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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."
This has to be another sinister plot by Aries! Xena should have killed him when she had the chance!
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.
Maybe it's all black except for a bright white spot.
The War on Terrible Planet Names has begun ;).
Pay girls to strip!
Forget Xena, the planet should be named Marvin.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
New Face discovered on Mars
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.
So, how do you get half a pixel on a screen? I too was under the impression that an individual pixel was either all on or all off...
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
I'll bear that in mind as the flare passes us en route, with 4900 times the intensity it will have when it reaches Xena. "I bet RLiegh's having a chuckle right now", I'll think to myself.
(4900 assumes Xena is at an average 70 au)
"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)
It is nice to know that it is only 1/2 pixel or whatever number of pixel, but how about a real size ? in kilometers ?
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
PROFESSOR FARNSWORTH: I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all.
FRY: Oh. What's it called now?
PROFESSOR FARNSWORTH: Urectum.
I thought network television did that...
Fighting over religion is like seeing whose imaginary friend is best.
...post a link to the image?
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
As every Dr. Who fanboy knows, the tenth planet is named Mondas. http://www.drwhoguide.com/who_2d.htm/. What is slashdot coming to?
As George Carlin said pollution; Earth will be fine. We might be fucked; but the earth will be A-OK.
,s/said pollution/said about pollution/g
Kill Xenu? You can't say that about my religion! I'm gonna sue you! I'll see you in court!
It's because the word planet isn't really a scientific word. There's no hard point where something becomes a planet and where it's not a planet. Words like planet are really just our own convienent language definitions. Arguing about whether something is a planet or not is a little like arguing whether something is a chair or not. It only matters based upon useage.
AccountKiller
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."
First of all, IANAA (an astronomer).
:)
[rant]
It's truly amazing that we can see things so far away with our little technology; but ultimately, humans have made it so far as the moon... with respect to our sandbox in the universe, that's not very far. Jupiter and Mars are completely different things - they probably were created via entirely different processes. Mars is a dusty rock that gets hot & cold a lot. Jupiter is a massive ball of gas that has thunderstorms with its moons; I read somewhere that one of Jupiter's moons has a tidal terrain. Could you imagine the crust of the Earth rising and falling some-odd hundred meters as the moon went by? One (many?) of Jupiters' moons has this property.
We need a name for balls of mass (whether a few km in diameter or an astronomical unit, e.g. 93 million miles, in diameter) that orbit stars for a living. If that's a planet, fine. Sounds like comets, Pluto, Xena, and everything else that orbits a star is a planet. Otherwise, a "planet" is a name for the eight terrestrial entities that astronomers have known about for centuries... and we still need a name/class system for things that orbit parent stars. Many (most?) argue that comets and the like are not planets because they came to be and exist in a different way than our traditional "planets"... but our own (8 or 9) planets are so very different to begin with, that if you think about it long enough, they're all too radically different to be in the same class. We may like to think we know how Jupiter and Mars and Earth and the Moon were created; that crap happened so long ago, it's safe to say that humans have no way of knowing - none of us were there.
I like the second article, which suggests we demote Pluto and Xena (and similar objects) to "dwarf" planets.
We're only human! For a long time we thought matter and energy were two different things; now, the fact that matter is considered "solid" is coming into question. It goes to show how little we really know to begin with, and arguing the definition of a "planet" is as useful to our curiosities as arguing the difference between a rabbit turd and a cow pie.
[/rant]
So as not to only rant, I thought I would try to be informative as well.
If anyone would like to see Xena, here's a page with a decent shot. The actual NASA feature about the recent picture is here.
NASA secretly discovers disturbing facts about the nature of the tenth planet, and decides the news is too shocking for the wide audience. A plan is created to announce the news in several manageable bites:
:)
1. tenth planet not as big as previously thougth, it's more like a small planet, but hey it's a still a friggin 10-th planet, right!
2. tenth planet not a planet as previously thougth, it's more like a moon of Pluto.. but it's still a friggin planet, if not THE 10-th planet...
3. new moon not really a moon, turns out it's more like a really big meteor, so big, it's kinda as big as a moon, almost, but not exactly...
4. big meteor kinda smaller than big, more like, medium meteor, still there though! xena, the medium meteor!! Yei!
