The discovery of 2003 UB313 Eris, the 10th planet largest known dwarf planet

http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/planetlila/index.html

This article was passed on to me from pipkin after I talked with him about researchers not wanting to share data in early stages of analysis.

Eris is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt that is somewhat larger than Pluto. It is the furthest object yet to be found orbiting the sun and it takes twice as long as Pluto to orbit the sun. Eris was found in the same week of July 2005 as two other bright objects in the Kuiper belt.



These objects were found in Southern California at the Palomar Observatory using the robotic Samuel Oschin Telescope and the Palomar QUEST camera. Every night photos of the sky are sent from the observatory to Pasadena and 10 computers at Caltech analyze the photos for moving objects. All photos that may contain moving objects are flagged for human analysis. In the case of Eris, the initial computer analysis did not detect Eris because the dwarf planet was moving so slowly and was so far away. It wasn't until a year and a half later when the photos were being reanalyzed for very distant objects that Eris was discovered.

On page 199 of Scholarship for the Digital Age Borgman mentions the controversy over finding Eris. What happened is an example of why scientists guard their data until their papers have been released and credit has been explicitly assigned to the original researcher or team of researchers.

What Happened: In July 2005 the astronomers who found Eris in Pasadena released an abstract of an upcoming talk and in the abstract they mention the object K40506A, which is what their automated software named the object. What the astronomers did not know was that the data from some of their telescopes was not secure and that it was possible to search the web for K40506A and discover the object. By the end of July, computers at the Instituto de Astrofisica in Spain accessed the telescope records containing information on K40506A. Two days after they accessed the data an e-mail was sent from the same IP address at the Instituto de Astrofisica to the International Astronomical Union Minor Planet Center with news that P. Santos-Sanz and J.-L. Ortiz had discovered a distant object in the Kuiper belt.

Somehow the scientists in Pasadena were lucky enough to discover that their records were public, this prompted them to officially announce their findings without an official scientific paper.

After all of the excitement of Eris and after scientists broke their protocol of writing scientific papers to release findings, there was a backlash against the Pasadena astronomers for not officially sharing Eris sooner. The accusations that the astronomers were keeping secrets are surprising but they have prompted an interesting discussion of the scientific process. The rest of the article is in defense of the scientific process and explains why scientists have such clandestine practices.

This article is a good case study of when and why scientists share their data and it illustrates the conflict between open access to data and science as we know it. My remaining questions: Is this event an anomaly? Are there other contemporary occurrences of scientists being scooped out of their own discoveries? Also, after an event like this, how can we be surprised that scientists are slow to deposit their data into a collective repository?