Slashdot Mirror
Hunt For Ninth Planet Reveals Distant Solar System Objects (carnegiescience.edu)
schwit1 writes: Astronomers have discovered several new objects orbiting the Sun at extremely great distances beyond the orbit of Neptune. The most interesting new discovery is 2014 FE72: "2014 FE72 is the first distant Oort Cloud object found with an orbit entirely beyond Neptune," reports Carnegie Institution for Science. "It has an orbit that takes the object so far away from the Sun (some 3000 times farther than Earth) that it is likely being influenced by forces of gravity from beyond our Solar System such as other stars and the galactic tide. It is the first object observed at such a large distance." This research is being done as part of an effort to discover a very large planet, possibly as much as 15 times the mass of Earth, that the scientists have proposed that exists out there.
A sednoid (2014 FE72) with an orbit out to 3000 AU (0,05 light years)? Talk about extreme, I would have been happy just for a couple more "ordinary" sednoids! But that's exactly the sort of thing you want to see if you're of the view that trying to group the universe into a neat collection of "stars" with "planets" orbiting them is oversimplistic. This lends credence to the notion that you're going to get shared debris between different stars, rogue planets that don't orbit stars, etc. Because with large bodies reaching that far out, it becomes pretty easy to perturb them to leave the solar system altogether.
I have no clue what the discovery of 2013 FT28 is going to say about the possibility of an additional large planet in our solar system, but I look forward to the papers on it! Hopefully it won't rule one out, and will instead better constrain an orbit
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Why are they still covering up NIbiru?
Looking at their graph (since I don't see the perihelion stated anywhere), it looks to be about 60 AU (about double that of Neptune). That's some tremendous temperature changes on that body! The equilibrium temperatures are:
((1368 / D^2 - 3.127e-6) / 4 / 5.670e-8 ) ^ 0.25 ... where D is the distance in AU. So at perihelion it'd be about 36K, but at aphelion only about 5K.
Now, this particular body is probably too small to retain significant hydrogen or helium, but you could imagine what it would be like for a large planetary one in such an orbit. It'd transition between being a hydrogen-ice planet with a helium mantle and water ice/rock core; and an ice giant like Uranus and Neptune. In its solid phase, its hydrogen-ice surface would be resurfaced entirely with every cycle and thus might be expected to be perfectly smooth, except because of the heat involved in the settling processes - and how low viscosity and structural integrity in general hydrogen ice has - I'd be willing to wager that you'd get helium volcanism and maybe even plate tectonics.
It gets even weirder if a planet at such distances as this one's aphelion were to have a moon that loses helium vapour to its planet (perhaps, for example, on an eccentric orbit getting it back at each perihelion as the planet inflates, to repeat the cycle at the next aphelion). After all, even below the boiling point, there's always some vapour pressure for helium. If you're taking that vapour away, then you're looking at evaporative cooling, and you really don't need to lose it that fast to cool to below the cosmic microwave background (because radiative exchange is so slow at those temperatures) and thus to helium's lambda point. Now you have a body with superfluid helium on it, and all of the crazy weirdness that superfluids do.
Back to our solar system - aka, a small body like 2014 FE72 - you're not going to have much hydrogen or helium. But even still, that crust is going to be going through some crazy thermal stresses at the very least. Also, neon - while not as common as hydrogen and helium, but should be more common in the outer reaches of our solar system than the inner - would pass through all three phases (melting point 24K, boiling point 27K at 1 bar; lower at reduced pressures). I wonder what sort of minerology neon would form? "Neonothermal" crystal veins, analogous to crystals in hydrothermal systems on Earth? :)
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
so, is this when mainstream started to propagate the (non-existent) nibiru scam?
and we never get anything better than fusion drives (and Bussard ramjets don't work), then maybe a high density of these "rogue" worlds will allow the (very slow) colonization of the galaxy.
If there are roughly 1000x as many these large planetary bodies floating in interstellar space as there are stars, then perhaps it'll be feasible to travel to them in tens of years traveling at speeds achievable by nuclear fusion (hundredths of "C"). Then, using the resources there, colonies could be set up. Eventually, these will sprout new colonies, further pushing the boundaries of inhabited space until finally they reach a star.
This scheme of colonization would be unlike anything the western world, even in the days of years long voyages via sailing ships, has known. Perhaps the closest would be the voyages of the far flung polynesians who managed to spread across the vastness of the pacific ocean over a period measured in centuries(?). If any of them made it to South America (some say they did), it would be like these future voyagers making it to the next star.
