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Solar System Fossils Found By Hubble
segment writes "Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered three of the faintest and smallest objects ever detected beyond Neptune. Each lump of ice and rock is roughly the size of Philadelphia and orbits just beyond Neptune and Pluto, where they may have rested since the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago. The objects reside in a ring-shaped region called the Kuiper Belt, which houses a swarm of icy rocks that are leftover building blocks, or "planetesimals," from the solar system's creation. The results of the search were announced by a group led by Gary Bernstein of the University of Pennsylvania at a meeting of NASA's Division of Planetary Sciences in Monterey, Calif."
Can we invade them for oil? take over their population, oust their government and continue to wage war on their surface for another decade?
no?
pfft. what use are they then?
"The three small objects the astronomers spotted - given the prosaic names 2003 BF91, 2003 BG91 and 2003 BH91 - range in size from 15 to 28 miles
Hence the size of Philadelphia varies from 15 to 28 miles. Oh, and Philadelphia is a also an irregular sphere.
I would fond it interesting how the scientists can be sure that there objects have originated when our solar system was created. Wouldn't it be also possible that the asteroids traveled vast distances, having originated in stellar events far away, and eventually gor captured by sub's gravity? This would be even more interesting for us, wouldn't it. I just would like to know if it would be feasible to launch a probe to one of those objects, as to look of what materials it is composed. But can you hit an object that small across this distance and, even more land a probe safely there?
".Sig Stealer" was here
Excuse me, Sir :
In Armageddon, the meteor was "as big as Texas", now, this one is "roughly the size of Philadelphia".
Now, for the non-US guys here, could you translate ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Contact: Steve Bradt bradt@pobox.upenn.edu 215-573-6604 University of Pennsylvania
Solar system 'fossils' discovered by Hubble Telescope
PHILADELPHIA -- Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered three of the faintest and smallest objects ever detected beyond Neptune. Each lump of ice and rock is roughly the size of Philadelphia and orbits just beyond Neptune and Pluto, where they may have rested since the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago. The objects reside in a ring-shaped region called the Kuiper Belt, which houses a swarm of icy rocks that are leftover building blocks, or "planetesimals," from the solar system's creation.
The results of the search were announced by a group led by Gary Bernstein of the University of Pennsylvania at today's meeting of NASA's Division of Planetary Sciences in Monterey, Calif.
The study's big surprise is that so few Kuiper Belt members were discovered. With Hubble's exquisite resolution, Bernstein and his co-workers expected to find at least 60 Kuiper Belt members as small as 10 miles in diameter -- but only three were discovered. "Discovering many fewer Kuiper Belt Objects than was predicted makes it difficult to understand how so many comets appear near Earth since many comets were thought to originate in the Kuiper Belt," said Bernstein, associate professor of physics and astronomy at Penn. "This is a sign that perhaps the smaller planetesimals have been shattered into dust by colliding with each other over the past few billion years." Bernstein and his colleagues used Hubble to look for planetesimals that are much smaller and fainter than can be seen from ground-based telescopes. Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys was pointed at a region in the constellation Virgo over a 15-day period in January and February. A bank of 10 computers on the ground worked for six months searching for faint moving spots in the Hubble images. The three small objects the astronomers spotted - given the prosaic names 2003 BF91, 2003 BG91 and 2003 BH91 - range in size from 15 to 28 miles and are the smallest objects ever found beyond Neptune. At their current locations, these objects are a billion times fainter than the dimmest objects visible to the naked eye. But an icy body of this size that escapes the Kuiper Belt to wander near the sun can become visible from Earth as a comet as the wandering body starts to evaporate and form a surrounding cloud. Astronomers are probing the Kuiper Belt because the region offers a window on the early history of our solar system. The planets formed more than 4 billion years ago from a cloud of gas and dust that surrounded the infant sun. Microscopic bits of ice and dust stuck together to form lumps that grew from pebbles to boulders to city- or continent-sized planetesimals. The known planets and moons are the result of collisions between planetesimals. In most of the solar system, all of the planetesimals have either been absorbed into planets or ejected into interstellar space, destroying the traces of the early days of the solar system. Around 1950, Gerard Kuiper and Kenneth Edgeworth proposed that in the region beyond Neptune there are no planets capable of ejecting the leftover planetesimals, so there should be a zone, now called the Kuiper Belt, filled with small, icy bodies. Despite many years of searching, the first was not discovered until 1992; nearly 1,000 have since been discovered from telescopes on the ground. Most astronomers now believe that Pluto, discovered in 1930, is in fact a member of the Kuiper Belt. Astronomers now use the Kuiper Belt to learn about the history of the solar system, much as paleontologists use fossils to study early life. Each event that affected the outer solar system -- such as possible gravitational disturbances from passing stars or long-vanished planets -- is frozen into the properties of the Kuiper Belt members that we see today.
