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Mike Brown: I sometimes get hate mail because people are convinced it does exists and I discovered it and therefore the destruction of the Earth is really all my fault. I only WISH I had that much power.
Ian O'Neill: Lol! That's an interesting twist! So you're not hiding the existence of Planet X then? Or should I say "Nibiru".
Mike Brown: It's funny. I really do get many emails and even worried calls from people who are convinced that I know something and am not telling. It is very hard to convince someone who thinks that there is a conspiracy that you are not part of the consp
Mike Brown: Emotion and ignorance. If you ask people to draw planets in the solar system and make them the correct relative size and then draw Pluto, most people will make it about the size of Mercury (which itself will be 1/3 the size of Jupiter). And I think that's because that's what we often see in popular images of the solar system. SOOOOO wrong. I wish I could take all of those images out there and at least make them correct.
It's fabulous that the images are taken automatically and that the first cut at finding moving things is done by computer. It means that even though I was collecting data most nights for 8 years, I still went home every night and slept in my bed. It's a much more civilized way to do astronomy, I must say.
Ian O'Neill: Ha, that sounds like my kind of astronomy too
“If in 1/2 of the Kuiper belt we find a very smooth distribution of sizes like this, then surveying the other half of the KB it is unlikely we're suddenly going to jump an order of magnitude in size.”
Originally posted by liveandletlive
Does he mean “bigger” as far as discovery or “bigger” in size?
Mike Brown: I don't get paid enough to be part of a conspiracy that big.