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The Sun's 10th Planet... Sedna?
dsanfte writes "While NASA remains intentionally vague, promising only a news conference Monday, The Australian has the details. The new planet, dubbed Sedna after the Inuit goddess of the sea, is 3 billion km further from the sun than Pluto, and is slightly smaller at 2000km in diameter. This discovery has apparently reignited the debate as to how big a solar object must be in order to qualify as a 'planet', but it is significant nonetheless."
So why should we start counting an even smaller "planet"? Pluto gets grandfathered in, and that's it.
I wonder what is so important that NASA is going to wait until Monday. Maybe they will be unveiling something else at the same time?
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I want to know what happened to Quoaor or whatever the hell it's name is. wasn't it planet 10 last year?
I thought planets were Roman gods. It's not even like we've run out of them. We can still find Vulcan (Mulciber if you want to avoid rabit Trekkies), Juno, Minerva, Apollo (You can call this one Phoebus if you want to avoid confusing it with space probes), Diana, Vesta.
And that's before you start getting slightly obscure ones like Janus, Bacchus (Or Liber), Fanus, Quirinus, Pomona, or Vertumnus.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
Out in the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud there are thought to be as many as one trillion objects - most small 1 to 10 km chucks of ice.
The really interesting question is, what is the mass distribution ? (I.e., how does the number of objects scale with their mass ?) This is basically unconstrained by real data. All such cosmic mass distributions are steep, but many (for example, planets in the Solar System, Asteroids in the Asteroid belt) are dominated by the most massive bodies.
If this holds true in the Oort cloud, in particular, there could be some pretty big objects. Even a Jupiter sized object might be able to hide from the Infrared surveys (the best way of detecting such an object).
If both focal points for the orbit are contained within the volume of one body, or if one focal point is contained within the volume of one body and the other focal point outside of both bodies, then the smaller object is a moon of the larger.
If both focal points are outside the volume of both bodies, or if one focal point is within the volume of one body and the other focal point within the other body, then the pair of objects should be considered a double planet.
So Pluto/Charon, following this reasoning, should be considered a double planet.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Anyway something 2000km in diameter is hardly small. Aren't astoroids that could kill earth just a couple of kilometers accross?
Anyway excluding it is sizeist. Can't have that. If you are going to classify keep it simple. Object larger then a rock orbetting the sun and being close to round. I think that is what most people consider a planet.
So welcome sedna.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It won't be an issue until they find a Kuiper object that is bigger than Pluto. Then they'll have an awkward situation. Making Pluto a planet when this bigger object isn't one doesn't make sense; nobody wants to add a new planet, because in retrospect it was a mistake to make Pluto a planet, and adding another Kuiper object would just compound it; and removing Pluto from the list of planets offends tradition.
Everyone wants to push this off as long as possible, so if the new object is really smaller than Pluto, they'll breathe a sigh of relief and go on with things as they are.
Ten Planets? You haven't been keeping up with here astrology has been going the last twenty-fove years. I know astrologers who use twenty planets, most of which are imaginary. [ Dutch School of Astrology. Germans School of Astrology. The Planets of Alice Bailey, and related flakes.]
This, of course, ignores the two hundred or so asteroids which new age astrologers use. And don't forget the plethora of comets, meteor showers, deep space objects, and other things that may, or may not exist.
And to be sure that you haven't forgotten anything, there are umpteen "Arabic Parts", Midpoints, Orbs, harmonics, ( or something like that) etc.
In short, roughly 10^8 objects that no self-respecting astrologer would omit, if one believes in the validity of all the books on astrology that have been published.
Wanna know what will REALLY give the conspiracy theorists, New Age freaks, etc? "Sedna" is "Andes" spelled backwards! Everyone knows the advanced Inca civilization lived in the Andes mountains, and there are more than enough wacky theories about the Incas involving aliens and whatnot. Oooh...why is an Inuit god named after backwards-Andes...are the Inuits actually Inca refugees? They're close the Pole, too, and there are already crazy theories about a hole to the interior of the earth where advanced civilizations live, and the Eskimos are somehow related....
Yeah, can't imagine a worse name, really. Backwards-spelled stuff is pure gold in the conspiracy community.
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They might have chosen the name Sedna because the object is in the Kuiper Belt. If I recall correctly, the naming convention for Kuiper Belt Objects is that of creation deities. Sedna is the most important deity to the Inuit and plays a vital role in one creation tale, what with her parents chopping off her fingers and those fingers turning into various aquatic animals.
Pluto has an atmosphere, so it's a planet. What about Sedna? Does anyone know, or must we wait until Monday?
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
The concept of Planets should no longer be regarded as a formal (as opposed to colloquial) classification. We have four rocky inners, four gassy outers, and a vast number of planetismals. Forming a group of the first two classes, with or without a few of the last, is a false classification.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Did you know that in 1998 Senator Patrick Leahy, of Vermont, got his State's largest Lake, Lake Champlain, to be reclassified as the 6th Great Lake? At least as far as the awarding of researh grants. Being considered a "Great Lake" made the academic institutions in his constituency eligible to apply for certain research grants.
There is talk of sending a probe to Pluto. Is it possible that it is easier to sell a probe to "planet Pluto" than to send one to Kuiper-belt object Pluto?
I remember, back in the days when I tuned in to debates as to which newsgroups should be created, the big debate as to whether a new group should be talk.acquaria, rec.acquaria or sci.acquaria.
In Leahy's defence, these were environmental research grants, and I should probably assume he added this line to the bill to protect his constituent's natural environment -- not for the petty partisan purposes.
That would be Bode's Law. It is wiewed as more of a coincidence than a law these days.
According to my hung over calculations Sedna is 67 AUs out, which is not that far off from the 77.6 that Bode predicts, but not really close either.
Sedna isn't actually a creator goddess -- she was born mortal, and became a goddess when the spirits of the air and the moon decided to reward her for her suffering in her mortal life, as she was drowning. Two accounts of the Sedna myth may be found here and here.
In any event, aren't you glad that they're naming it Sedna, and not Uinigumasuittuq?
If it's big enough to assume spherical shape by the action of gravity, it's a planet.