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Pluto's New Moons Named Nix and Hydra
Dean W, Armstrong writes "Pluto's two new satellites, previously identified as S/2005 P 2 and S/2005 P 1, received official names from the International Astronomical Union today. Nix and Hydra are named after the mother of Charon and the fierce nine-headed monster. The initials of the new names, N and H, call to mind the New Horizons spacecraft, on a fast trajectory to visit Pluto, just like Pluto's symbol calls to mind Percival Lowell."
This was after Goofy and Minnie were rejected.
Moons named after the ferryman of the dead's mothers place, and a "fierce nine-headed monster" doesn't sound like a good place to be! I'll probably never pass through there on my way though, it's not on my route.
...the're really meaning it'll go to the moon instead?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
no really!
bob. yeah, not as catchy if the entire planet were called "bob" but still!
bob the moon.
sad robot making broken music
Could someone more familiar with greek mythology please tell me how Pluto and the Hydra are connected?
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
Now to see who's the bigger and badder moon! Found one, fight!
Just like my server and my laptop!
They named both of these moons after mythical creatures that had almost everything to do with water. the Nix and the Multiple headed Hydra to which we owe many of our roots in the english language for water, I am assuming.
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
I hope Celestia (celestia.sf.net) will be updated soon so I can "visit" these new moons.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
They originally wanted to name it Unix, but SCO threatened to sue.
I feel like they should have saved Hydra for something else.
(rimshot)
Thank you!
Pluto could use a hydrant.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
I for one can't wait for this craft to make it to Pluto. There's so much we don't know about that area of the solar system and even a fly-by mission could tell us so much. Wouldn't it be grand if we could pin down chemical makeups of pluto and other objects in the Kuiper Belt? We might get a better idea if the Deuterium and Protium Isotope proportions are dissimilar to the Earth's Ocean Water and help decided whether comets like Halley and Hyakutake are good represent sample (if they are, they're easier to study than the rest of the Belt.) What if we discovered that the ratio is closer to Earth's Ocean than the comet's have provided? It could lend quite a bit of credence to theoretical origins of atleast some of Earth's water as being Extraterrestrial! Who knows what other clues Pluto and its moons may hide about the origin and growth of the solar system. I wonder if these new moons plus Pluto and Charon would be massive enough (as one) to be above the controversy over Pluto's planethood?
Demented But Determined.
Akima: You can't call a planet "Bob."
Cale: So now you're the boss. You're the King of Bob.
Akima: Can't we just call it "Earth"?
Cale: No one said you have to live on Bob.
Akima: I'm never calling it that.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
to Pluto, maybe Cosmonaut Li can land on Nix.
Li nix - a good thing.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
So much effort to name rocks billions of miles away and yet our closest neighbor just gets called "moon." ok, "the moon." Well, you always take the familiar for granted.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Why Nix? Why not Cerberus and Hydra?
and then NASA and other space agencies watched in horror as the "moons" crashed into the tiny planet. They later revealed they were simply conviently placed asteroids. I thought pluto was a planet that was just the right size to be a moon itself, I guess it got tired of all the other bigger planets making fun of it for its size. So it got two asteroids and called them moons, and gave them really nasty names? It just feels to me that we really haven't had enough time with high level telescopes to determine the satalite properties of the outer planets, They are still somewhat mysterious themselves to be naming the moons
Did someone say cake?
Shocking! Celestia finally pushed past version 1.3.2, where it had languished for years. Will wonders never cease? Can't wait to get home and download this puppy...
Constitutionally Correct
A million little kids would rise up and mop the floor with you. After being made to memorize a list of planets, to tell them they are wrong ... that'll get you killed.
I think technically it isn't a planet. But life's boring if you live it to the letter. Let's call it a planet for the sake of breaking the rules.
... and the kids.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Earth's natural satellite is officially named "The Moon", yes, capitalized, with "The" included. In many Latin-based languages, it is called "Luna", which is what I prefer as a 'name'. Just as our planet's official name is "Earth", even though 'earth' can also refer to dirt.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
What's going to happen to dear old Nix when Pluto is nixed as a planet? The traditionalists will probably sick a hydra on those who dare say Pluto is not a planet.
But if Pluto isn't (better: won't be) a planet http://physorg.com/news70120085.html, how can it have moons?
"You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm." - S. G. Colette
I jsut finished refreshing my security suit.
A Linux machine with software like THC Hydra, what was I supposed to think?
So, I've been forced to rename my laptop to Pluto.
-Tim Louden
What is this "subscribe to SlashDot" of which you speak? (read...read...read) Holy shit - does anyone actually pay good money to read SlashDot? (If they do, they're mistaken about the "no ads" bit...)
fullphaser - pluto now has THREE moons (that we know of): Charon, Nix and Hydra.
More trivia: How many planets in our solar system have only a single moon? (answer: one)
How many have NO moons? (two or three, mecury, venus, and maybe xena)
Ratboy
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
"Gentlemen! To complement my recent invention of the Five Assed Monkey, I present to you... The Man With Nine Dicks!"
--Dr. Alphonse Mephisto
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
That Goofy the dog is a peer of Mickey's, but Pluto is Mickey's dog. Doesn't that make Pluto a slave?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
These moons, and those newly discovered ones around Saturn obviously did not just come into existence in recent history, we merely detected them finally, and gave them names. To extrapolate, there will be many more that we haven't detected yet, most likely around the last three: Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, simply because detailed analysis by dedicated spacecraft hasn't been done yet. I think the Voyagers did a fairly thorough job, though, so whatever is left should be quite small, but may merit the classification of "moon" none-the-less (not sure what the criteria is...Saturn has billions of "moonlets" in its rings).
This sort of begs the question, how many names are we gonna have to come up with. Surely Classical mythology has a finite supply...
... have a big yellow smiley face with glasses?
I thought that our satellite is known as the Moon. A lot of people erroneously refer to other satellites as "moons", but they aren't. Right...?
You are the central mass around which the laptop is dependent, therefore you are pluto and the laptop can be Hydra. Just so long as you don't call your laptop Charon, you should be okay, but should you ever get a g/f* then try and convince her to be Charon, while you two revolve around each other for eternity. It's a nice gig, this being married stuff.
/.ers single male young. DO NOT TAKE OFFENSE TO THIS STATEMENT. DO NOT REPLY TO THIS STATEMENT. THANK YOU FOR YOUR, er... ahem, Thank you for your time.
*oblig ref to most
2^3 * 31 * 647
For real!
Just like discoveries of Suns in other Solar systems.
...so the naming people nixed Nyx in favour of Nix.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...a pair of gloves (accurate to within one... er... finger, anyway).
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...if all of the SCOX legal drones got launched off to Pluto for a while.
"Hey, um, Pluto seems to be getting a bit, well, thicker recently?"
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing