Giant Asteroid Breaks 200 Year Old Record

Renobulus writes: "The BBC has this story about a giant asteroid orbiting near Pluto. This article also talks about Pluto's role as a planet in our solar system. This asteroid could help prove scientists belief that Pluto is only a minor planet."

Comments

Re:how does this change plutos role?

[JBowz15]

How does this change Pluto's role?

Well, Pluto will no longer be eligible for the lead planet Oscar. From now on, it will have to make do with the category of best supporting planet.

Virtual Telescope

[Alien54]

The history of the solar system seems like it was a lot more complex than people have been thinking.

Pluto is seen as a escaped moon of Neptune.

Evidence suggests that the Solar systyem underwent major changes about 65 million years ago. The dinosaurs seem to have been minor collateral damage.

Mars, for example, has a whole bunch of craters that cover just one side of the planet. The other half is pretty clean. Sounds like something went BOOM.

So oddities like asteroids orbiting pluto etc are par for the course.

What I find interesting is that The observations were carried out at the European Southern Observatory with the world's first operational "virtual telescope", Astrovirtel.

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I think I'll call it...

[Glytch]

Bob.

Re:Mars Craters

[Alien54]

Which side of mars is that? are you suggesting the whole exploding 5th planet thing? having craters on half the planet would mean that asteroids chose to strike mars between certain hours every day.. and not during other hours.. I'm not sure why but this doesn't quite make sense to me...

Not a problem. You can search on the string:

line dichotomy mars craters

and get all kinds of links at google. The boundary of the crater disparity is at about 35 - 40 degres angle to the equator. There are these links that are interesting:

* http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/online.bks/mars/cha p12.htm - Part of a book online - describe the conventional view of the dichotomy

This paper says that the impacts did not take place on a on a repeating basis, but was part of a one time event. Probably 65 million years ago. There are other pieces of the puzzle that tie into this, available from good scientists, on the web.
* http://www.enterprisemission.com/tides.htm which is from the other side of the fence, but is not badly written.

There are a lot of PDFs for download as well from many research papers.

Remarkably, at a June, 2001 Earth Systems Processes Global Meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland, astrobiologist Bruce Runnegar of the University of California in Los Angeles presented some striking independent evidence that "something" major happened in the solar system ~65 million years ago. Runnegar and his colleagues had previously identified evidence of a 400,000-year cycle in ancient ocean sediments, indicating changes in Earth's climate corresponding to natural fluctuations in its orbit. To probe this cycle's influence on Earth's climate over the past 100 million years, Runnegar's team constructed computer models based on known variations in planetary orbits, their proximity to the Sun and their interactive perturbations. In running the models, they found that the known fluctuations of the solar system's dynamics remained constant going back to 65 million years ago. Then, to their surprise, the frequency of perturbations to the orbits of the inner planets suddenly changed

This was on CNN, etc at the beginning of the summer. Simple searches for "Runnegar" yeild good results on CNN, and in general. for example:
http://cnn.com/2001/TECH/space/07/05/dinosaur.wobb le/index.html

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