Slashdot Mirror
Pluto Is Emitting X-Rays (digitaltrends.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Digital Trends: Scientists have noticed the tiny trans-Neptunium object emitting X-rays, which, if it is confirmed, is both a baffling and exciting discovery. Carey Lisse and Ralph McNutt from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and a team of colleagues detected the X-rays by pointing the Chandra X-Ray Obervatory telescope in Pluto's direction four different times between February 2014 and August 2015. Seven photons of X-ray light were detected during these observations, confirming the team's hypothesis that the dwarf planet is detectable on the X-ray spectrum, potentially due to the presence of an atmosphere. Their findings have been published in the scientific journal Icarus. Why is this such a big deal? First of all, it would challenge what scientists have previously believed to be true of Pluto's nature. Until now, the popular description of the dwarf planet is as a tiny ball of frozen rock slowly meandering around the sun some 3.6-billion miles away. One of the possible explanations for why Pluto is emanating X-rays would be that the high energy particles emitted by the sun are stripping away and reacting with Pluto's atmosphere, producing the X-rays that are visible to Chandra. There are other potential explanations, such as haze particles in Pluto's atmosphere scattering the sun's X-rays are possible, though unlikely given the temperature of the X-rays observed. It is also possible that these X-rays are actually bright auroras produced by the atmosphere, but that would require Pluto to have a magnetic field -- something that would have been detected during New Horizon's flyby, yet no evidence of one was found.
It's a space station, installed by aliens to observe the solar system.
I literally had to absorb seven quintillion photons from my iPhone to read about seven random photons from Pluto.
All these worlds are yours except Charon.
Don't think it is a slow news day around here. Because apparently there are another 10^45 articles prepped and queued for auto-publish this morning about other critical batches of photons we've got to know about.
noticed the tiny trans-Neptunium object emitting X-rays
I appreciate that "dwarf" planet doesn't sound too PC but I do wonder whether we should reserve the adjective "tiny" for items too small for their own gravitational mass to pull them into a sphere. Surprisingly there are rather a lot of items smaller than Pluto, even in an astronomical context, and I'm not sure we should leave "minuscule" as the next step down.
what of Cygnus X-1?
My dick's emitting sex rays, straight into your mum's wretched vaj
So much for all those nay-sayers who thought the Mi-Go would just sit quietly by when we insulted Yuggoth by denying it the full status of a planet. We'll see how the people of Earth stand up to an onslaught of X-Ray photons. 7 is just the beginning, at full power this weapon could probably deliver 20 to 30 in one blast!
It's a trans-NEPTUNIAN object. Not trans-NEPTUNIUM. Neptunium is an element (Np. Atomic Number 93).
Pluto will always be a planet as far as I'm concerned. The seven photons I could give a shit about.
One, it should be trans-Neptunian object, even if it isn't trans all the time.
Two, it's a planet.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
^^
Dude, it's a planet.
Dwarf or otherwise, it's a planet.
Though he prefers to just be called a "little planet".
Don't listen to those loud-mouthed, embearded astrologers in American university. PLUTO IS A PLANET and nothing they say will change my mind.
Way to go everyone. All Pluto ever wanted was to be a planet like the other 8. But no, you had to go bullying it and telling it it's not a planet. Now it's all pissed off, and it's building a black hole to destroy our solar system.
I too, do emit X-Rays for a while after eating Cheese Whiz.
Pluto is probably just a defunct spaceship. The emissions are the equivalent of a cellphone calling a base tower now and then.
. . . it's aliens.
(Semi-seriously, it doesn't have to be a buried monolith; we haven't taken sufficiently high-resolution images yet to have been able to see one on the surface, eh?)
