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The Tenth Planet Shrinks Under Hubble's Gaze
starexplorer2001 writes "An object called the 10th planet by some astronomers is not as large as previously thought. New images of 2003 UB313 (aka Xena) were delivered by the Hubble Telescope and showed up as only 1.5 pixels! Now, some are calling to demote Pluto and kill Xena."
how exactly do you represent or see half a pixel? i thought pixels were supposed to be atomic...?
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
Forget Xena, the planet should be named Marvin.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Ah, I still remember fondly the first time I saw a slashdot thread climb to a few hundred posts of argument about 'what makes a planet a planet?'. If ever a term was crying out for a rigid, ostensive definition from astronomers, it's 'planet'. From the ancient greek word for "wanderer", if we don't tighten it up some, the argument will come trotting out every time someone finds a rock doing laps about the sun. Stays within 10 degrees of the ecliptic, say 3,000km across...that works for me.
"New images of 2003 UB313 (aka Xena) were delivered by the Hubble Telescope and showed up as only 1.5 pixels! "
1.5 pixels on what scale? A pixel is not a unit of measurement for size, it just denotes the smallest distinct unit in a picture. Yes, it appears sensational to say that a 'planet' appeared to be 1.5 pixels (100 exclamation marks), but that's just as stupid as saying that my backyard appears to be 5 pixels wide on Google Earth. Gives no information unless you say that the resolution is 1 pixel = X metres.
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
I don't understand why this is so hard to understand. The only sensible definition for a planet is an object that is spherical due to its own gravity, orbits a star, and is not itself a star. But these bozos keep saying "But Pluto is so different from the other planets, we can't call it a planet!" Well boohoo. So it's freaking different! Earth and Jupiter are somewhat freaking different from each other, last time I checked, but we call both of those objects planets! "But then there will probably be a thousand planets in the solar system!" they say. I say, get over it! This is not a big problem unless you're an astrologer! I honestly don't give a rat's ass about Pluto's legacy as being called a planet, if we are going to continue calling it a planet then we also need to call this other object (and several others) planets as well. The problem is, we keep being told that this needs to be controversial because defining a planet is somehow difficult, what I think is happening here is that there are a group of scientists who have an emotional problem with there being a thousand planets in the solar system and are preventing the IAU from adopting the obvious definition.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
I've been reading a book recently (The Geography of Thought) on the differences between how Western and Eastern people think. One of the main theses in the book is that Western thought (since ancient Greek times) is oriented toward objects and their classification, whereas Eastern thought (since ancient Chinese times) focuses more on continuous substances and the relationships between them. Another thesis (or corrolary of the previous one) is that Western thought avoid contradictions, whereas Eastern thought invites them.
So I wonder if this is a case (debating the classification of a "planet") where Western-style thinking misleads us. Although this kind of thinking is great for science, at the same time insisting on logic can be irrational: simply wasting time on an issue that is inherently complex and not either-or.
IIRC, the discussions at the astronomical society have come to the conclusion that most of the good roman names have been used up. They're talking about moving into other pantheons for names (Hindu I believe was considered).
It better be a big set of names if we're going to start naming all the large Kuiper belt objects we're going to find.
Unless the greenhouse effect is runaway, like Venus, and all the water is evaporated away. Then we're all fucked.
I did some scary back of envelope calculations today about Venus. It's closer to the sun, and receives about 1.9 times the sunlight as Earth. But its atmosphere is so reflective (which is why it's so bright in the sky, the albedo is almost twice that of Earth), that only half the amount of sunlight gets through the CO2 and SO2 clouds without being bounced back into space.
Venus receives less energy from the sun than Earth does.
I try not to think too much about that, it scares the living crap out of me. Something went terribly terribly wrong with Venus. We need to figure out what that was.
It's likely that earth has a corrective measure that will throw the planet back into a severe ice age if CO2 levels rise too high. Our history is dominated by ice ages. Still I like my planet the temperature it is now, not severely hotter or colder.
If you really want to scare the pants off you and the shit outta you (preferably in that order, otherwise you'll have to change) read Bill Bryson's "A breif history of just about everything."
In it he explains how much of an anomoly we are, not only that life appeared on this planet, not only that it evolved to multicellular organisms, not only that it evolved into inteligent beings, but also that it survived all the many catastrophes that might have occurred throught that process, and how, at any minute, any number of things could completely wipe us off the planet.
He talks about how as greenhouse gasses build up in the atmosphere one of a couple things could happen, either the heat is trapped on the surface and continues to build rapidly, boiling the seas and creating more greenhouse gasses (a neverending cycle, it'd never end without some outside influence), or the gasses would reflect the heat from the sun causing the climate to initially heat up (shrinking the ice caps, and causing more evaporation) and then (relatively) suddenly getting very cold, creating more and more ice, which reflect more and more sunlight.
We're really kind of walking along a tightrope when it comes to this kinda thing, and we're dancing around mindlessly with a bowling ball in our hand, it's a total fluke that we havn't fallen yet.
Oh, and we're technically still in an ice age just at a short high point in temperature, normally the tempareature is either freezing cold (ice covering most of the planet) or swealtering hot (tropical just about everywhere), mostly freezing cold though...
and that's just the temperature, I didn't get into the potential extraterrestrial bombardment (now that doesn't mean aliens, it just means things not from Earth), supervolcanos (Yellowstone), disease, etc. Not to mention things that we've done, are doing, and may continue to do, to ourselves.
I highly reccomend Bill Bryson's book, it tells you we're doomed in a way that'll keep you laughing the entire time.
Xena is not a roman god or goddess, not even a small one like Luna, Nike or Pluto.
I think Xena and Buffy are prefectly fine names. The Roman-God names are just drawn from the fictional mythology of the era in which many of the planets were discovered. I think the silliness that we may associate with Xena and Buffy is merely the same silliness and unimaginitiveness that many medical terms would have if we translate them literally into English.
Also, the discoverers wanted to use a name that started with 'X' to point out that they discovered 'Planet X'.