If the Hubble telescope could search the entire sky, it would find perhaps a half-million pla
"I have the same issue with people like you who assume God didn't create everything."
Or people like the original poster who can twist any subject into a platform to bash people who do not have the same religious views as the poster.
So that's where Darl McBride and the rest of SCO are from!
Comets are as much the remnants of the formation of teh solar system as the belt is. In fact, I would go as far as to say that the belt is in face a string of comets whicha re being held in place by centripetal forces. Asteroid belts and such tend to hang around for that very reason. It's the natural order of things. Everything is in a constant state of transition and by definition, once it reaches a more stable state, it is inclined not to leave that state, but remain in a state of stability. Thus, when the comets which reach the state of being in this belt, they are in a mroe stable state and tend to stay in it, compelled by the centripetal force to orbit regularly. Other comets which don't reach that state are more likely to collide with planets and such, since the stable belt is mainly stable due to the non-interferance of other spatial bodies such as the gravity of planets and their moons or other comets or meteors, asteroidsa and the other celestial "brik-a-brak" floating around in space. So when they are in the belt, they tend to remain in the belt and not to collide and be subsequently absorbed by planets and such. That's why we see these belts. They have stood the test of time. There are so many comets out there that if it weren't for these glimpses into the huge belts that lie in and outside of our solar system, we could nearly assume that the comets are as dense everywhere. Of course, that's not true because planets and moons invariably have gravity which attracts them, which is why you'll see quite a large number of craters on planets and very few regular comets which come close to them. Maybe that's why it's such a big occasion for us, when a regular comet like Halley's comet. Well, that's just my 0.02 money units.
This could be bad news for the New Horizons (Pluto-Kuiper Belt) mission, which plans to visit some as-yet undiscovered Kuiper belt objects after swinging by Pluto - but if there are a lot fewer than first thought..
Discovering many fewer Kuiper Belt Objects than was predicted makes it difficult to understand how so many comets appear near Earth since many comets were thought to originate in the Kuiper Belt,..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
Each lump of ice and rock is roughly the size of Philadelphia
:P
Does the Google calculator convert between Philadelphia's and metric units for us non-Americans?
...Each lump of ice and rock is roughly the size of Philadelphia...
Yeah but how much would they weigh at sea level in metric elephants?
The objects reside in a ring-shaped region called the Kuiper Belt, which houses a swarm of icy rocks that are leftover building blocks...
In other news, Bob Vila will be demonstrating how to build a solar system from scrap in his series This Old House. Also, a hotel chain in Sweden has threatened to sue God for patent infringement citing illegal use of icy blocks for construction.
Desi Noise, Live!
os trabalhos e os dias: http://zmoreira.net
Not remnants of the BigBang, remnants of the first days of our solar system.
The intresting part of the search was the discovery of lots of big icy rocks there compared to the relatively very low amounts of small ones.
Its not yet known why there is a lack of the small rocks..
First, creation of the solar system happened about 10 billion year later than the big bang. Second, planets do not just magically appear, they slowly form when smaller particles and rocks lump together because of either gravity or impact. Therefore small blocks of "ice" can be considered building blocks.
karma capped
The reminants of the big bang (or universal black hole collapse, as I like to think of it... but that's nonstandard) would be the background radiation, nothing more.
After the big bang, you had the cooling out of our different forces, the formation of subatomic particles, the formation of Hydrogen atoms, and then the formation of giant stars.
Those stars all exploded long ago, creating the wealth of other elements that we see today. Life may or may not have formed at that time, but if it did, it is my guess that all such lifeforms would have been destroyed in the supernovaes of the first generation of stars. Our solar system formed from the exploded remains of one or more of those.
All of which makes these fossils impressively old, the moreso because it is not inconcievable to me that bacteria could predate planetary formation. It would indeed be interesting to look at them, and see what we see.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
"Solar System Fossils Found By Hubble"
When I saw this in my newsfeed I thought they'd found an alien fish or lizard.
So how much does that weigh in clouds?
When I was a kid there were 9 planets, the asteriod belt a few moons and we were happy with it. Now with this new fangled Hubble stuff they're finding new spitwads everyother damn day. This ones' the size of Bangor Maine, that one's the result of two K Mart parking lot sized iceballs crashing into each other. What the f---?
Actually, comets are considered building blocks of the solar system. That's why there's a large push from NASA and the ESA to send spacecraft to comets and land on them and/or gather samples from them. Here are a few links:
Stardust
Contour (failed)
Rosetta (to be launched)
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Some answers to posted questions from the one who did the research & wrote the press release:
How do we know these things came from our Solar System and not another one? The response about the directions of orbits is good; all the Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) and all the known planets orbit in the same direction around the Sun. Wouldn't happen if things were falling in randomly, so almost certainly reflects the rotation of the disk of gas & dust from which our solar system formed. Also, why would it be any easier to make a chunk of ice/rock around another star and have it accidentally caught be our star thousands of light years away, then to just make it around our star? There are grains of dust moving through our Solar System that appear to come from interstellar space, but no big chunks.
