When I was a teen, I liked to stay up way too late with my nose in an Agatha Christie novel, reading compulsively to the end to see if I had guessed the culprit correctly. It wasn’t obvious that a love of mysteries translates into a love of science, but maybe it should have been.
When Christopher Crockett suggested his Planet X story, it was the aura of mystery that hooked me. First, there is the surprise that parts of our own solar system remain opaque, even as we find planets around distant stars and see the cosmic radiation from the universe’s first light. How could our blind spot be so large? Second, there is a real mystery here: Scientists don’t understand what caused the strange, loopy orbits of two dwarf planets beyond the Kuiper belt. In the past, attempts to explain orbital anomalies led to the discoveries of Neptune and Pluto. (As Tom Siegfried mentioned in his Context blog earlier this year, however, similar attempts to explain an anomaly in Mercury’s orbit required not a new astronomical body but a new theory: general relativity.)