Controversy Over The Discovery of Haumea - Discovery and Announcement

Discovery and Announcement

On December 28, 2004, Mike Brown and his team discovered Haumea on images they had taken with the 1.3 m SMARTS Telescope at the Palomar Observatory in the United States on May 6, 2004, while looking for what he hoped would be the tenth planet. The Caltech discovery team used the nickname "Santa" among themselves, as they had discovered Haumea on December 28, 2004, just after Christmas. However, it was clearly too small to be a planet as it was significantly smaller than Pluto, and Brown did not announce the discovery. Instead he kept it under wraps, along with several other large trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), until through additional observation he could better determine their natures. When his team discovered Haumea's moons, they realized that Haumea was more rocky than other TNOs, and that its moons were mostly ice. They then discovered a small family of nearby icy TNOs, and concluded that these were remnants of Haumea's icy mantle, which had been blasted off by a collision. On July 7, 2005, while he was finishing the paper describing the discovery, Brown's daughter Lilah was born, which delayed the announcement further. On July 20, the Caltech team published an online abstract of a report intended to announce the discovery at a conference the following September. In this Haumea was given the code K40506A.

At around that time, Pablo Santos Sanz, a student of José Luis Ortiz Moreno at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía at Sierra Nevada Observatory in southern Spain, examined the backlog of photos that the Ortiz team had started taking in December 2002. He says that he found Haumea in late July on images taken on March 7, 9, and 10, 2003. In checking whether this was a known object, the team came across Brown's internet summary, describing a bright TNO much like the one they had just found. Googling the reference number K40506A on the morning of July 26, they found the Caltech observation logs of Haumea, but according to their account, those logs contained too little information for Ortiz to tell if they were the same object. The Ortiz team also checked with the Minor Planet Center (MPC), which had no record of this object. Wanting to establish priority, they emailed the MPC with their discovery on the night of July 27, 2005, titled "Big TNO discovery, urgent", without making any mention of the Caltech logs. The next morning they again accessed the Caltech logs, including observations from several additional nights. They then asked Reiner Stoss at the amateur Astronomical Observatory of Mallorca for further observations. Stoss found precovery images of Haumea in digitized Palomar Observatory slides from 1955, and located Haumea with his own telescope that night, July 28. Within an hour, the Ortiz team submitted a second report to the MPC that included this new data. Again, no mention was made of having accessed the Caltech logs. The data was published by the MPC on July 29.

In a press release on the same day, the Ortiz team called Haumea the "tenth planet". On July 29, 2005, Haumea was given its first official label, the temporary designation 2003 EL₆₁, with the "2003" based on the date of the Spanish discovery image. On September 7, 2006, it was numbered and admitted into the official minor planet catalogue as (136108) 2003 EL₆₁.