Another posts said that comets are the true fossils; in fact short-period comets (including the ones targeted by the spacecraft) are believed to be escapees from the Kuiper Belt. Comets are being evaporated by the Sun (that's why they look so big, they have clouds around them) and so they'll evaporate to nothing but rubble in 10,000 years or so. Not very long by astronomy standards. So there must be unborn comets in "cold storage" somewhere far from the Sun.
The New Horizons mission to Pluto & Kuiper Belt object(s) is alive & kicking. Our discovery means it will be a little harder to find a Kuiper Belt target for them to hit, but it should still be possible. There probably is a dust cloud associated with the Kuiper Belt (debris from collisions), which is doughnut-shaped, but this cloud is not very dense and won't be a threat to the spacecraft. Space is very empty, even in a "crowded" neighborhood like the inner Solar System.
However, I would argue that we do not know how most parts of the human body work. If we did, we could, for instance, stop aging and death, or accomplish still more mundane things like cure diseases such as AIDS without effort. For certain, there would be a great many researchers out of work by now. Add to that the notion that all man's great "inventions" are simply copies of things found in nature: if it requires intelligence to copy these things, is it not logical to conclude that there was originally an intelligence to think them up in the first place?
Now, as coincidence would have it, I am an electronics engineer. But for the answer to your question on the atomic workings of electricity, I think you meant to say that you are not a physicist, did you not? Nevertheless, I believe that it is safe to say that we do know exactly how electricity works. On the other hand, how electricity relates to the other forces in the universe is not known (see: Einstein's failed attenmpt at a Unified Field theory). While I used a completely acceptable linguistic device to emphasize the [currently] incalcuable difference between two things, you were factually incorrect. I point this out because it seems to be your basis for undermining my position, and not to be a twit and one-up you.
My original point was to highlight the irony that evolutionists and creationists are equally dependent upon faith, and as such, neither can accuse the other of being closed-minded or unscientific, despite the evolutionists' claim that they are of a higher intellectual caliber than creationists. I also underscored the basic difference between science and religion: How? vs. Why?. These two disciplines have different objectives and thus cannot be held to the same metrics. Relevence to the source post is that saying that the existence of ice cubes in space proves that life evolved from non-life requires a bit of an intellectual stretch, to say the least.
If evolution were "fact", then it would be possible to reproduce the process experimentally. To be scientific "fact", we must, by definition, know exactly "how" and thus be able to reproduce the action -- or at the very least prove the observed effect is reproducable, which has never been done, despite the popular folklore-based belief that it has). But this has yet to be done (hence it is still theory). Stanley Miller came as close as anyone when he "created" amino acids from "organic soup". But it was quickly proven that the solution the amino acids were in would prevent them from coalescing into anything, but rather, they could only decompose. He ended his career in utter frustration over this point. But the one pro-creation element in all his experiments that could not be avoided: Who did Miller himself represent in the experiment if not an intelligent creator? In the actual event, who takes the place of Miller?
Oh great another unit of measurement. I already have a hard time converting US Standard to metric, much less elephants, LOCs, and VWs. Now this.
The three new discoveries are about 42 AU from the Sun, in orbits that are about the same distance but less inclined (tipped) to the rest of the Solar System than Quaoar. They are not "plutinos".
Press releases are always skimpy on the real information; if you want the gory details, read the scientific paper. There will be some articles in Science News, maybe other places, at an intermediate level.
The big question is whether they could spot any Toynbee Tiles inlaid in the remnants?
> To stop terrorism, of course, as Saddam Hussein was a major source of it.
The sad irony is that the only terrorists operating out of Iraq were the Ansar al Islam, which arose in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region under the no-fly zone, and could not have existed without American bombers to hold Saddam in check. (FYI, terrorists hated Saddam almost as bad as they hate us.)
> Anti-imperialism was also a goal too, given Saddam's track record of attacking neighboring countries with the goal of annexing them.
Novel concept: combat imperialism by overthrowing other governments and setting up your own in their place. I suppose we should applaud the Romans for fighting imperialism in their many wars with the Parthians, Sassinids, and various Hellenistic empires.
> (he still claimed Kuwait as his own land, and still was committed to the goal of conquest of Israel and extermination of the Israelis).
He certainly wasn't making much progress at those goals, was he. If we're going to deploy force against big-talking fuckwits, Saddam is far from the only person who needed to worry about it. Yet somehow I'm missing all the others in the news...
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade