Posted on 08/23/2005 4:39:11 PM PDT by neverdem
PASADENA, Calif. - Between feedings and diaper changes of his newborn daughter, Michael E. Brown may yet find an 11th planet.
Once conducted almost exclusively on cold, lonely nights, observational astronomy these days is often done under bright California sunshine.
When he has a few spare minutes, Dr. Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, downloads images taken during a previous night by a robotically driven telescope at Palomar Observatory 100 miles away. Each night, the telescope scans a different swath of sky, photographing each patch three times, spaced an hour and a half apart.
In any one of the photographs, a planet or some other icy body at the edge of the solar system looks just like a star. Unlike a star it moves between the exposures.
Dr. Brown's computer programs flag potential discovery candidates for him to inspect. He quickly dismisses almost all of them - double images caused by a bumping of the telescope, blurriness from whirls in the atmosphere or random noise.
Sometimes, like last Jan. 5, he spots a moving dot.
Dr. Brown had rewritten his software to look for slower-moving and more distant objects.
On that morning, he was sitting in his Caltech office - unremarkable university turf sparsely decorated with a not-full bottle of Jack Daniel's, a dragon mobile, a dinosaur toothbrush, a Mr. Potato Head and other toys and knickknacks that long predated parenthood - and re-examining images from nearly a year and a half earlier, Oct. 21, 2003.
The first several candidates offered by the computer were the usual garbled images.
Then he saw it: a bright, unmistakably round dot moving across the star field.
He did a quick calculation. Even if this new object reflected 100 percent of the sunlight that hit it - and...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Planet or not planet? I think the category "planet," like Bode's Law, is good as far as it goes, and has gone as far as it's going to go. Like Bode's Law, it's neat, but reality is messy, and sooner or later we discover that.
So, let's not call anything-else-we-find-past-Pluto a planet.
(Unless of course it's big, has moons, and a tidy orbit on the same plane as everybody else.)
I say if it causes silly arguments, it's NOT a planet.
2005FY9 is Easter Bunny? I thought that was 2004JFnK.
Drop it, Dr. Brown- we've already got too many planets.
If the telescope was pointed in the wrong direction, the lack of infrared light would not be an indication of anything.
Mercury should be a moon of Venus. Once this is done the plan will be complete to perfection as intended.
Pluto was obviously placed there to occupy our limited intellects so we won't have leisure time to seriously challenge the greater perfection.
Uhhhh, OK.
The fact that Mercury does NOT revolve around Venus is immaterial?
I would think one of the first requirements of a planet's moon is that it revolve around the parent planet.
Just whose "plan" are you referring to, anyway?
Either that, or the principle of Dadaism should be brought out of the attic, dusted off, and launched into the universe at large.
That would be redundant. The female bosom accomplished that goal.
Heck, if 1/10th of 1% of the attention given to women's breasts were given to the space program, we'd have had hot dog stands on Mars 20 years ago.
That's true. I would bet the reason we are concerned at all with outer space is what Veblen said about the leisure class.
"This Is Your Brain on Chocolate"
Yummy.
I'll post it as a separate thread, if you don't mind. I love chocolate threads. :)
This is just more men of science speculating about the sky with their ungodly viewing tubes. More than 9 planets? Total speculation. I remember real science with steam and pistons. Not this modern fantasy romance with the sky.
I have no plans to place Mercury in orbit around Venus. Any Terraforming plans for either will have to deal with their current orbits.
Wow! How cool is THAT? I get a whole planet!
Now the trick is getting there.
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