Captured Comet Becomes Moon of Jupiter

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.'

Comments

The comet's shape

[R2.0]

The comet's shape was revealed to be rectilinear, with an aspect ratio comprising the squares of the first 3 non-zero positive primes.

Re:The comet's shape

[maxume]

non-zero positive primes

Isn't that somewhat redundant?

Re:The comet's shape

[LaminatorX]

That was not an entirely settled matter when The Sentinel was written.

Re:The comet's shape

[jollyreaper]

The comet's shape was revealed to be rectilinear
Though some thought it a doorway with stars in here
with an aspect ratio comprising the squares
of the first 3 non-zero positive primes.
Burma shave

Re:The comet's shape

[R2.0]

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.

Re:The comet's shape

[rattaroaz]

The comet's shape was revealed to be rectilinear, with an aspect ratio comprising the squares of the first 3 non-zero positive primes.

I thought only Uranus was rectalinear.

Re:The comet's shape

[bcmm]

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.

Re:The comet's shape

[danwesnor]

Yeah, I wrote that article when I was on acid. Might not want to take it so seriously.

Re:The comet's shape

[Opyros]

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

But...

[njfuzzy]

"That's no moon!"

Re:But...

[SterlingSylver]

Well, it was for 12 years

Good catch Jupiter

[moon3]

One can imagine that over billions of years Jupiter helped to clear-out our system from similar thrash pretty well.

Re:Good catch Jupiter

[navygeek]

Jupiter is like VICE Cops on a rampage...

Re:Good catch Jupiter

[speedtux]

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

Re:Good catch Jupiter

[Anonymous Coward]

What an intelligent design to put it there, to dispose of all the garbage.

Re:Good catch Jupiter

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Actually, had there been no Jupiter in our Solar system, the aliens would have probably parked the monolith in the orbit of Iapetus instead of Europa. Europa only made commuting easier for them.

Re:Good catch Jupiter

[Tablizer]

And if it wasn't there, we may not be here to wonder why.

Re:Good catch Jupiter

[Chris Burke]

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

Maybe. However in addition to capturing bodies that could have threatened earth, Jupiter also attracts objects from the Oort Cloud etc. that would not have been any threat to Earth otherwise. The jury is still out on whether Jupiter is actually a net positive.

Deep Thought

[ciderVisor]

"Whether they ever find life there or not, I think Jupiter should be considered an enemy planet." - Jack Handey

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

"in the mid-20th century"

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot
History for nerds. Stuff that mattered.

I'll bet if I go back 50 years, I'll find a dupe in the archive.

Re:This should be NASA's focus

[clone53421]

Yeah, and it's been thrown around the table a few times, but we still haven't figured out what sort of payment Jupiter will accept (or how to get it there). Hiring out gas giants for protection turns out to be less easy than you'd expect.

Re:This should be NASA's focus

[Red Flayer]

NASA should be spending most - if not all - of its budget preparing to avert a comet/asteroid from hitting earth.

With all due respect, I disagree. Yes, some resources should be directed at that problem. But there is so much more that can and should be done by NASA. The Hubble, Chandra, and Spitzer telescopes are a good example.

But what is the point in surviving if all we are doing is treading water? Sure we could spend billions on monitoring near space for potentially dangerous objects, but IMO we're better off spending those billions on things that can advance technology.

And in the (very) long run, our currently feeble attempts at space travel may lead to the best defense against catastrophic collisions -- another colonized planet.

Re:Is Jupiter gravity saving Earth?

[Wizard Drongo]

If you want to get truly pedantic, it'd be Iovian, since Latin lacks the letter "j"... But let's not quibble about details...

Re:This should be NASA's focus

[KeithJM]

Sorry, but how is colonizing another planet going to prevent a catastrophic collision?

Imagine when all of what would become the human race lived in one valley in Africa. One particularly harsh winter or dry summer could wipe out the whole species, right? If that happened today it might still be a catastrophe but humanity would go on. If we had self-sufficient colonies on other planets, an asteroid could destroy the earth without killing off humanity.

Wait a second... article may be overstating case

[wisebabo]

The article says that the comet had an orbit around Jupiter of 12 years. Well Jupiter has an orbital period around the sun of almost exactly 12 years also. Does this mean that the comet was in orbit around Jupiter or that it was merely in an orbit that was very similar to Jupiter's (in relation to the sun).

I believe that there is a NEO that basically does the same thing around earth. It travels in an orbit around the sun just slightly different from the earth so that sometimes it is in front of the earth on it's path and sometimes it is behind. From our perspective it makes a complex lissajous (spelling?) track. But I seem to remember it is definitely NOT "orbiting" the earth.

The article doesn't specifically state whether or not the comet is gravitationally bound to Jupiter which I guess is the definition of "orbiting" (I'm not a professional astronomer). Even if it was orbiting Jupiter, with a period of 12 years it was very loosely bound. In any case, how was it brought into Jupiter's proximity? How did it get ejected? Where is it now?

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:This should be NASA's focus

[Junior J. Junior III]

NASA should be spending most - if not all - of its budget preparing to avert a comet/asteroid from hitting earth.

Everything else is moot if we let that happen.

Unfortunately Congress is more concerned with steroids in baseball.
Sometimes I think we deserve to become extinct.

If we just gave enough steroids to the baseball players, they could probably hit any threatening meteors, asteroids, or comets out of the solar system, thereby solving both problems.

Re:This should be NASA's focus

[Sir_Lewk]

We are the first and only known organism that has the ability to improve the state of it's species. We have the ability to make ourselves great and prosper and you propose we do nothing more than simply survive. Take about underachievement.

Re:This should be NASA's focus

[yurtinus]

Feeding trolls is bad, but perhaps I should clarify regardless:

NASAs goals and objectives are not solely to protect earth from dangerous rocks. It is a research and exploration agency. I can see that if you're terrified of dangerous space rocks, you'd want to see that mission changed. I simply think it's a bad idea to redirect all of your resources to fend off one threat which has a minuscule year to year statistical likelihood. Sure, don't ignore the threat, but don't give up on all the other exploration you're doing.

But then again, you stick to your priorities. I can respect that ;)

Re:This should be NASA's focus

[yurtinus]

Except it's not a 1% chance. It's not a 1 in 500 chance. Extinction level impacts are a once in tens of millions of years event. I'm no astronomer, so have no ideas the difficulties involved in finding and tracking all NEOs-- but I do know that the effort involved for that is compounded by any number of objects that don't regularly live in our space. Essentially, you can never be 100% safe. I'm not saying do nothing, it's a mitigation versus aversion discussion. You can mitigate risks substantially where completely avoiding the risk is impossibly expensive.

Additionally-- impact events are only one of a myriad of potential calamities that we might face. Destabilization of the atmosphere (runnaway global cooling/warming), supervolcanoes, nearby gamma ray bursts, clathrate methane release, velociraptors, etcetc. You can't protect against everything, spending everything you have attempting to do so is just silly. Face it - Life is risky.