It's our solar system Jim, but not as we know it

'[It's] like waking up one morning and finding your house is ten times bigger than you thought it was.'

This is how astronomer Dave Jewitt described the feeling of finding an object orbiting the sun, far out beyond the orbit of Pluto. Astronomers had long suspected that there was more to our solar system than had already met the eye, and Jewitt was one who set out to find something. Finally he did, after around five years of 'blinking' - rapidly comparing two photographs of the same patch of sky taken at different times to see if anything unknown has appeared.

'Hasn't this been done already?' - 'No'
'Then why should we do it?' - 'Because if we don't nobody will.'

Thus ran a conversation between astronomer Dave Jewitt and then research student Jane Luu in 1987. Jewitt was proposing that Luu join him in a search for outer solar system objects, and it was this project that led to the above discovery. Jewitt and Luu were working at Mauna Kea in Hawaii, 3000m above sea level, where 'most regular users will admit to at least a few hours of almost moronic thinking trying to solve a technical or mathematical problem they could sort out in a matter of minutes in the thicker air of sea level.'

'The extra processing increases the labour greatly, and I have to do everything here, including vacuuming the floor.'

Jewitt and Luu are no longer alone in the search for distant solar satellites. As professional astronomers they don't have to do the cleaning, unlike Warren Offutt, a dedicated amateur who used the proceeds of a successful career in industry to build his own observatory at home in New Mexico when he retired in 1990. In between vacuuming he was instrumental in providing recovery observations for a number of distant objects and had minor planet 7639 named Offutt in his honour.

John Davies details the efforts of these and other sky watchers, as well as the earlier figures such as Kenneth Edgeworth, who first suggested the existence of outer solar system objects in the 1940s. Edgworth also took up serious astronomy in his retirement after a military career in the Royal Engineers.

Davies's book does not confine itself to the observational aspects of the story and includes the work of researchers like Eilleen Ryan. Ryan pulverises ice balls in a vacuum chamber to help determine how the distant planetoids are formed. Davies concludes with a look at the controversy over the naming of the belt of matter that lies beyond Pluto. Why should it be named the Kuiper Belt, after the Dutch astronomer, when his work post-dated that of Edgeworth, and was most likely indebted to it?

Beyond Pluto will provide a fascinating read for all amateur astronomers and anyone with an interest in the formation of the solar system. Davies does not demand technical expertise from his readers, but at the same time his book will prove a useful backgrounder for students too.

Cambridge University Press

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It's our solar system Jim, but not as we know it

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