Posted on 07/13/2015 5:45:36 PM PDT by radu
LAUREL, Md. — With less than a day to go before NASA's New Horizons mission zooms past Pluto, scientists reported on Monday that the dwarf planet isn't quite as dwarfish as they thought — in fact, it's the largest known solar system object beyond Neptune.
How large? Based on New Horizons imagery, its diameter is 2,370 kilometers (1,473 miles), plus or minus 20 kilometers (12.4 miles). That makes it almost 30 miles wider than Eris, the dwarf planet whose discovery led to Pluto's downfall as the "ninth planet" back in 2006. Eris' diameter has been measured to be 2,326 kilometers (1,445 miles), plus or minus 12 kilometers (7.5 miles).
*snip*
Stern said New Horizons' observations also confirmed that Pluto has a polar ice cap, and that the composition of that cap is different and more methane-rich than the dark bands and splotches of material ringing Pluto's equator. The piano-sized probe's instruments also have detected atoms of nitrogen escaping from the dwarf planet's atmosphere, Stern said.
*snip*
Because Pluto is almost 3 billion miles away, it will take 4.5 hours of travel time at the speed of light for the all-clear signal to reach Earth. If and when that moment comes, sometime around 9 p.m. ET Tuesday, it will set off a cheering, jumping-for-joy celebration at APL's Mission Operations Center.
"Tomorrow evening's going to be a little bit of drama," Stern said Monday.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
Even smaller than Mickey Rooney.....
BTW apropos of nothing at all, Voyager is 111.44 AU from Earth at present, with a total one-way transmit time of 15h 26m 51s.
If you want to get an even better feel for how vast the distances are in the solar system, check out Celestia, which I mentioned above. Limit yourself to light speed when travelling around the Solar System. The Solar System is huge. The universe is huger. (grin) Using celestia, you can set your speed to 1AU/sec. That means it would only take you 1 second to get from Earth to the Sun (and get a really bad sunburn). It only takes about 32 seconds to get to Pluto at 1AU/sec. Now, travelling at that same speed, head to Alpha Centauri. Be prepared to wait a while.
186282.397051 miles/sec
Listening to the radio today, I heard the newscaster say that the ashes of Pluto's discoverer where aboard the spacecraft.
What a coincidence! That's EXACTLY how long it takes "conservatives" to go liberal once they get to Washington, DC!
Did you round that?
It can get really interesting when you start to try to convert things like force or power in archaic terms.
It’s kind of lame we’re still in the Trivial Pursuit phase of manned space exploration. Back in the day, I thought we’d be terraforming the moon and forming colonies on Mars by now.
“Since Einstein introduced special relativity, the theory and the special status it gives to the speed of light have appeared iron-clad.
Until now, that is. Scientists working on the OPERA experiment at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland beamed neutrinos 454 miles (730 kilometers) underground to Italy, and calculated how fast they made the trip. Shockingly, the neutrinos appeared to beat light speed by 60 billionths of a second. The finding appears to fly in the face of the last 106 years of physics.
“Our understanding hasn’t evolved at all, we’ve been doing extremely precise tests of special relativity since the very first days,” said Ben Monreal, an assistant professor of physics at University of California, Santa Barbara. “Special relativity has been passing tests with flying colors for over 100 years now. That is why this result is so surprising and unexpected.”
If the finding of the OPERA experiment does pan out, the implications are much more mind-bending. Under special relativity, if something travels faster than the speed of light, it goes backwards in time. Such a proposition could interfere with the basic rule that cause precedes effect, called causality.
“The reason a lot of physicists are very unmoved by these claims is that it could make causality itself very problematic,” Galison said. In other words, it raises the prospect of time travel.
There is another issue too. Einstein introduced the speed of light as a mathematical constant, c. If neutrinos can indeed exceed the speed of light, then c loses its special status, giving rise to a host of other problems elsewhere in physics, where c has been used in calculations, such as the famous formula E=mc^2. [Warped Physics: 10 Effects of Faster-Than-Light Discovery]
“For all of these reasons, people are going to need extra evidence to conclude that it is going to hold up,” Galison said.”
http://www.livescience.com/16248-speed-light-special-relativity-neutrinos.html
Sounds like a cool site. I’ll download it and play with it.
I heard something about his ashes being on the spacecraft yesterday and thought, “How cool is that?!!” Very fitting.
Ya got a point. Guess I’d better start thinking about what kind of sign to put together so I can join the march! ;-)
You and me both. The way things have turned out has been a huge disappointment.
That looks interesting. I’ll have to check it out tomorrow. Time for bed.
The science isn’t settled?
3 billion miles...The speed of light, for those that don’t know, is 186,000 miles per second!
All of a sudden....that seems so slow.
...
You’re right. It is slow.
From Wikipedia: In September 2011, OPERA researchers observed muon neutrinos apparently traveling faster than the speed of light.[6] In February and March 2012, OPERA researchers blamed this result on a loose fibre optic cable connecting a GPS receiver to an electronic card in a computer. On 16 March 2012, a report announced that an independent experiment in the same laboratory, also using the CNGS neutrino beam, but this time the ICARUS detector, found no discernible difference between the speed of a neutrino and the speed of light.
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