.....VP Biden is Ready to go
"Barack is sending me on a mission to check out the asteroid named after me...(Singing) The pink space rock, the sun's friendliest plan-et... "
Posted on 03/27/2014 1:16:15 PM PDT by bestintxas
It's official name is "2012 VP-113." But astronomers have nicknamed the newly discovered planet-like object on the edge of the solar system "Biden."
Smiling Joe, nick-named for Vice President Joe Biden, is 7 billion miles away from the sun and has its own celestial body, The Washington Post reported. Biden is quite small at 280 miles in diameter, and scientists say it could be dwarf planet. Pluto, which was deemed a dwarf planet in 2006 has a diameter of 1,430 miles. By contrast, Earth is 7,900 miles across.
It has a temperature of minus 430 degrees Fahrenheit and is likely covered in ice.
The discovery was reported in the science journal Nature by Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington and Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii.
It was spotted from a ground telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile in November 2012.
They say that "Biden" could help explain how the solar system was formed.
"It goes to show that there's something we don't know about our solar system, and it's something important," said Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii.
"We're starting to get a taste of what's out beyond what we consider the edge."
It is in a region called the Oort Cloud, which is 30 to 50 astronomical units (AU) away from the Kuiper Belt where Pluto is located.
A similar planetary object was discovered in 2004 called Sedna, which is also in the Oort Cloud and is 76 AU from the Sun. Biden is 80 AU away. Sedna can stray 1,000 AU from the Sun, but Biden never goes more than 452 AU away.
The fact that it seems so bound by the Sun's gravitational pull is also a mystery, Sheppard told Nature.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsmax.com ...
At first glance I thought it said “plant-like object” and that made sense, too.
No identifiable intelligence there, so it’s a good name.
Of no importance and devoid of anything but temperature...sounds like the perfect name.
Is it a big flaming ball of gas?
they’ve discovered something very dense.
...because it’s so dense?
I think absolute zero is actually -273 Celsius, or about -460 Fahrenheit.
I'd say more so a Dummy planet, gravitationally bound to another dummy object ...
Slow Joe has the computing power of a box of rocks at absolute zero!
” But astronomers have nicknamed the newly discovered planet-like object on the edge of the solar system “Biden.””
Because it’s spinning off it’s axis...
We'll call it Biden! Genius!
Named Biden, because like Biden, it out there!
.. kinda describes ol’ Plagiarizing Plugs pretty well, huh?
Just wondering, where is Planet Ronald W. Reagan? I think planet Obama is getting the run around from planet Putin.
Because he and it are dim....
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