5. ok maybe it's not that of a medium, more like a small meteor, little warrior meteor thingy.
6. hey what did you know! that little meteor thingy noone really friggin cares about, was a smudge on the Hubble lens system! huh, sh*t happens, but it's not like we confused it to be the 10-th planet in the Solar system, I mean, cut us some slack, come on
7. hey watch us drink cola in zero gravity. wobble, wobble, wobble, wobble!! lol!
You can measure "sub-resolution" size by taking repeated measurements and averaging (eg. count the number of pixels ten times and average). This is quite commonly done with a wide variety of sensors to get better resolution than the sensors can provide on a single measurement. Sometime noise is added to the measurements to help improve the resolution.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Well, what kind of a name should that be anyway? Xena is not a roman god or goddess, not even a small one like Luna, Nike or Pluto.
So if this object should be called a planet, here's the proper list of names to choose from:
Acca Larentia, Alemonia, Anna Perenna, Carmenta, Carna, Consus, Dea Dia, Feronia, Flora, Fons, Furrina, Maia, Nike, Ops, Pales, Pomona, Portunus, Robigus, Silvanus, Veiovis, Vertumnus, Volturnus
everything else is not acceptable.
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
Don't forget it's a reversed (negative) image, so Xena itself is dark and the background of space is white.
I think if you look very closely you can see a few faint stars in the background...
I wonder how dificult it
Your idea would cost more than servicing the Hubble with a shuttle. Actually it might be cheaper to build another one, I'm afraid.
But fear not. The Hubble will be serviced, more than likely, and continue to be operated until a replacement (of sort) becomes available (i.e., JWST, though it ain't nothing like the HST).
All the Pixels around it were black except for one that was white, and one next to it that was grey, 1/2 white, 1/2 black. The pixel averages everything in the space it covers. I don't know if they actually use black or white or not, but that's how it works. Does that simplify things?
Someone save me from this sanity.
I bet they're looking at it through the wrong end of the telescope. If they turn Hubble around, that thing'll turn out to be HUGE!
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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.
The following joke just came to mind...
Your momma is so big and so cold they launched her into space and couldn't figure out if she was a planet or not!
OK, that was a crappy joke.
I'd have to agree with the "no 1000 planets, please" antagonists. Defining Kuiper belt objects as planets demotes the concept of "planet". We might as well call every object that orbits the sun "space thing" and be done with it.
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.
The reasons are simple. Even Mike Brown says there is no scientific basis for calling 2003 UB313 a planet. Here is what he said last year:
I will not argue that it is a scientific planet, because there is no good scientific definition which fits our solar system and our culture, and I have decided to let culture win this one.
He's using Mike Brown's acceptance of the generally accepted cultural view that planets are 'anything pluto sized or larger' as a way of discrediting 2003 UB313. In fact, Mike Brown had felt previously that the definition of Planet was unsatisfactory and threw out some ideas on how the definition could be altered. http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/sedna/index.htm l#planets links to the text in question. Mike Brown has since come to the conclusion that culture is going to decide what defines a planet, not a bunch of scientists. So basicly, unless the scientists who want to change the definition of a planet can convince society to listen, it's going to be like a tree falling in a forest with no one around to hear it. Sure, it happened, but who cares?
"The bass, the rock, the mic, the treble. I like my coffee black, just like my metal" - Mindless Self Indulgence
I'm an astronomer (in a different sub-field), and I'm pretty happy with the situation as it stands. The whole is-it-a-planet-or-not debate gets people interested in astronomy, but it's of essentially no significance to us. It's only a name, we care about the reality of things and not the invented names given to them.
This is a cynical way to put it, and maybe some other astronomers care more than I do. I'd certainly like it if people were more interested in cutting edge research (or detailed politics, computer technology...) than naming stuff: a name is the ultimate in empty media-friendly soundbites. Still, everyone is comfortable expressing an opinion in this debate, it's nice like that.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Sounds like its time for a lynching.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
It's just "small boned".
And also *poof* us, since we are in the way and much, much closer...
