Controversy over the discovery of Haumea

Haumea was the first of all the current^[update] IAU-recognized dwarf planets to be discovered since Pluto in 1930. However, its naming and formal acceptance as a dwarf planet were delayed by several years due to controversy over who should receive credit for discovering it. A California Institute of Technology (Caltech) team headed by Michael E. Brown first noticed the object, but a Spanish team headed by José Luis Ortiz Moreno were the first to announce it, and so normally would receive credit.

However, Brown suspects the Spanish team of fraud, by using Caltech observations to make their discovery, while the Ortiz team accuses the American team of political interference with the International Astronomical Union (IAU). The IAU officially recognized the Californian team's proposed name Haumea over the name proposed by the Spanish team, Ataecina, in September 2008.

On December 28, 2004, Mike Brown and his team discovered Haumea on images they had taken with the 1.3 m SMARTS Telescope at the Palomar Observatory in the United States on May 6, 2004, while looking for what he hoped would be the tenth planet. The Caltech discovery team used the nickname "Santa" among themselves, because they had discovered Haumea on December 28, 2004, just after Christmas. However, it was clearly too small to be a planet, because it was significantly smaller than Pluto, and Brown did not announce the discovery. Instead he kept it under wraps, along with several other large trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), pending additional observation to better determine their natures. When his team discovered Haumea's moons, they realized that Haumea was more rocky than other TNOs, and that its moons were mostly ice. They then discovered a small family of nearby icy TNOs, and concluded that these were remnants of Haumea's icy mantle, which had been blasted off by a collision. On July 7, 2005, while he was finishing the paper describing the discovery, Brown's daughter Lilah was born, which delayed the announcement further. On July 20, the Caltech team published an online abstract of a report intended to announce the discovery at a conference the following September. In this Haumea was given the code K40506A.

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