Slashdot Mirror
Asteroid Lutetia Revealed As a Protoplanet
astroengine writes "Asteroids visited by spacecraft have all turned out to be piles of rubble or chunks broken off of larger bodies, but that's not the case with 21 Lutetia, a 75-mile long, 47-mile wide body orbiting in the main belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. Europe's comet-bound Rosetta probe flew by Lutetia last year and gave scientists a big surprise. With its dense body and an interior that seems to have survived intact, the large asteroid appears more like a protoplanet — a leftover building block from the formation of the solar system."
Demoted to "Dwarf-Protoplanet" by a minority of IAU in a meeting held after all the sensible people have left the conference ...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
You go stumbling around in the dark and end up stepping on a few. The damned things get everywhere.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
21 Lutetia, a 75-mile long, 47-mile wide body orbiting in the main belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter.
This is a science article on a science website. Why is there only two dimensions listed for a three dimensional object, and why are those dimensions measured in miles?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Take note stupid editors : if you see ridiculous imperial units, you blew it.
95% of the world population does not know what the heck a mile is.
SI units for the win (and sanity).
Many of the articles I've read seem to claim that Lutetia has a molten core. I don't see how that could possibly be the case. It may have once had a molten core, but it would have solidified billions of years ago.
It sounds like a prime candidate for asteroid mining.
Bad enough that Kirk's son messed with the stuff, now we have a bunch of it orbiting our sun. Seriously even Klingon scientists have denounced the use of protomatter.
Pluto shouldn't be classified a planet, as it doesn't share a lot of properties with them. First it's not a celestial body but 2. Second, its orbit is elliptical, as opposed to the circular orbit of the planets, and not in the ecliptic. Also, it's very small, smaller than the Moon.
Heh. We're not sure what a planet-planet is yet.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
If this thing got smaller, it's not nearly Pluto, so Pluto isn't nearly it (the reflexive property is how I roll), so those who campaigned to demote Pluto are full of retroactive spacecrap.
I want Pluto back where it belongs.
Why do they keep saying "left over from the formation of the solar system? Who's to say it isn't still forming? Give the proto planet a few more eons and maybe it'll make something of it's self.
All this whining about the status of a tiny frozen lump of space rock as a result of patriotic pride.
I had an idea, posted to Andrea Rossi's Journal site related to LENR cold fusion, that the core of the Sun is iron/nickel (as suggested in the "Iron Sun Theory" which says the sun only has hydrogen at the surface, like the Earth has water and oxygen at the surface but if hard underneath) just like the core of the Earth has a lot of nickel and iron, and the nickel is constantly ejecting neutrons at the boundary from quantum tunneling effects, which in turn then fuse back with the nickel via the Rossi/Focardi effect to produce heat and copper and neutrons that produce other elements. Oil and methane may comes from that layer too, from escaping hydrogen interacting with other decay components like carbon and oxygen.
So perhaps the same is happening in that asteroid -- that it has a nickel core where cold fusion is happening at the boundary? Which suggests to me there may likely be hydrocarbons being emitted too from Lutetia, which should be easy to check?
Basically, in this conception, the universe may have formed as nickel and iron (essentially, from neutrons), not hydrogen, and what we see in the universe is mostly the decay of masses of neutron from quantum effects, not the fusion of hydrogen (even as hydrogen does fuse, especially at the hot surface of stars powered by nickel-hydrogen cold fusion).
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I can not understand that /. uses the Imperial system instead of the far more scientific Metric system for indication the protoplanets dimensions.