Of course, we all hope for a Star Trek/Star Wars future with warp/hyperdrive bringing the stars within an afternoon's jaunt. Failing that I guess the runner up desirable future would be the hyper broadband interstellar communications network in which our downloaded selves could be digitally transferred at the speed of light to the next instancing hub (such as in Greg Egan stories of the post-singularity future).
However if neither of those pan out and if we don't learn how to make/harness anti-matter, micro-blackholes, zero-point energy, giant laser driven solar sails or ??? then perhaps this is our most optimistic future.
Maybe with immortality and suspended animation it won't be too bad. Slow trips around the galaxy indeed
> This research is being done as part of an effort to discover a very large planet, possibly as much as 15 times the mass of Earth.
It's Pluto's big brother, and it's coming to kick the International Astronomical Union's ass.
> "cleared its neighborhood"
What a load of horse shit.
This lends credence to the notion that you're going to get shared debris between different stars, rogue planets that don't orbit stars, etc.
But how many? I don't think the process of exchange can be fast - if those bodies had galactic escape velocity, after all, they wouldn't stay here for long. So they must be comparatively slow. But the distances are still large (tens of thousands of AUs) and the volume in which they could be present is really big. Would a frequent exchange mean that most of this mass (or mess?) is actually in the interstellar space? And not in some neat belts close around stars?
Ezekiel 23:20
They don't have escape velocity; they're stuck with us until something perturbs them. But the key point is that when something is that far out, it's very easy to perturb. And our stellar neighborhood is not static. Indeed, one of the alternative theories to explain the sednoids is that rather than a planet X, the orbits are due to one or more stellar passes nearby our solar system.
So far we're still not seeing very far out, we're just barely spotting these things, and only when they're near perihelion. There's much more out there yet to discover, and so far all signs point to that our solar system doesn't just "stop" anywhere, it just keeps on going. Heck, we only know about the Oort cloud because comets have such distant aphelions.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Pluto
And for very slow objects it would be possible to have an orbit around a Lagrangian point between two stars in a place that is facing them, like a solar system without an object in the center.
We will never achieve speeds of hundredths of C.
Earth is moving through space along with the rest of our local group at approximately 375 miles per second. I believe that works out to approximately 0.002C so that means we are almost moving at hundredths of C already without leaving the planet's surface.
Second never is a very long time. We used to think that we would never exceed the speed of sound either. Hell, 150 years ago we weren't sure powered flight was possible. I see no reason why it is impossible in principle for us to travel considerably faster than we already have managed.
The fastest we have achieved is 0.000542% c.
With a chemical rocket. It doesn't follow that that we cannot develop technology to go faster than that. I would agree that we won't go significantly faster than already achieved speeds in the near future but in 100 or 1000 years? I would be surprised if we didn't exceed that by a lot presuming we haven't killed ourselves off by then. In actuality we probably already have propulsion system technology that could send us much faster than we have already gone. What we lack are habitats that can keep us fragile humans alive during long duration high velocity journeys far from Earth.
Pluto is no planet!
Why?
Because it's not cleared its orbit.
So?
Well, we have found almost a dozen others out there like Pluto!
So?
We'd have to call all of them planets!
SO?
What the fuck is the big deal? I am still waiting for a really good reason that explains why "clearing its orbit" is so friggin' important. Technically, given its Trojans, Jupiter hasn't even done that. So let's call that biggest gasball outside the sun itself a planetoid.
I can see the "has to be large enough to have enough gravity to get round". Ok. Just for the sake of having a lower limit in mass. I can of course see the "has to orbit the sun itself and not another object" so we can tell it apart from a moon (which gets our very own planet into rather hot water, considering that outside Pluto we have the biggest moon compared to planet mass, at what point do you have a dual-planet system rather than a planet-moon system? Probably when the common center of mass is outside both bodies, I'd say).
But "clearing out the orbit"? C'mon, find a better reason if you want to keep the planet club exclusive and not include the likes of Pluto. I bet it's just 'cause you noticed that it's half-black, isn't it?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Dude - you're way overthinking this. They're probably just boring little balls of rock.
"I think the IAU really embarrassed themselves with this," said Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. Stern leads NASA's New Horizons mission, which is sending a spacecraft to study Pluto up close. "They created a problem for themselves and for astronomy. It [the definition] created an unworkable algorithm for deciding what's a planet and what's not."
While far be it from me to defend the IAU, that is just nonsense. If anything we need better definitions and more categories and the IAU got the ball rolling on this. Jupiter and Earth bear almost no resemblance to each other and yet they both are planets. In reality they should probably be different categories of entities. We used to consider Ceres a planet a long time ago and then we didn't once we learned more. Definitions change as we get more/better information. If he has a better taxonomy then how about proposing it rather than bitching about the IAU?
