Posted on 07/29/2005 3:35:26 PM PDT by Right Wing Professor
Add a 10th planet to the solar system - or possibly subtract one.
Astronomers announced today that they have found a lump of rock and ice that is larger than Pluto and the farthest known object in the solar system. The discovery will likely rekindle debate over the definition of "planet" and whether Pluto should still be regarded as one.
The new object - as yet unnamed - is currently 9 billion miles away from the Sun, or about three times Pluto's current distance from the Sun. But its 560-year orbit also brings it as close as 3.3 billion miles. Pluto's elliptical orbit ranges between 2.7 billion and 4.6 billion miles.
The astronomers do not have an exact size for the new planet, but its brightness and distance tell them that it is at least as large as Pluto.
"It is guaranteed bigger than Pluto," said Michael E. Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at Caltech, who led the team that made the discovery. "Even if it were 100 percent reflective, it would be larger than Pluto. It can't be more than 100 percent reflective."
The discovery was made Jan. 8 using a 48-inch telescope at Palomar Observatory. The astronomers, however, were not able to see it using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which looks at infrared light. That means the planet is less than 1,800 miles in diameter.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Three new Prison Colonies.
Could well be so, but if so, Sky and Telescope isn't immune.
["Even if it were 100 percent reflective, it would be larger than Pluto. It can't be more than 100 percent reflective."]
Maybe it shines by it's own light and it ISN'T larger than Pluto. :^)
Ping
Not likely. 2003 EL61 was discovered yesterday, and these other two objects were published in response to 2003 EL61 today.
2003 UB313 is interesting in that it is a lot more planet-like than either Pluto or these other objects. It is significantly larger and is not in a resonant Neptunian orbit. However, it also has an inclination of 44 degrees.
Something else worth noting about these objects: they all give off noticeable water spectra. They may be big, but they are also apparently covered in water ice. This has screwed up the albido estimates used for initially sizing them, making them seem a bit larger than they are.
If they find one shaped like a donut, we'll know Larry Niven had the inside track.
All of the Kuiper objects are inconceivably cold. If we are ever to benefit from them, (and isn't it encouraging that we don't have to leave the Solar System to have new planets swim into our ken?), we will have to do one of two things: Develop the ability to deal with cold on an almost Absolute scale, or develop robots that can do so.
Extreme cold materials science would appear to be a growth industry.
Name them Huey,Duey and Looey!!!!
LOL. Or hows about Moe?
Okay, I'm confused. At least once or twice in the past 30 years, someone has announced finding a "tenth" planet. Shouldn't we be up to 12 by now? What happened to the other new planets?
"...The discoverers of this object have a name but they have not released it. If you look at the end of this press release there is a link to a page Caltech. If you follow a link on that page about this discovery it has the name http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/planetlila/index.html. So, is the name suggested for this planet "Lila"? Answer: it is the name of Mike Brown's newborn daughter..."
"...How big is Sedna? In our discovery images, we see only a point of light. We can't directly measure the size of Sedna from this point. The light that we see has travelled from the sun, been reflected off the surface of Sedna, and come back to us where we can see it in the images like the discovery images below. So a small icy object and a large coal-covered object, for example, would both look about the same brightness in the discovery images, because both objects could reflect about the same amount of sunlight.
We can measure Sedna's size using a thermal telescope, which measures the heat coming from the surface. We know how far away Sedna is, so we know that the surface temperature is about 400 degrees below zero Farenheit. A large object of that temperature will give off much more heat than a small object of that temperature (just light a match and a bonfire are the same temperature, but a bonfire keeps you much warmer at night because it is so much bigger). In collaboration with Frank Bertoldi at the MPIfR Bonn, we used the 30 meter diameter IRAM telscope, and in collaboration with John Stansberry at the University of Arizona and Bill Reach at the Spitzer Science Certer, we used the Spitzer Space Telescope. Sedna was too small to be detected in either. This tells us that Sedna is at most about 1800 km in diameter: about halfway in size between Pluto and the largest known Kuiper belt object Quaoar. Even though all we know for certain is that Sedna is smaller than 1800 km, we have evidence which suggests that the size might be pretty close to this number. We are virtually certain that the size is larger than the 1250 km size of Quaoar, though this object has shown many unexpected characteristics, so we can't completely rule out a smaller size.
For astronomers, apparently there are no numbers in between "10" and "billions and billions."
Ducking for cover.
How about "Parts Unknown"? :-)
Either that or we'll have a system with thousands of "planets".
Sorry Pluto. Your lofty planet status is doomed.
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