The End [Mike Brown's Planets]

Mike Brown's Planets weblog ^ | Sunday, September 28, 2008 | Mike Brown

[SunkenCiv]

After 11 years of (robotically) scanning the skies almost every single night... I am done, as of last night...

The sky-scanning has evolved greatly over the past 11 years.

The very first version, started in July 1998, consisted of real people at the telescope taking real photographic plates (!) of the sky... When the photographic plates were finished we sent them to David Monet at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Flagstaff who digitized the photographic plates using an outrageously precise mega-scanner he had painstakingly develop just for these purposes.

Soon after the initial survey ended, the telescope got a giant digital camera and a robotic brain... Chad Trujillo... came on board to lead this new effort. Within a year we had a first major discovery: Quaoar...

The robotic telescope soon got a second generation camera... and David Rabinowitz... began working with us. From 2003 until 2005... we found Sedna, about 2/3 the size of Pluto... Orcus, half the size of Pluto... Then, in one four month period, we found the big three: Haumea (3/4 the size of Pluto), Makemake (2/3 the size of Pluto), and Eris (5% bigger than Pluto!)...

That's it. No more coming up. We have nothing up our sleeves (well, OK, we haven't completed the analysis of last night's data, so there is a miniscule chance that we happened to make a huge discover on the last night of our 11 year program, but that doesn't seem so likely)...

Starting next January my new student Michele Bannister is going to start a new project; she will be looking for new planets every night... from Australia. The southern sky is the last pristine territory to search for dwarf planets.

[SunkenCiv]

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[Larry Lucido]

We didn’t gain any new planets. We lost Pluto and gained a bunch of rocks. Way to go, guys.