So say we all
Sure, and if you stab someone, they'll be ok. Oh, sure their life processes might stop and they might cease to be recognisable for the attributes we value about them, but their bones and stuff will be around for quite some time.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Mother Very Easily Made a Jam Sandwich Using No Peanuts, Mayonnaise, or Glue
How does one display "half a pixel"?
I'm guessing greyscale, but still the idea of half a pixel strikes me as somewhat funny.
ps. Kudos to the person who posted the "." as a substitute for a link to the image. You made my day.
Would you please advance from the Commodore PET era? Nowadays we live in at least 24bit color world. The pixel was #888888, or rgb(127,127,127) if you prefer.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Couldn't we just say that since Pluto was granted planetary status that its size defines the criteria for becoming a planet? Anything smaller than Pluto is not a planet and anything larger is a planet?
It really seems very subjective to me and this way, we could all move on with our lives.
It's Persephone. It's nicknamed Rupert, after some astronomer's parrot.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
For that matter, even if we add in language saying that it has to orbit a star, what does that do to the binary-star systems were the stars are rotating each other?
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Then there's the problem of defining "spherical", and the planet wars erupt all over again. Earth is sort of spherical, but squashed a bit, so we get into how squishy/bumpy/whatever still qualifies as spherical enough.
If as a later poster suggests, you're referring to 'atomic' as the smallest possible unit, or something indivisible, then you should do some reading up on cleartype. My understanding is that each visible pixel on your screen is made up of a few (RGB?) sub pixels which turn on in different intensities to create the 'pixel' you see. Microsoft and some others apparently discovered that if you 'steal' some of the sub pixels from adjacent 'pixels' and activate them, you can soften hard edges, effectively an antialiasing effect visually. I'm not an expert, I didn't read the article, and I know very little about how the hubble imagery is created, but I'm putting my money on that half pixel being something like what I described above.
cheers
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--
According to the TV show CSI, they can take that pixel increase the image size and then enhance it enough to make out all the different geographical terrian on the planet/object in space. I tried it in Photoshop and it just doesn't work.
Can I bum a sig?
that means mercury is not a planet. but titan is
that means mercury is a moon. so is pluto. so is ceres
that's it
so the key is you classify something on its composition, regardless of what it orbits
therefore you would talk of moons of the sun (mercury, pluto) versus moons of uranus, planets of saturn (titan) versus planets of the sun, and asteroids of mars (phobos/ deimos) versus asteroids of the sun
you even have asteroids of asteroids (ida and dactyl) and moons of moons (pluto and charon)
we even have a binary moon of the sun (antiope the "asteroid")
i firmly believe this nomenclature wuild be more useful as we will come to see lots of more planetary systems out there, some quite exotic, with secondary planetary systems orbitting gas giants (which you can say saturn and jupiter already have) and maybe even TERTIARY systems (moon of a moon of a moon?)
i expect to find suns with rings too (not just planetary rings)
binary/ trinary star systems will complicate things. i expect we will find binary planets sharing an atmosphere, i expect to find planets orbitting nonspherical large asteroids. all sorts of lunacy (no pun intended)
we need a new nomenclature
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Maybe it's because Hubble giggled...
That's no moon, that's a space station.
-[joke removed for your safety]-
Isn't this the deal they were calling Quaoar or some other goofy name? Changing it to 'Xena' now is hardly keeping us abreast of the situation.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
I guess a solar flare large enough to melt ice at 97 AU (distance Sun-Xena) would probably melt stone at 1 AU (our distance to sun). Or more likely, evaporate it. So *poof*, no more Earth as well.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
That would be LV-426 (Acheron).
You're assuming the pixels themselves are square in shape, which may or may not be so (plasma display pixels tend to be rectangular). Of course, not assuming that the object is round is also perfectly fine, since the Earth (if not most of the other planets) is not perfectly round.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
There was shrinkage! Significant shrinkage!
Its not a damn 10th planet, its just a large kuiper balt object. So's pluto for that matter. Theyre not really planets, its just that UB313 isnt cool sounding enough to be on a headline. I highly doubt the story "Kuiper Belt object UB313 found to be of different size than previously ascertained".
Whenever I read about doomsday scenarios like that, I remember several things:
1) We are not the biggest thing to hit Earth - Go back 100 million years, see what is the worst that happened. That did not kill all life, that did not boil off the ocean (in fact, Earth has never been above temperate ever since life began. We should be worried about the cooling that happens all the time, not the warming which has only ever made our planet a paradise!)
