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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.
Cue conspiracy theories, New Age freaks, Planet X believers and other idiots. Still, at least this discovery has the redeeming quality of completely fucking up astrology
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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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Thank god I am out of elementary school. Memorizing 9 planets was hard enough, but 10! They have got to be kidding.
was right after all!
Three things are certain: Death, taxes, and lost data. Guess which has occurred.
Pluto is 2300 km diameter, ranges from 4.3 to 7.4 billion km from the sun.
i stics.html
http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/pluto/stat
Because you have to be looking at the right place at the right time. Do you have any idea how vast a volume of space we're talking about?
Whether Pluto is 'really' a planet or just a big Kuiper object seems to be a silly argument. Even if it's not justifiable, we'll call Pluto a planet out of tradition.
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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.
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Actually, they switched back in 1999; Pluto is again further away than Neptune.
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They should call it rupert.
Correction - Neptune was farther from Pluto from January 21, 1979 to Feb. 11, 1999 but at this time Pluto is farther from the sun than Neptune.
Of course, there's debate as to whether Pluto-Charon is a planet with a moon, or a double planet...
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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).
It's always been hard to see distant planets because they don't emit light. Hubble can see distant galaxies because they contain lots of luminous objects.
The binoculars also limit or eliminate local vision while in use, obscuring the approach of your spouse/mother and a disapproving hand. . .:)
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"FAR" is a very vague thing in space.
I hear they're going to adopt the new distance measures 'hither' and 'yonder' so normal folks will have a better understanding, at least in galactic terms, of where things are.
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I think I can answer all of the people on here who are asking "Why didn't they go with a Roman name?". It's real simple: political correctness. After all, Roman names were given to the planets by a bunch of old, dead white men, and are a vestige of a conquering, warfaring civilization. This new Inuit name represents one of those poor, marginalized, powerless indigenous tribe types. It's like affirmative action for planets.
;-P
Personally I think we should have just stuck with the Roman names and kept a consistent system...but then again, I am a middle-class white male.
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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.
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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.
don't know if anyone else feels this way, but I'm kind of let down by the fact that our most interesting space story for awhile now is that we MAY have a 10th planet in our solar system.
Umm...what? The past few months have been *spectacularly* exciting from a space point of view. We have two probes that successfully landed on Mars and have found strong evidence that Mars had liquid brine at one point. We have a ton of pictures from the surface to look at, and are expecting tons of findings, papers, and theories based on probe data that's been returned.
And while, yes, the classification may not be interesting, the fact that we discovered a new, sizeable chunk of matter in our solar system is not small stuff either.
May we never see th
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.
There was a formula for predicting orbital paths that was related to Fibbunaci's sequence, I wonder if sedna falls into the sequence?
meh
Dude, *how* can you possibly blame NASA for insufficient coverage?
They put out an entire *channel* of content and have an extensive website with tons of goodies. They have been fighting like mad to get more media coverage to ensure that they get continued funding.
If you want to blame someone, blame our current media sources or people's interests. NASA is the *least* guilty party involved in trying to expose people to information about space.
May we never see th
Still, at least this discovery has the redeeming quality of completely fucking up astrology.
Astrology doesn't work that way.
Astrology is syncretic religion -- it readily (and inevitably) incorporates new influences.
Like an amoeba, astrology engulfs everything it touches.
In this sense, astrology is rather like paranoia: everything pertains, everything is part of the Big Picture.
Sedna won't fuck up astrology. On the contrary, astrologers will eagerly seize on the idea of this new planet, treating Sedna as one more vacuole in the amoeba.
-kgj
-kgj
Sedna? No. Plenty of people in this thread have complained about two facts - One, our planets have names derived from the Roman, not Inuit, panthon. And two, we already have a planet named after a sea-god, ie, Neptune.
So, I propose that in protest to such a blatant attempt at PC Multiculturalism, we as a community refer to the tenth planet as Nox, the Roman goddess of night. Since it lies the furthest from the sun, that actually fits it, in a descriptive sense.
