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Captured Comet Becomes Moon of Jupiter

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the don't-leave-me-moon-buddy dept.

An anonymous reader writes 'Jupiter's gravity captured a comet in the mid-20th century, holding it in orbit as a temporary moon for 12 years. The comet, named 147P/Kushida-Muramatsu, is the fifth body known to have been pulled by Jupiter from its orbit around the Sun. The discovery adds to our understanding of how Jupiter interferes with objects from the 'Hilda group,' which are asteroids and comets with orbits related to Jupiter's orbit.'

5 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The comet's shape by maxume · · Score: 2, Informative

    non-zero positive primes

    Isn't that somewhat redundant?

    --
    Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
  2. Re:The comet's shape by R2.0 · · Score: 5, Informative

    From Wikipedia:

    "Primality of one

    The importance of this theorem is one of the reasons for the exclusion of 1 from the set of prime numbers. If 1 were admitted as a prime, the precise statement of the theorem would require additional qualifications, since 3 could then be decomposed in different ways

            3 = 1 3 and 3 = 1 1 1 3 = 13 3.

    Until the 19th century, most mathematicians considered the number 1 a prime, the definition being just that a prime is divisible only by 1 and itself but not requiring a specific number of distinct divisors. There is still a large body of mathematical work that is valid despite labeling 1 a prime, such as the work of Stern and Zeisel. Derrick Norman Lehmer's list of primes up to 10,006,721, reprinted as late as 1956,[4] started with 1 as its first prime.[5] Henri Lebesgue is said to be the last professional mathematician to call 1 prime.[citation needed] The change in label occurred so that the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, as stated, is valid, i.e., "each number has a unique factorization into primes."[6][7] Furthermore, the prime numbers have several properties that the number 1 lacks, such as the relationship of the number to its corresponding value of Euler's totient function or the sum of divisors function.[8]"

    At least I came by it honestly.

    --
    "As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
  3. Re:Good catch Jupiter by speedtux · · Score: 4, Informative

    Yes, it did. A planet like Jupiter may actually have been essential for complex life to develop on Earth.

  4. Re:The comet's shape by bcmm · · Score: 2, Informative

    You're thinking of the dimensions of the TMA-1 Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. In The Sentinel (which 2001 was very loosely based on), the beacon is not a cuboid and has no such geometrical connection to prime numbers.

    --
    # cat /dev/mem | strings | grep -i llama
    Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
  5. Re:The comet's shape by Opyros · · Score: 2, Informative

    And is located on our Moon, not one of Jupiter's.