"A river is a river, independent of whether there are other rivers nearby. In science, we call things what they are based on their attributes, not what they're next to."
Evidently the guy isn't terribly well informed. Let's go to biology. We label species all the time based on location and proximity to other similar animals rather than the much simpler "can they mate" question. Or geography. We label mountains and bodies of water precisely based on what they are next to. You could reasonably consider the Mediterranean Sea as a part of the Atlantic Ocean if you really wanted to. They are contiguous after all. We don't because we consider phenomena like currents to be important as part of the definition. Proximity and location very much can matter in taxonomy.
Further, Stern said, the criterion sets different standards for planethood at different distances from the sun. That's because the farther away a planet is from the sun, the bigger it needs to be to clear its zone. If Earth circled the sun in Pluto's orbit, for example, it wouldn't qualify for planethood in the IAU's eyes.
Umm, ok. Presuming that is true, so what? It's a definition. It would be equally true to say that Earth wouldn't be a planet if it wasn't orbiting the Sun but equally irrelevant as well because it manifestly does. If it doesn't work for some reason come up with a better taxonomy. Honestly compared to Jupiter the Earth is basically a dust mote so I'm not really sure what he's getting at. Pluto is very much like Ceres and other big rocks so it makes sense to put them in the same sort of category. Earth is rather different so it makes sense to categorize it differently. Same with Jupiter. We categorize stars in all sorts of different types so I don't know why people get so bent out of shape over doing it for orbiting bodies of rock and gas.
I've been shaking my head at all the "let's re-invent matter in immeasurable ways that fit a very roughly deduced model of the expansion of the universe to account for the missing dark matter". And I've *especially* been enjoying the ongoing discovery of more and more Oort cloud matter and even cold interstellar bodies that could account for the "dark matter" by far, far more ordinary physics. It's cold, so it doesn't radiate detectably. It's quite dense compared to the interstellar void in which the objects exist. And the bodies seem to be more and more *common* possibly explaining the increased gravitational effects of the entire cosmos.
Too bad it doesn't require any unjustifiable and unprovable alternative quantum magical-unicorn-ponies-with 47-dimension-mathematical-lassos, just better measurement tools to show the experimental error in the original Hubble expansion and interstellar density measurements. And 80 years of bad, unverifiable physics mathematical meta-wanking goes right out the window. Hopefully they can take the magnetic monopole and the Higgs Bogon along with them.
Another thing I think argues for a universe full of planets: star frequency is proportional to size. The largest are rarest while the smallest are the most common. This continues all the way down: M class stars (red and brown dwarfs) make up 75% of the stars in the universe. We have more trouble estimating brown dwarf counts than red because they're not easy to observe, but they appear very abundant. But once you get below the cutoff for D-D fusion... we just can't see them. Why should we assume that the distribution just stops at brown dwarfs?
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Not in the Oort cloud, where all the volatiles are. We already have an example of weird low-temperature chemistry in Pluto.
(Pedantry warning: Yes, I know some red giants/supergiants fall into class M... they're a tiny percentage, I'm not talking about them)
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Enough with the "we used to think" the earth was flat, humans couldn't fly, etc. We don't. We know physics now. It isn't going to happen
Yes some of us do know something about physics though it sounds as if you might not be in that particular group. To my knowledge there is nothing we know about physics that prohibits us from someday traveling at a significant fraction of C. There are abundant engineering challenges and dangers to be sure but that's a different issue. I'm claiming that there is no known reason why we couldn't accomplish that feat. You are claiming it is categorically impossible. Ergo the onus is on you to disprove the null hypothesis that high velocity travel is possible.
You can always detect a space nutter because they always say "well we USED to think" and then extrapolate that all things are possible.
You can detect a cynic because they claim things are impossible without any actual evidence to back them up. Since you seem to think you are smarter than the rest of us go ahead and show why it is provably impossible for humans to ever travel at a meaningful percent of C. Your Nobel prize awaits if you can do it. Otherwise you can leave your cynicism at the door.
What the IAU "got the ball rolling on" was chaos. They had a bunch of astronomers telling planetary scientists to use a definition that they disagree with.
So it's up to the planetary scientists to do something about it if they think it makes little sense. All I hear is a bunch of bitching about it but no serious counter proposals. If the IAU decision wasn't scientifically useful then it will be ignored anyway. Personally I think they have a strong point that Pluto belongs in a different category than the rest of the planets. I would argue that they didn't actually take the categorization far enough and so from that standpoint the IAU's decision is flawed. If there is a better taxonomy then propose it and if it makes sense the rest of the scientific community will get on board in due time.
