When Máté Ádámkovics was young, he learned about the nine planets in the solar system with a mnemonic device.
"My Very Educated Mother Sold Us Nine Pizzas," he learned as a reminder for Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.
"There were definitely the pizzas," said Ádámkovics, now a professor of physics and astronomy at Clemson.
Thanks to the work of astronomer Mike Brown though, those pizzas are no longer there.
In 2006, Pluto was reclassified from a planet to a dwarf planet because of Brown's research.
On Thursday, Brown came to give two lectures at Clemson University. Ádámkovics invited him as part of the Tigers Advance speaker series, which helps younger faculty members bring a leader in their field to campus.
Brown and Ádámkovics both got their graduate degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and the two have co-authored a paper.
"I would say after Neil deGrasse Tyson, there's probably only two or three other scientists within the field of astrophysics that have the level of fame that he has reached," Ádámkovics said of Brown.
During his lecture, Brown — the self-proclaimed "Pluto Killer" — did not focus on the planet he doomed from elementary school textbooks, but instead told the story of a new discovery.
Brown explained how the interesting orbits of two planetary objects named Sedna and Biden led him to predict the existence of a true ninth planet, six times the size of Earth.
Working backwards like a forensic investigator, Brown and other researchers hypothesized that the orbits of Sedna and Biden might be the result of a massive planet. Using computer simulations, they decided the theory had merit.
"It is really quite easy to come up with an explanation for some set of phenomenon, and planetary scientists for 150 years have been using planets as an explanation," Brown said. "We didn’t want to be just another set of people saying, ‘Uh, there must be a planet,' because it seemed really unlikely."
That initial caution gave way to more research.
Brown projected that if there really was a massive planet, it would have a set of objects in perpendicular orbits around it. When he modeled where those would be, he found six known objects perfectly aligned with his projection.
"This is when my jaw hit the floor," Brown said. "This is where it went to, “Oh my God, there’s a planet out there."
While no planet has been spotted that matches Brown's discovery, he believes it is a matter of "when" not "if" it will be found.
The California Institute of Technology professor is now collecting data from a telescope in Hawaii to try and find the planet.
When he returns to his office on Monday, he said he hopes to have the data from the Hawaiian telescope analyzed.
"It might be in there," he said. "Some days I am optimistic, some days I am pessimistic. I could be wrong, but I think the case is clear—something is out there."
Despite his hopefulness, Brown does not want to even ponder a name for the planet. He called astronomers "a superstitious lot."
Ádámkovics, who researches planet formation, the origin of planets and planet atmospheres, hoped that Brown's lectures at Clemson would be inspiring to his astronomy students.
He also saw the lecture as a sign of the caliber of Clemson's work.
Ádámkovics said it gives him a sense of pride, "knowing that we can get top notch scientists to Clemson to present research to us. There is a recognition of the growth and improvement of the science that is happening at Clemson."
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