2) Humans survived the last ice age. In tents. Without electricity.
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
You either have a pixel or you don't; unless someone has made a screen that displays fractions of pixels. If they're saying 1.5 pixels, does this mean they're basing their measurement on the value of each pixel?
The only dark side of the moon is the inside, and that's not very good for astronomy.
A crater near the lunar axis might have the advantage of always being in shade, but until the moon is populated it's more practical to have a telescope in earth orbit. It's easier to service there.
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The classes of object in the Solar System (according to shared features) are:
- Gas Giants
- Rocky Planets
- Asteroids
- Comets
- Kuiper Belt Objects
- Oort Cloud Objects (only Sedna yet observed?)
And then there are some asteroid-like bodies that have wandered off (Apollos, Jupiter Trojans, etc) and some kuiper-like bodies (Centaurs) that have wandered off. Moons are a bit trickier to classify, but we'll ignore them since they're not Sun-orbiting.Planet is most sensibly defined to be the combination of the first two classes. They share such features as: circular in-plane orbits, large mass, common formation. The most important feature of these two classes is that they are small; four bodies each. A definition of planet that included thousands of objects would not be useful.
Since Pluto and 2003-UB_313 fall into the KBO class (sharing such features as: eccentric orbits, resonance with Neptune, icy composition, medium mass), they are not planets. Pluto was originally mistaken for a Gas Giant-type body; it's not, so it should have been declassified as a planet. However, the KBO class was unknown at the time, and Americans liked the idea of an American-discovered planet, so it got inappropriately included. As for 2003-UB_313, it's hardly surprising that the discoverer thinks that it's a planet, but his opinion should clearly not be taken seriously.
Xerxes
#888888 = rgb( 136, 136, 136 )
#7F7F7F = rgb( 127, 127, 127 )
Lindsey
@>-->-----
No, half a bit is obviously a system which has sqrt(2) different states, because two of them together have two different states.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Half a pixel is indeed like half a bit. In information theory non-integer bits are common and useful.
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Light reflected from Earth could be a minor problem, but I think in the visible spectrum this isn't significant either. For an IR telescope like Spitzer it's important to get away from Earth to get decent images, so they put it in a heliocentric orbit similar to Earth's.
Still trying to think of a clever sig...
Still I like my planet the temperature it is now, not severely hotter or colder.
Being a resident of inland Canada, I ask the global community to keep polluting! Milder winters, earlier spring, it's not so bad.
Don't forget to replace the radio while you are at it. I doubt that the one currently in the Hubble is designed to talk to anything except specific communication satelites.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
It may probably make more sense to send Hubble into Luna orbit rather than into free space... Less energy and easy to locate and has one BIG bonus: when its on the far side, the Moon is acting as a giant shield against all the crap that Earth emits.
Hmm... How about a Luna-orbit radio telescope?
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
2) Humans survived the last ice age. In tents. Without electricity.
Yeah, but those humans weren't the total wusses we are now.
Now, we've built up complex, interconnected societies on a global scale. The only way all 6.5 billion of us are able to survive is because of these complex societies which provide us food, shelter, sanitation, etc. There's simply too many of us to go back to being hunter-gatherers. Any severe climatic disaster would probably disrupt our societies, and cause massive chaos resulting in starvation and warfare. Most of the population would probably be killed before things stabilized again.
Yes, some humans will probably survive, but most of us won't. And those who do will probably be living in stone-age conditions.
But as everyone around you is evaporating into whiffs of hydrogen, ozone and carbon monoxide, you'll be too busy evaporating yourself to care...
It WAS a full-sized planet until it was hit by Dr. Evil's sinister Solar System Periphery Planet-Shrinking Laser Beam (SoSyPerPlaShLaB).
The space , even inside the solar system, is so huge, that you idea has no merit.
rajmohan_h@yahoo.com
"All the Pixels around it were black except for one that was white"
Meanwhile, the manufacturers of Hubble respond that they won't repair it until another 3 dead pixels are found...
Actually, if the earth is in the way of that flare, it's fucked to.
