays its neighbors in the cosmos, and Hyperion is a tumbling world of ice and rock that is as porous as a sponge.
Schilling also presents fascinating insights into the characters of astronomers who have explored the solar system, from the prickly personalities of some of the brightest stars – like Gerard Kuiper, for whom Pluto’s neighborhood is named – to the sweetness of now-famous astronomers as young children, who stared at the stars and dreamed of being astronauts.
Throughout his explorations, Pluto is the thread. Schilling reveals early on that Pluto never did fit Percival Lowell’s search image, because it’s not big enough to cause the disturbances in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune that indicate something large is there. The story builds as he explains all the other candidate explanations – leading up to recent discoveries in the Kuiper Belt – that have provided hope and frustration in the search. And then, toward the book’s conclusion, he details the contentious infighting at that fateful 2006 meeting of the International Astronomical Union, in Prague, where Pluto spent far too long on a chopping block in the spotlight.
Herein lies my only complaint about the book: Schilling is not only dismissive of our beloved little brother in the planetary family; he’s downright hard on Pluto. He seems to delight too much in writing slurs like “ugly ducking” and “icy little runt.”
All in all, The Hunt for Planet X is a delightful detective story that presents the history of solar system research – including the most recent, and explosive developments – in a meaningful and colorful way. As for the gratuitous Pluto-bashing? Well, we can let Schilling off with a warning. He’s not from around here.
Anne Minard is the author of Pluto and Beyond: A Story of Discovery, Adversity and Ongoing Exploration. She is also a proud member of the Facebook group When I was Your Age, Pluto was a Planet.
