Michael E. Brown Facts
Michael E. Brown Facts
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| Interesting Michael E. Brown Facts: |
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| Michael Brown was born in Huntsville, Alabama. |
| He graduated from Virgil I. Grissom High School in 1983 and earned an A.B. in physics from Princeton University in 1987. |
| He moved to the University of California, Berkeley and earned an MA in astronomy in 1990 and a PhD in astronomy in 1994. |
| His primary research area is on surveys of distant objects in our Solar system. |
| He and his team have discovered many trans-Neptunian objects, including a dwarf planet named Eris. |
| The team originally named Eris and its moon, Xena, and Gabrielle after characters in Xena: Warrior Princess but they have since been renamed Eris and Dysnomia. |
| Eris was discovered to be more massive than Pluto which led to Pluto's loss of status as a planet. |
| They also discovered a planetoid which they named Sedna. |
| Brown and his team discovered a dwarf planet named Haumea but their website was hacked and a team from Spain reported the planet first. |
| In 2006 Brown was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people. |
| In 2007 he was awarded the prestigious Feynman Prize from Caltech. |
| In 2012 he received the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics which is awarded by the Norwegian Academy of Science to outstanding scientists. |
| Asteroid 11714 Mikebrown is named for him. |
| His book, How I killed Pluto and Why it Had It Coming, explained why Pluto did not fit the International Astronomical Union's definition of a planet and why it now designated a dwarf planet. |
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