A Huntsville, Alabama native, Mike Brown attended and graduated from Virgil I. Grissom High School in 1983. Four years later, he earned his A.B. in physics from Princeton University, where he was a member of the Princeton Tower Club and completed his graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley where he earned an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in astronomy.Brown is famous for his surveys for distant objects orbiting the Sun. His team has found many objects, including Eris, which may be larger than Pluto, and is one of a number of dwarf planets in the Solar System; 90377 Sedna, a planetoid thought to be the first inner Oort cloud object; and 90482 Orcus.His team also informally named Eris and its moon Dysnomia with the names Xena and Gabrielle, respectively, after the two main characters of _Xena: Warrior Princess (TV Series 1995-2001)_.