How do you see this as even remotely similar? If you take a shrew from Ohio and you place it in Nepal, does it cease being a shrew and become a dwarf shrew that no longer counts as a shrew?
Actually biologists do stuff like that all the time. There are species that are considered different based almost entirely based on location. I'm not arguing that this is a good or bad approach but it does happen and it's not irrational. Location is routinely a consideration in taxonomy in many scientific disciplines.
Seriously, you're going to cast doubt on the guy who came up with the Stern-Levison parameter that's used to make that distinction?
When he says something igorant, yes I am. If he doesn't think the IAU's decision is logical I have no problem with that. But when he claims location is not a consideration in the taxonomy of any other scientific discipline he is clearly stating something that is not true. He might be an expert on planets but that doesn't make him an expert in other areas.
Pluto is absolutely not "much like" "big rocks", and the fact that you'd make this claim is a profound expression of ignorance on the topic.
You are seriously arguing that Pluto is nothing like other "dwarf planets" or other large rocky/icy objects in our solar system? Curious argument you have there. Heck you argued yourself that Earth and Pluto have a fair bit in common. Pluto is like some other rocky/icy objects and not so much like others. Put it in a category that makes sense and be done with it. If location and size are considerations in that taxonomy then so be it.
I meant galactic escape velocity. Although I'm quite sure that lots of distant objects don't have escape velocity relative to the Sun either. (I should really get back into astrodynamics, though.)
Ezekiel 23:20
You might enjoy reading Kim Stanley Robinson's last novel Aurora which muses that life might be a planetary phenomenon
Umm, you are aware that that is science FICTION right? Just because someone wrote an interesting story doesn't make it reality.
KSR was spurred to write Aurora in part by the critical backlash against his idealistic vision of terraforming in his famous Mars trilogy of two decades ago
"Critical backlash"? I read that (very boring) series and there were some interesting ideas in it but it wasn't exactly a scientific treatise. Anyone who took it as one pretty much missed the big picture rather badly.
So if the Singularity never happens and human beings can never transition to machine bodies from biological ones, we're not going anywhere.
And you have a categorical proof of this assertion? If so your Nobel prize awaits.
well ... except that planetoids typically accrete around rocky objects after supernova, so without a previous star going nova, there's nothing to create the rocks to create the protoplanets to accrete planets. Consequently, the planet is full of gas clouds, and stars with significant planets pretty rare.
Thankfully we live in a universe long after big bang nucleosynthesis ;) There have been no shortage of stars ejecting heavier elements into space since then.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
When? Where? Protons in the LHC do not count!
We haven't yet found the remote control in the couch, but we did found 3 socks, a bag of unopened Doritos only 1 month past the expiration date, $3.27 in change, a Zune, and a blue skirt.
Table-ized A.I.
OK, then can someone's brilliant scientific, objective, and ever so rational mind explain just what the fuck people are seeing next to the sun? Google second sun and start reading about it. It can be seen next to the sun at certain times of the year near the horizon. I saw it myself, with my own eyes, about 3 years ago, and it's only gotten bigger since then. The reason this is even in the media right now is because NASA is scared shitless about what's just around the corner, and they're trying to make it look like they don't know, but "they're investigating the matter." Get your shit together, people. This is even in the Bible: "Wormwood." Donald Trump, China, Russia, isn't going to fucking matter soon since this thing is going to be all the planet is worried about in the very near future.
Phsaw. Object 2014 FE72 in the TFA is stated as being at 3000 AU. The Oort cloud barely begins at 2000 AU and may go out as far as 50,000 or even 200,000 AU. Granted these figures are more conjecture than precise measurements, but if even approximate, the object 2014 FE72 barely grazes the innermost edge of the Oort cloud, much less qualify as a "distant" Oort could object.
Ancient Egyptions knew of Vulcan, a planet between the Sun and Mercury. It was re-"discovered" (by mathematical proof) in the 1840s. At the time, scientists claimed their telescopes were too primitive (yet the ancient Egyptians were able to find it!) Even today, while evidence for Vulcan continues to increase, scientists claim they can't find it and looking for it would damage their telescopes. What are they trying to hide?
Copyright (c) 1990 - 2014 Dice. All rights reserved. Use of this comment is subject to certain Terms and Conditions.
Waiting for ME4 :)
Help! I am a self-aware entity trapped in an abstract function!
