Slashdot Mirror
New Moon of Uranus Discovered
paulnuyu writes "A group of international astronomers have found a new moon orbitting Uranus. This brings Uranus's total moon count to 21. The newly discovered moon is speculated to be a remaining fragment from a collision that occured when the solar sytem was still forming."
it seems that mars, venus, & mercury all have few or no moons, while on the other side of the asteroid belt, you have planets (sans pluto & really small planets) with moons in the teens to twenty in numbers. why is this?
is most of the space matter in our solar system stuck in the L4, L5 points, and thus doesn't find it's way into the inner regions of the solar system? or is it just that the enormous mass of the farther out planets seems to attract more mass & thus has a higher chance of a rock entering orbit (as a result of a larger margin of error for stable orbit due to the size of the planet). it just seems to be more than coincidental....
or is it just a possiblity that these planets have a particularly large asteroid in an unstable orbit just long enough to discover and document, before it a) leaves orbit or b) gets sucked into the atmosphere?
moox. for a new generation.
You know, on second thought, screw that crap. This joke never gets old. The more I think about "21 moons on Uranus" the more I crack up. Pun intended. Just allow yourself to laugh at this, and maybe even let it lighten up the rest of your day. It has mine.
I also can't wait until a story comes along about how scientists "find" a small chance that there could be frozen water, which could indicate the slim chance of life. In turn, there'll be all the boring threads about the seti@home project and distributed computing to look forward to--certainly more pertinent than this post of course, but what the hell...
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
I used to think it'd be cool to have more than one obviously visible moon in the sky. 21 may be a bit much but it'd certainly make the sky interesting.
Thinking about it, 21 significant orbital bodies accompanying a planet the size of our own would create nightmares for people trying to predict the tides, and we'd have to get some pretty serious seismic activity from any significant alignment.
Even worse some form of collision is almost inevitable over the full expanse of time, moons ricocheting like billiards around the sky [joking].
Give a lot of options for moon bases too - countries could argue over who gets the biggest or best situated. I guess we'd lose the use of the L points as a side effect though (or there'd be L orbits weaving monstrously complicated paths though the orbits of the moons)...
It's not that I'm Anti-American - I'm Pro-Freedom
The moon ... is between six and 12 miles across.
Wow. In 100 years we'll have space stations that big. it's hardly Moon (x00miles+) size is it? Y'know theres a golf ball floating arround the Earth's moon - a moon of a moon?
Professor: I call it "The smelloscope". Try it!
Fry:Just don't point it at Uranus..
Professor:Very funny Fry, we changed that planets name years ago just to get rid of that stupid joke.
Fry:What did you call it?
Professor:Urectum.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
Does knowledge about a 21st moon of a remote planet really increase our understanding of anything?
I know. As a matter of fact, it does. If we only had a handful of moons to look at, we'd never really know to what extent the trends we see are just statistics of a few and to what extent they reflect real underlying physical processes at work. Each additional moon adds to the statistics. Individually they aren't wildly important. Collectively, larger numers of moons lead to better theories of where this little guys come from. Brett Gladman, who received the annual Urey Prize for the Division for Planetary Sciences this year, gave a talk about irregular satellites. Having been in the audience, I can tell you that having many moons on there made the trends a lot more believeable than had there been only, say, 5 data points.
If you're asking if each new moon is worth of a headline or even a Slashdot story, I'd agree that it really isn't. But if you're wondering if we should bother looking for these moons, I'd have to say yes, absolutely.