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Two New Saturnian Moons
Mixel writes "NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting saturn since the 30th of June has uncovered two previously unknown bodies. 'The moons are approximately 3 kilometers (2 miles) and 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) across -- smaller than the city of Boulder, Colorado.' The Huygens probe will be deployed to the large (bigger than Mercury!) yet mysterious moon, Titan, in December."
Saturn actually has millions of moons if you count the boulders in the rings. If you don't count them, then where is the cut-off point? This debate has never been settled, and may require an arbitrary cut-off size to get a clean definition.
Table-ized A.I.
Where do we draw the line between classifying a stellar body as a moon or an asteroid? Do we simply base it on the fact that it's a piece of rock orbiting a planet or is there some other defining characteristic?
Ceres, the largest asteroid in our solar system, has a diameter ~950 Km in length, much larger than many of the so-called moons we've discovered.
In C++, friends can touch each others private parts.
It seems like one (S/2004 S1) of the little worldlets may have been re-discovered since it may have been spotted when one of the Voyager probes passed Jupiter by in 1981, then christened S/1981 S14.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
1) I have to muse, when did Boulder CO become a unit of astronomical significance (and for the trolls: how many library of congress is that?)
2) Everybody keeps asking, but the reason these are significant is because
a) they orbit saturn (most asteroids orbit the sun)
b) they differ from the asteroids in the asteroid belt because, well, they are not in the asteroid belt
c) their orbit are actually located between two other moons, which is surprising because such area is under heavy bombarbment from other sun-orbiting asteroids and they should have been destroyed long time ago - this sheds light on our understanding of the kuniper belt, asteroids, saturnic satellite formation, etc etc.
That said, I couldn't make out the things on the picture, so i dunno... could be CCD noise? that would badly suck...
A planet is an object massive enough to become spherical under its own gravitationnal field, that orbits a star.
Although this is a very logical definition, it's not the one that's usually used. Quite a few objects have already been found that are large enough to become spherical (Ceres, Quaoar, "Sedna", Ixion, to name a few) that aren't classified as planets.
It seems that the definition of a planet in this solar system is "those nine objects we currently call planets, and nothing else."
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Actually, what struck me about the sizes quoted, is that Boulder Colorado must be really small. I do a three km walk every day. I always pictured it as a big city, but you could walk from one end to the other in an hour, hour and a half. That's not a city, that's a town.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
I have read a great deal of his stuff, and his critics too. I am not talking about his THEORIES though, I am talking about his OBSERVATIONS, specifically concerning the planets in the solar system.
I checked into a few of his planetary findings (including Saturn's now missing ring spokes), and they checked out as advertised. Mars' ice caps are dissapearing rapidly, and had a 3 month long global dust storm a few years back. Solar activity is insane.. more sunspots in the last 40 years than the previous 1150. There's stuff like this described for every single planet. I haven't checked them ALL out myself yet, but the claims have been disturbingly true so far...
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson