Controversy over the discovery of Haumea
Instead he kept it under wraps, along with several other large trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), pending additional observation to better determine their natures.
[7] On July 7, 2005, while he was finishing the paper describing the discovery, Brown's daughter Lilah was born, which delayed the announcement further.
[8] On July 20,[9] the Caltech team published an online abstract of a report intended to announce the discovery at a conference the following September.
[10] At around that time, Pablo Santos Sanz, a student of José Luis Ortiz Moreno at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía at Sierra Nevada Observatory in southern Spain, claims to have examined the backlog of photos that the Ortiz team had started taking in December 2002.
He further said that in checking whether this was a known object, the team came across Brown's internet summary, describing a bright TNO much like the one they had just found.
[16] On July 29, 2005, Haumea was given its first official label, the temporary designation 2003 EL61, with the "2003" based on the date of the Spanish discovery image.
[18] The same day as the MPC publication, Brown's group announced the discovery of another Kuiper belt object, Eris, more distant, brighter and apparently larger than Pluto, as the tenth planet.
[3][19] The same day Ortiz announced the discovery of Haumea, Brown submitted his own draft with the data on the first of its moons that he had discovered on January 26, 2005, to The Astrophysical Journal.
Upon learning from web server records that it was a computer at the Sierra Nevada Observatory that had accessed his observation logs the day before the discovery announcement – logs which included enough information to allow the Ortiz team to precover Haumea in their 2003 images – Brown came to suspect fraud.
[21] Ortiz later admitted he had accessed the Caltech observation logs but denied any wrongdoing, stating this was merely part of verifying whether they had discovered a new object.
[23] Following guidelines established by the IAU that classical Kuiper belt objects be given names of mythological beings associated with creation,[24] in September 2006 the Caltech team submitted formal names from Hawaiian mythology to the IAU for both (136108) 2003 EL61 and its moons, in order "to pay homage to the place where the satellites were discovered".
In addition, she is identified with Papa, the goddess of the earth and wife of Wākea (space),[27] which is appropriate because 2003 EL61 is thought to be composed almost entirely of solid rock, without the thick ice mantle over a small rocky core typical of other known Kuiper belt objects.
"[12] The Spanish newspaper ABC went on to call the decision a "US conquest", asserting that politics played a major role as the US had 10 times more astronomers in the IAU than Spain had.
