X-Planets ( extrasolar planets, and the various planets X )

Our Tiny Little Minds ^ | various | self et al

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New Scientist for Dec 14, 2002, had a cover story for Planet X:

The Hunt for Planet X
by Heather Couper
and Nigel Henbest

Just over a year after the New Horizons' launch, it will... pick up enough velocity to reach Pluto, possibly as early as July 2015... In their new research, Melita and Brunini have explored three possible reasons for the Kuiper Cliff... The third possibility is that the region beyond was brushed clear by the gravity of Planet X... the KBO orbits they have investigated so far fit in best with the influence of a Planet X.

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Okay, this is the usable version, I'm quittin' now, I mean it.

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regarding a certain kind of troll:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1507383/posts?page=23#23

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alas, it's a dead link, noticed the file, and it's from 2001:

Astronomical Fiction
by Frank C. Jordan
Natural History
October 1935

There is a pleasant fiction that from the bottom of a deep well or a lofty chimney in the daytime a bit of dark sky may be seen, spangled with stars. A very bright star might be seen, but certainly no others. The writer of a story had the hero fall into a deep pit, apparently without any serious injury to life or limb, but he remained there through the light hours of the day without rescue. His one ray of hope was one bright star which remained directly overhead all day. A very accommodating star. The writer was one of the 4999 out of every 5000 persons who do not know that the stars move across the sky.

[Army Air Corps]

Gotta remember to beware of this guy...

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Good advice...

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John Anthony West and his ex-wife are selling their house, located at 667 Manorville Rd. Saugerties, NY 12477, and asking $450,000. Story here.

I'd gone to his site just to see what if anything is new. The Conference on Precession and Ancient Knowledge 2007 was two weekends ago (previously discussed here and in the current topic), and is available as paid mp3 d/ls and on (kinda pricey) DVDs.

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The New Worlds: Extrasolar Planets by Fabienne Casoli and Therese Encrenaz

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We've had a little dry spell, off and on, since the iMac's analog board died and I've had to resort to my older machine, moving files, flash drives, and whatnot. Here's something that doesn't warrant its own topic, but it a) related (planets X) and b) interesting. It's a weblog, really:

Mike Brown's Planets
Saturday, December 22, 2007

A weekly column from astronomer Mike Brown on space and science, planets (full and dwarf), the sun and the moon and the stars, and the joys and frustrations of search, discovery, and life... Mike Brown is an astronomer at Caltech in Pasadena. He is best known for the discovery of Eris, the object beyond and bigger than Pluto, whose discovery led to the demotion of Pluto from a real planet to a dwarf planet. But he does a lot of other things, too. And he thinks dwarf planets are pretty cool... Tomorrow, if the weather holds, I'm going to go outside with my binoculars and see exactly where the sun sets again. Because I do this every year, and because I can look up the precise date and time of the solstice, and because I know that the earth will continue to go around the sun with the same tilt for my entire lifetime, I know what will happen: the sun will have moved away from the anonymous office building and finally started moving right again. The day will get imperceptibly longer. Really, there is not much suspense in what will happen, just a certain reassuring inevitability. But if I didn't know these things and didn't have confidence in the inevitable, I can imagine myself holding my breath as the last rays of the sun were shooting out and I was trying to see just where it was setting. I stopped yesterday, but is it really turning around today? Will the days really get longer again? Will my crops (well, ok, my vegetable garden) come back to life?

Weekly?

[singing] Mike Brown's planets lie a mould'ring in the grave...

Okay, he's not a poet. He's a pretty darned good astronomer.

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Vague hopes and just happenings
Mike Brown (from his ‘blog, Mike Brown’s Planets)
http://www.mikebrownsplanets.com/2008/01/vague-hopes-and-just-happenings.html

[snip] The survey of the skies that led to the discovery of Eris and the other dwarf planets ended more than a year ago when we finally had scanned almost all of the skies that can be seen from our telescope at Palomar Observatory. But after spending most of a decade searching the skies for newer and larger bodies, it was hard to actually quit... From our discovery of Sedna, which spends most of its time far far away from the sun, we realized that there might well be many many objects out at those distances, and that some of them could be quite large indeed. By “large” here, I am talking about something perhaps even the size of Mercury or of Mars... it plausibly could be and that no one has ever done a thorough search... a Mars-sized body orbiting at perhaps twice the distance of Eris... If we really did discover such a thing it would probably re-light the planet definition fire, and we would all get to watch astronomers begin arguing once again. [end]

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Dave Jewitt: NAS Sackler

Sackler Colloquium 2007 January 5-6

The NAS Sackler Colloquium on "EXPLORATION AND EVOLUTION OF PLANETARY SYSTEMS" was a two-day event at the NAS building in Irvine, California. Most of the talks were very good, I thought.

