* Astronomy

Planet hunter Michael Brown will discuss his discoveries at the outer edge of the solar system in a free public lecture at UC Santa Cruz on Thursday, May 24. Brown's talk, "Pluto, Eris, and the Dwarf Planets of the Solar System," will take place at 7:30 p.m. in the Humanities Lecture Hall on the UCSC campus. The event is part of the Halliday Lecture Series presented by UCSC's Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics and UC Observatories/Lick Observatory.

Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, has been scanning the skies for planets beyond Pluto for the past seven years. In 2005, after a search of about half the sky and the discovery of dozens of objects almost the size of Pluto, his team discovered Eris, the largest object found in the solar system in the past 150 years and the first new candidate for planethood to be discovered since Pluto.

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