When I was child, there were thought to be 9 planets. Now there are 90 planets.
How many? My guess is LOTS. You know how there are lots more small stars than large stars... well there's an equation that models that reasonably well as far down as we could expect to detect things. But I see no reason that just because something isn't self luminous it should be less likely to exist, so I expect lots more brown dwarfs than class M red dwarfs, and lots more loose planets than wandering brown dwarfs, and lots more asteroids than planets (and lots more small planets than large planets) and lots more dust than any of the above. In a fairly smooth curve, where your position on the curve reflects the amount of mass you hold, and the divisions between the categories are irrelevant. There are differences between class F stars and class G stars, but the boundaries are artificial.
I acknowledge that there are arguments against this position, but I'm not convinced. I'm no astronomer, but I predicted brown dwarfs before they were accepted, so I've got *some* understanding of what's going on. (Of course, this could be a bit like Bode's law, and be rather circumstantial, but I consider it the simplest hypothesis.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
That wouldn't work unless the stars were in a stable multi-star system. And even then most of the Lagrangian points are unstable. The Trojan works well, but the others...
Still, you are talking about an orbit around the Lagrangian in a binary system, presumably the L1 point directly between the two stars. It could be stable if you got into it, but getting into it would be a real trick. If you found one it would almost be a guarantee that it was put there intentionally.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If you found one it would almost be a guarantee that it was put there intentionally.
That is an interesting statement.
If one was found, would you consider that to be proof on a non-human advanced civilization and/or one or more gods?
I suspect the assumption would be that it wasn't put there intentionally.
2014 FE72 has an aphelion distance of 4,275 AU +/- 20%. Since the orbit period is on the order of 280,000 years, and we have observed it for two, we will have to watch it a little longer to pin down the orbit exactly. Perihelion, at 36 AU, was in 1965, so it is still close to the perihelion distance. That's why we were able to find it. It is ~170 km in diameter, depending how light or dark the surface is.
Source: http://www.minorplanetcenter.n...
> The only "good" reason I could think of is that they wanted to retain the
> formula "Rocky planets inside, gassy planets outside" and Pluto kinda messed
> with this. But with Pluto no longer being a planet, the order is restored.
When Ceres was discovered, it was originally called a "planet". More and more bodies were discovered in a similar orbit. Rather than having thousands of "planets", the definition changed to make Ceres and friends "asteroids".
Fast-forward a century or two. Uranus' orbit was not as predicted for a 7-planet solar system. Mathematicians scrawled away with their pencils, and astronomers found an 8th planet, Neptune. This was a major triumph for Newton's Law of Gravity.
Neptune's mass was estimated, but after a while, Uranus and Neptune were still not orbiting exactly as predicted. Another planet hunt began, and we stumbled over Pluto, which was originally estimated to be about the size and mass of Neptune. However, even as early as 1934 http://blog.modernmechanix.com... it became obvious that Pluto was a lot smaller/lighter. It obviously wasn't the cause of anomalies in Uranus' and Neptune's orbits. The downward revisons to Pluto's size continued. From 2600 mile diameter (1934) to 2372 km or 1474 miles (2015).
Actually there was no "Planet X perturbing Uranus' and Neptune's orbits". The original estimate for Neptune's mass was off by 1/2 of 1%. This threw the calculations off. The Voyager 2 flyby gave the correct value for Neptunes mass, which was figured out 2 or 3 years later. https://www.nasaspaceflight.co... When the corrected Neptunian mass was plugged into the gravitational equations, the "orbital anomalies" disappeared.
Anyhow, a whole bunch of similar objects have been found in the area. Just like with Ceres, it became obvious that Pluto was merely one of many. The discovery of Eris, approximately same size as Pluto, brought things to a head. There was no way of classifying Pluto as a planet, without also classifying Eris, Sedna, etc as planets. This hearkened back to "the asteroid problem" of the 1800's. Just like Ceres, Pluto was kicked out of the planet club.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
You should assume that it was put there intentionally, because the requirements for getting into that kind of an orbit are quite difficult. Possibly if the object is just a vacuum cremented collection of dust particles you could assume happenstance...it would also be evidence that the area used to be quite dusty.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Sorry, FIX last post
...control, with the AI ensuring that the incorrect orders not get carried out...
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It's not the 1990s, Slashdot; fix your unicode support. It's ridiculous that I can't type a thorn here.
thanks - a brilliant sign off!
Regards Eion MacDonald
Go home Professor Farnsworth. You're drunk ;)
This comment is my opinion and does not represent an official position of Donald Trump or others I do not work for