You can see them here.

My talk on the Kuiper belt and related bodies is on-line here as a flash-player movie: here.

Crank up the volume, click the link and sit back.

(and, as the www site suggests, if you have any trouble viewing the movies, contact the National Academy of Sciences people at sackler@nas.edu)

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Comet	Jewitt	Kuiper	Irregular Satellites

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The World Question Center 2004

Zangger's First Law

Most scientific breakthroughs are nothing else than the discovery of the obvious.

Zangger's Second Law

Truly great science is always ahead of its time.

Although there seems to be a slight contradiction in my laws, historical evidence proves them right:

• The Hungarian surgeon Ignaz Semmelweiss in 1847 reduced the death rate in his hospital from twelve to two percent, simply by washing hands between operations -- a concept that today would be advocated by a four year old child. When Semmelweiss urged his colleagues to introduce hygiene to the operating rooms, they had him committed to a mental hospital where he eventually died.
• The German meteorologist Alfred Wegener discovered in 1913 what every ten year old looking at a globe will notice immediately: That the Atlantic coasts of the African and South American continents have matching contours and thus may have been locked together some time ago. The experts needed sixty more years to comprehend the concept.
• When Louis Pasteur stated that bacteria could cause disease, colleagues treated the idea as "an absurd fantasy'!
• The theories of the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud were called "a case for the police" during a neurologists' congress in Hamburg in 1910.
• Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, only eight years before Orville and Wilbur Wright left the ground in an aeroplane, remarked: "Machines that are heavier than air will never be able to fly!"
• German physicists Erwin Schrödinger's PhD thesis, in which he first introduced his famous equation, was initially rejected.
• When the Spanish nobleman de Satuola discovered the Late Ice Age painted cave at Altamira, established scholars described him as a forger and a cheat.
• The decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs by Jean Francois Champollion in 1822 was still rejected by scholar twenty years after his death.
• And when Johann Karl Fuhlrott discovered the bones of a Neanderthal in a cave near Duesseldorf in 1856, the president of the German Society of Anthropology considered it a bow-legged, Mongolian Cossack with rickets, who had been lucky enough to survive multiple head injuries, but who, during a campaign by Russian forces against France in 1814, had been wounded, and (stark naked) had crawled into a cave, where he died.
• Heinrich Schliemann's excavation of Bronze Age Mycenae and Tiryns in Greece was considered by English archaeologists in The Times' as the remains of some obscure barbarian tribe' from the Byzantine period. In particular, the so-called prehistoric palace in Tiryns was labelled "the most remarkable hallucination of an unscientific enthusiast that has ever appeared in literature."

Scientific breakthroughs will always be held hostage to the lag needed to overcome existing beliefs. Lucius Annaeus Seneca realized this already two thousand years ago, when he said: "The time will come, when our successors will be surprised that we did not know such obvious things."

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Pan-STARRS
panoramic survey telescope rapid response system

http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/faculty/jewitt/papers/ANTO/Jewitt.2003.pdf

http://www.noao.edu/meetings/system2/media/hodapp-pan-starrs.pdf

http://pan-starrs.ifa.hawaii.edu/public/

http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/051221_pan-starrs.html

Action Plan For Killer Asteroids
BBC | February 17, 2007 | Jonathan Fildes
Posted on 02/17/2007 8:31:38 AM PST by Loyalist
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1786540/posts

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these three titles were linked by David Jewitt here.

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Trans-Neptunian Objects and Comets: Swiss Society for Astrophysics and Astronomy by D. Jewitt, A. Morbidelli, and H. Rauer ed by K. Altwegg and W. Benz	The Solar System Beyond Neptune ed by M. A. Barucci, H. Boehnhardt, D. P. Cruikshank, and A. Morbidelli	Beyond Pluto: exploring the outer limits of the solar system by John Davies

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Pluto Petition

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Scientists Say Knicks Are No Longer a Basketball Team
The Borowitz Report
Sunday, September 10, 2006

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Mike Brown has submitted a paper to Science, regarding a discovery he thinks he's made regarding Saturn's moon Titan.

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Top 10 Exoplanets: Weird Worlds
in a Galaxy Not So Far Away:
Scientific American Slideshow

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Scientific American Top Ten Exoplanets -- it's got eleven graphics, and I didn't want to tax your bandwidth more than I have tonight. :')

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:') Since it *has* been a while...