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See Also:

• Wired's Favorite Sci-Fi Flicks of All Time — Pre–Star Wars
• Wired's Favorite Sci-Fi Flicks of All Time — Star Wars and After

Mike brown set out to expand the galaxy, not shrink it. He spent much of his childhood surveying the night sky, hunting for alien worlds in the outer reaches of the solar system. Then he grew up to become a planetary astronomer at Caltech and really did find something. He called it Eris, but being only slightly bigger than Pluto and three times as far from the sun, it just didn’t seem worthy of planet status. And this caused a major problem. If Eris