Sedna... Whatever. Remember, we hear about this stuff months before your typical Fox news junkie, and people tend to respect us as sources of information. So spread the word - We have a new, tenth planet, named Nox. Sedna? Nope, they must have heard wrong. Nox. Nox? Nox!
for obvious reasons...
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My former advisor here at UC Berkeley, Gibor Basri, has a neat way of discriminating between planets and the lesser (comets, asteroids, etc.). His idea is that if the object has enough self-gravity to force it into a spherical shape, it's a planet... if it doesn't (like Mars' "moons"), it's something less.
Here's a snipet:
read on for his full article.
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.
I feel insulted. I'm an atheist and I don't like these stupid god names polluting skies. What's the matter with these people? Can't humanity grow out of its infantile and get rid of this gods&belief nonsense?
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.
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Hockey was invented somewhere in Europe or European North America in the 19th century. Lacrosse was invented by Indians near the St. Lawrence and is played on grass rather than snow, so I doubt the Inuit were involved.
Inuit inventions include snowshoes, toboggans, dogsleds, kayaks, toggle harpoons, and various other tools for hunting and travelling in the North as well as snow and ice civil engineering techniques. Pretty impressive, I'd say, for a culture with almost no wood, rock, or metal. They've probably contributed as much as any other non-Eurasian colonialised culture, and they make some really cool art.
This will be handy for those short-sighted sysadmin types that name their servers after finite sets like planets.
Now they'll be able to buy up to 10 servers before re-thinking their naming strategy.
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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.
I have been interested in Astronomy since I was about six years old. Just over forty years. I have heard what you suggest before -- but only in the last few years. And I don't understand it any more this time than I did on the earlier occasions.
Frankly, I strongly suspect it is a false factoid, like that the internet was built to survive a Nuclear War. I strongly suspect it is a bullshit meme that keep being repeated because it sounds cool, but is completely false.
Pray explain what you mean when you say the other 138 moons would float off ?
I am trying to do the "thought experiment" of silently, quietly erasing the principals of those moons, mass and all. I am finding this difficult to do. I don't believe there is any way this could occur, in our Universe.
So, instead I imagined doing something to accelerate a moon, any moon, to the escape velocity of its principal. What happens then? Well, the object accelerated to just beyond a planet's escape velocity will assume an orbit very similar to that of the Planet it just escaped from. Sometime in the last couple of years ago there was a flap about a small object that seemed to have been temporarily captured in the Earth-Moon system. But it turned out to be NASA space debris. It appeared to be the discarded upper stage of an Apollo moon shot.
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?
The moon's orbit is everywhere concave towards the Sun. Therefore, the moon is a satellite of the Sun, and not a satellite of the earth. As such, perhaps it should be called a member of a binary planetary system.
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If it's big enough to assume spherical shape by the action of gravity, it's a planet.
By that logic, Anna Nicole Smith qualifies. ;)
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
The key to preventing an extinction-causing asteroid impact is simply to NOTICE it early enough and have a fast means to get a vehicle there. The reason the asteroid-defeating plans are so hard to create is that we have to wait until the asteroid is near us before we can reach it. By then it's too late. If we can affect it sooner, then exploding it into parts could work really well because the parts would be imparted with enough velocity to spread apart so most of them miss the Earth. Even if an object is headed to strike the earth dead-center, then you only need to deflect it far enough to move it a little more than one earth-radius of distance to the side by the time it gets here and that will make it miss.
(You do need to go a little more than one earth radius because gravity will pull it in - you need to get it far enough out so it will at least slingshot around earth instead of striking it.)
To put this in perspective, if the asteroid was blown up 40 days before impact, that would give us 960 hours for it to move. In 960 hours, an object can move an entire earth radius by going a mere 4.1 miles per hour. So as long as the explosion can impart a velocity of a little over 4.1 miles per hour perpendicular to the course of the asteroid, then the asteroid bits will veer far enough off course to miss. So exploding the asteroid and sending it's parts off in different directions *can* work, if your explosion is big enough to impart that much velocity, and (this is the hard part) you can get a vehicle carrying the bomb out there 40 days before the impacyt.)
The best defense against such an asteroid is a better space program, with faster vehicles that don't require months of prep time to launch. That gives us the time for a simple solution to actually work.
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