Final Book Review

After completing "How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming," I must say that I absolutely loved reading this book. Mike Brown does such a good job of making what would normally be very complex scientific language into extremely relatable and easy to read english. He mixes in stories of his wife and his daughter with his work life and tedious process of trying to find another planet. The book begins with him describing the night sky and how he fell in love with it. His journey to become an astronomer started at a very young age as he grew up in a small rocket city in Alabama.

After going to Cal Berkeley and eventually moving to Pasadena to work at Cal Tech as a full-time astronomer, he begins working with a series of telescopes in the area. At the time he was living in a small cabin at the top of a mountain without plumbing or much electricity not to far from his work. One late night while he's sitting in the control room of the telescope center, he decides to make a bet with one of his colleagues that in the next few years he'll find the 10th planet. What seemed crazy at the time, turned out to be, well, less crazy. In short, Brown and his team end up finding 3 celestial objects that had never been discovered before. It takes Brown many years just to search the night sky for these potential planets, and even longer for him to actually announce his findings. He goes into depth on how he created a computer program to scan the images taken but the telescope, and pick out which objects might be planets. While none of the objects he finds turn out to be "planets", Xena, the largest of the objects and one that is bigger than Pluto, ends up being the one that officially kills it. He had no intention to kill Pluto, but just happened that his findings would put an end to its planet title.

To anyone that enjoys anything somewhat scientific and likes casual dry humor, this book is perfect for you. I had so much fun reading it because of Brown's style of writing, and how his mixes every day things in his life with astronomy. He constantly makes fun of himself and laughs at his own miseries. For example, he discusses how psychotic he his for keeping a log of everything his daughter does, plotting it all on a graph, and posting it on the internet for everyone to see. All the while his work as an astronomer is nothing short of amazing. It's a relatively easy read and it is certainly very entertaining throughout the entire book. Final Rating: 8.4.