Michael E. Brown

Michael E. Brown is the astronomer the world knows as the man who "killed Pluto," and there is a lovely fittingness to that in his chart, because Gemini is the sign of "between," and Mike lives in the borderlands where a planet stops being a planet. His Sun in Gemini is the marriage of Helios and Mercury: the vitality shining through curiosity, communication and the endless sorting of what is what. Sitting in the sixth house of work and meticulous daily labour, that Sun makes him the Lion King of the grind, shining through patient, painstaking service to the sky. His team hunted down trans-Neptunian objects and found Eris, briefly thought larger than Pluto, which forced astronomers to redefine what a planet even is.

His Virgo Moon in the ninth house is the perfect signature for a scientist: an emotional nature fed by higher learning, precision and the big questions, finding peace of mind through getting the details exactly right. And his Sagittarius Ascendant is the mask of the jovial explorer, the Marco Polo who wanders the outer solar system. Author, Kavli Prize laureate, Caltech professor: a Geminian mind that mapped the edge of everything.