Sure, it will still be a ball of rock, but there will be no life, at all.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I mean, is it really so awful to have an exception to a rule?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It has an atmosphere. UIt may even exchange it with Charon.(a few molecules at a time)
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Ok, this is a plausible scenario. But let me ask you - if you knew that over the next 10 years the earth was going to get so cold that crops wouldn't grow (probably the limitting factor), how much would you (personally) be willing to spend to make sure that you were on the team that still had food? This is probably approximately equal to your net worth. Taking just the net worth of middle class Americans (assuming the rich are totally uncaring and the the poor have absolutely nothing), that would be about $10 Trillion.
Now let's suppose that I have a cunning plan to feed all those middle class people, but that it is totally impractical - such as building a large space station for farming (hey, getting stuff down from orbit is cheap!) - and let's further suppose that there are no cheaper alternatives. Would I be willing to build said station for $10 Trillion?
Of course what really happens is that farmers start farming the oceans, etc for far less money. Food skyrockets to 20 times it's current price, but fewer people actually starve because since there is more money in farming (and you can now only farm in the tropics) farming is run more like a business and distribution is more efficient. And you know that the democrats are not going to let people starve - well the same is true of other countries. (If you look at the starving people it is not due to lack of food, it is due to lack of distrbution of existing food.)
Really, these scary scenarios are not realistic at all. We are here to stay as long as we are not hit by a cosmological event or a nuclear war with Iran. (Even then, half the population survives).
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
Unless I should find out that my friend in reality comes from space and researches for the next edition of an electronic book which has the words "don't panic" written on it in large, friendly letters ...
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
He actually discusses this in his book as well. No, they didn't destroy all life on Earth, but they almost did. Apparently every human alive today is descended from a group of about 100 individuals, the sole survivors of an ice age or something like that.
Even if 2000 people out of 6.5 mil survived I think everyone would agree that's a pretty big disaster, especially to those of us who wouldn't survive...
...the Roman goddess of bleeding men dry. I'm not divorced, but I think my less fortunate brethren might want to skip over this one.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Hoo boy, you are quite the optomist...
They are quite realistic, and actually very probable. Besides, in all likelyhood we're not going to have much notice before it happens. And even if we did, have you ever noticed how people bitch and moan when ten or fifteen people die in one day during a heatwave? Imagine what would happen if a couple billion did... that's less than half the worlds population.
oh, and, no, we're not the biggest thing to hit the planet, but we are the most persistant. (And I believe the only single species to outnumber us in the history of the planet would probably be insects, bacteria and some smaller plants.
I'm curious - what do you consider a realistic timeline for conversion from the current Earth to an ice age Earth?
Personally, I believe we could get most of Earth's population off planet in about 20 years if we had to.
But then, that's what I'm working on - so I know what could be done with a couple $100B... I'm sure there would always be better alternatives.
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
Wouldn't the sun hit Hubble with a great deal more heat than the Earth? Put it in deep space, and now it's never in the Earth's shadow so it would get hotter. I don't see how being close to Earth, but not in its atmosphere, keeps Hubble warm.
Um, I was actually referring to large crater making devices, volcanoes, comets, the natural nuclear reactor of Africa, the fire that pretty much covered the globe, etc.
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
To point out the bleedingly obvious, Venus's surface pressure is several orders of magnitude greater than ours. Even if there were no greenhouse effect there, it would still be much, much hotter (remember, there is a direct relationship between pressure and temperature).
There is no way for Earth to reach venusian atmospheric density, and no way that Venus ever had something remotely resembling terrestrial temperature/pressure. It isn't just a matter of what proportion of the air is Co2, it's a matter of how much air there is in an absolute sense as well.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
Yes, I'm serious
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof for my post which this sig is too small to contain.
How about a body orbiting a star directly (not orbiting another planet) that within a certain percentage of round and orbiting within xxx degrees along the solar elliptic.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Ok... three years... hmm...
I think you need to look more cirtically at the site that you quote. Note that they make broad statements of fact, such as "Great Conveyor Belt shut down", without presenting any evidence of that. So they present an idea (the Great Conveyor Belt is the key to warm weather), then they tell a story (30,000 years ago it got very cold) and say QED, the idea is true. This is a very common approach to false science, essentailly an emotional play rather than a rational play.
