How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming is the title of the memoir by Mike Brown, the Caltech astronomer most responsible for the eventual demotion of the planet Pluto from its status of a planet to that of a dwarf object. [1]
The memoir is a non-fiction account of the events surrounding the eventual demotion of Pluto from full-planetary status. It chronicles the discovery of Eris, a dwarf planet even larger than Pluto, located within the Kuiper belt, beyond Neptune's orbit. The replaying of events include the adversarial challenging of long-held scientific beliefs between some of the world's leading astronomers, and the eventual 2006 International Astronomical Union's vote to demote Pluto from the nine planets of the Solar System.[1]
Reviews of the book have been generally positive, with James Kennedy of the Wall Street Journal calling the book a "brisk" and "enjoyable ... chronicle" of the tale of the search for new planets and the eventual resulting demotion of Pluto from planetary status.[2] Janet Maslin of the New York Times called it a "short, eager-to-please research memoir".[3]