Pluto es Hijo de Pluta. <|:)~
Posted on 10/07/2002 1:47:30 PM PDT by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - It's the biggest thing found orbiting the sun since astronomers discovered Pluto in 1930, but please do not call it a planet. Call it Quaoar.
At half the size of Pluto, Quaoar -- pronounced KWAH-o-ar -- is a large celestial object, but not large enough to be a planet, one of its discoverers said in a telephone interview.
Quaoar's discovery also calls Pluto's planet status into question, said Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology, who first detected the object on June 4. His findings were presented on Monday to the American Astronomical Society's planetary science division meeting in Birmingham, Alabama.
Still, Quaoar acts a lot like a planet. Circling the Sun once every 288 years, Quaoar is located a billion miles beyond Pluto, in an area loaded with icy orbiting objects called the Kuiper Belt.
The Kuiper Belt is where comets originate, and astronomers have long believed it harbors planet-shaped rocks like Quaoar. Over the last decade, more than 500 Kuiper Belt objects have been detected.
"In any realistic definition of a planet, you would have to say something like, a planet is significantly bigger than everything around it," Brown said. "(Quaoar) is only 50 percent bigger than the next biggest Kuiper Belt object, to me it's not massive enough."
Quaoar's existence confirms that large orbiting bodies can reside at the very fringes of our solar system, and could give new insights on the primordial materials that formed planets like Earth some 5 billion years ago.
PLUTO'S PLANETARY STATUS QUESTIONED
It also supports the theory that Pluto is not a planet at all, but rather a Kuiper Belt object. Pluto has a similarly long orbit -- 248 years to make a complete trip around the sun -- but is far more eccentric than Quaoar seems to be.
Instead of going around the sun in the same plane as the rest of the planets, Pluto's orbit is tilted about 17 degrees. At one point, Pluto comes close enough to the sun to heat up the volatile substances on its surface, making it more reflective.
By contrast, Quaoar has a highly regular orbit, tilted only about 7.9 percent, never getting close to the sun. Faint ultraviolet radiation over the ages has slowly changed the surface of this rock-and-ice object to a dark, tar-like substance.
Scientists have long suspected that big, planet-shaped objects like Quaoar would be found in the Kuiper Belt; this is by far the largest they have discovered.
Brown said Quaoar's presence some 4 billion miles from Earth casts doubt on Pluto's planetary status.
"There are nostalgic forces that are operating that prefer to call it a planet," he said. "If Pluto were discovered today, there are very few people, other than the person who discovered it, who would want to call it a planet."
Brown said, however, that even if it is not a planet, Pluto is "an incredibly interesting body" that deserves to be studied.
Quaoar is named after the creation force of the Tongva tribe, the original inhabitants of the Los Angeles basin where Caltech is located. It can be detected just northwest of the constellation Scorpio.
Jimmy Hoffa.
Pluto es Hijo de Pluta. <|:)~
If you want to read more about this object, check here
(He makes a helluva lot more sense than the Koran does.)
Sheesh - he's got the Tinfoil franchise all locked up.
Anybody got any jumper cables I have to kick start my brain after reading this stuff. ROTFLMAO
Hell's bells! Amiri Baraka's "poetry" makes more sense than the MoonDemon Handbook.
If it is large enough for it's gravity to capture a moon then it is a planet.
It isn't the Planet X people were imagining past Neptune, but it is a planet.
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