Astronomer Mike Brown's novel is awe-inspiring and very funny. His research took him years to complete, and not all of it could be automated. He had to use a jeweler's loupe to study star maps, just like the astronomers a century ago. He finally found a world larger than Pluto, in the Kuiper belt, which is way out beyond Pluto's orbit, and called it Xena. Then he discovered that there may be several hundred objects of Pluto's size out there and decided that they couldn't all be planets.
What's baffling to me is exactly why Pluto and Xena had it coming. Brown and other astronomers simply objected to a solar system which contained too many planets. They decreed that "planet" means "one of a small number of large important things in our solar system." This does not make sense to me, and I'm unclear how the definition will be used in the new star systems we'll discover.
Many pages of the book record the sleep-deprived Brown's obsessive notations on his newborn daughter Lilah. It's been argued that if a female astronomer emoted so much about her baby, her professional reputation would suffer. Double standard, even if the Lilah posts are cute.
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