How do they know that the Great Conveyor Belt shut down? What is the evidence? (Note that I am not claiming that they have no evidence, merely that they do not ever present any evidence).
OK, some basic engineering - the water on Earth masses about 1.4e21 kg. For the most part, it is near room temperature. So let's say that humanity will not survive a 10C change (I would say that we would, but that is a different issue). OK, so the Earth needs to lose 10C * 1.4e21 kg * 4 kJ/kg, about 6e25 J of energy.
For comparison, the sun provides about 350 J/s to each of the 5e14 square meters of Earth, for about 2e17 J/s. So (assuming that the Earth is currently near energy balance, which is probably a good assumption) if the sun goes out completely, we have 3e8 seconds (about 10 years) before we lose 10C in temperature. For your scenario to be plausible, the Earth has to be losing energy 3 times faster than the sun is currently adding it - in other words the Earth would be glowing in the visible (or at least near visible) spectrum. (Assuming the Earth is losing energy via blackbody, which is the worst case, the temperature of the Earth would need to be 1.4 times the current temperature in Kelvin - about 500 K = 200 C)
This was a very simple analysis, glossing over many issues - but 3 years to an ice age is simply not a possibility. At the very worst case, the climate may change and force us humans to live somewhere else (the ocean, for example) - but the end of humanity is not on the radar.
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
it's bigger than some stars!
still 3x size of Pluto.
Does it "wander" in the sky? Yes? Planet.
-pyrrho
Any way you define "planet" outside of something simple like a mass or radius limit will have a hazy limit. "Roundness," as in relaxed into an oblate spheroid by its own gravity, has a number of borderline cases already known, not to mention a number of objects that we just don't know about yet, and icy bodies seem to form spheroids at lower masses than rocky bodies, because they're less rigid. Composition doesn't help because the composition of most of the known TNOs is approximate at best, and outright guesswork in many cases. Using some kind of orbital parameters limits the usefulness of the term to our own Solar System, since many of the extrasolar planets that have been found show that there's more than one way for a system to form. Yet, if you use something simple like "objects with a radius of at least X km" or "objets with a mass of at least Y kg" you're drawing a completely arbitrary line.
Basically, I don't think "planet" can ever be a scientific term, because, as many of the large TNOs illustrate, sub-stellar objects form a continuum with multiple axes. Defining stellar objects is relatively easy: they have enough mass to sustain fusion in their cores, or they're the "dead" remnants of such an object. Likewise, Brown Dwarfs can be easily defined as massive enough to trigger deuterium burning, assuming the object has any deuterium left. Gas Giants are also fairly easy to class: no chance of fusion (deuterium or otherwise), and no solid surface. It's not cut and dry for the smaller objects, and I thinks there's always going to be some grey area and borderline cases, no matter what the definition.
The U.S. Constitution needs to be ammended with a "separation of business and state" clause.
heh, thanks. Best laugh I've had today
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
but that atmosphere is pretty weak
so there's a chink in my nomenclature: what do you call an atmosphere? i'm sure no matter what density boundary you set, some planet/ moon somewhere will straddle it
ah well
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
too weak to be considered a ring
;-P
which of course raises another point: what's the density at which something is considered a ring? no matter what lower boundary you assert, you'd probably find something somewhere straddling the boundary
so there's always room for controversy
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Yes, but why? I've seen discussion that suggests that a lot of that atmospheric CO2 is locked up in carbonate rocks on Earth. I'm uncertain if the levels are comparable.
Venus and Earth likely were practically identical at one point, moving at similar but subtly different evolutionary paths. What was the difference?
The explanation I always heard was that the differece was the event that formed the earth's moon.
It's theorized that another plaentary body collided with earth early in our solar system's history. This collision resulted in the ejection of a debris field, which would eventually form the moon, and the blasting away of most of the atmosphere. Additionally, it's possible that the presense of a moon either further reduced the atmosphere, or prevented it from reaching it's previous density (ie, gasses in the upper atmosphere would be pulled away by tidal forces).
Under this theory, venus is normal for a rocky planet of it's size, and earth has an unusually thin atmosphere.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.