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
But what happens when *my* dick's rays coming in from her wrecked blossomed anus combines with your sex rays in the middle of her withered dry worn-out uterus. See parent poster for the result. Too bad so sad. Amirite?
over time, my sensations and feelings about slashdot have certainly changed.
back when i first joined, it was kind of like recapturing the closely-knit social net that bbsing used to provide. except instead of being largely net by geographical proximity, *cough* we were net by intellectual capacity. "news for nerds", right?
and today i would say my feeling towards or sensation about slashdot is more like, sitting down at a dinner table that's so old and worn it largely resembles found wood, and i'm wearing raggedy, hobo clothes and so is the teenager sitting down across from me, and we have one old iron pot to scoop our food from with disgusting wooden bowls, and i make sure that the teen ager gets the greater portion of food because it's a growing child, but every last thing that comes out of the teenager's mouth just makes me want to kick it down the worn out dingy stairs right into the stupid fucking horse drawn buggy traffic. and it leads me to posts like this which are basically apropros of nothing suddenly standing up and spitting directly into the teenager's fucking soup pot.
It's coming from the Charon mass relay. Duh.
Really?
But what about Uranus?
Is there really any other explanation?
So you're postulating an alien on a treadmill? Or maybe that rubber or carpet exists in an area of Pluto at room temperature? This is exciting.
Now before we talk about the fact that Slashdot didn't wake you up, maybe you should consider how many things on earth generate x-rays which wouldn't otherwise do so at -230degC
I'm disappointed. I scrolled the rest of the comments and didn't find any more top posts from Moblaster. I mean, after the second or third post it was obvious what he was up to -- one post for every photon.
I come here for the love
Preach it, Brother! I memorized one fucking mnemonic back in grade school and I really don't want to have to come up with another one!
Unclear if you are being sarcastic but is abject laziness really the best argument someone can come up against changing planetary taxonomy?
I don't really get the furor over how we classify Pluto. It doesn't really matter if it is a bucket we label planets or a bucket we label something else. The point is to label similar objects into sensible categories. If you think the categories are poor ones then come up with a better one. But it is clear that Pluto is definitely something different than the other eight traditional planets so it makes sense to call it something different. Similarly the inner planets are clearly something different than the gas giants. If you want to say Pluto is a different type of planet than Earth which is a different type of planet from Jupiter, I can get on board with that. Frankly there probably are at least 3-4 major categories of "planets" and then a host of other minor categories. Much like in biology we should probably classify them based on how they form/evolve.
Of course the next headline will probably be that it's not a planet, it's a space station...
We already found the space station. It's called Mimas and it orbits Saturn.
So they're suggesting Pluto isn't a minor planet, it's a very large fissionable object?
Hey, let's build a starship around it and use it for fuel.
But what about Uranus?
It was renamed to end that stupid joke once and for all.
Why all this insistence on mechanisms involving an atmosphere? X-ray tubes don't require gas.
You get X-rays whenever you abruptly stop or deflect a fast enough charged particle (such as an electron). Pluto is a ("dwarf") PLANET, with no (known) planetary magnetic field to deflect the solar wind or cosmic radiation. Such a BIG solid body, even 'way out there from the sun, should be stopping LOTS of charged particles all the time.
(Sure, charged particles stop more "abruptly", and thus release more energetic photons, when hitting heavy atoms rather than things like hydrogen. But some of the incoming stuff will be fast enough to emit x-rays even when slamming into the bare photon of a hydrogen nucleus. And then there's the inverse case when an incoming heavy nucleus from cosmic radiation hits an electron.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Some might say that Pluto is home to Plutonium.
Thirty four characters live here.
By the above argument, ANY planet, dwarf planet, moon, or other solid object of substantial size, without a strong magnetic field (which would ALSO be noticeable), should be emitting some x-rays from solar wind and cosmic ray bombardment.
If this is true, perhaps this x-radiation could be used as a basis for detection of such objects?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Seriously? You woke me up to read about seven photons from across the other side of the solar system?
How big is the detector? How far is it from Pluto?
They detected them from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, which is in orbit around the Earth. That puts the distance between the detector and Pluto at somewhere between 29 and 50 astronomical units of about 93 million miles each, depending on where the Earth and Pluto were in their orbits during the observations.
- Calculate the area of a sphere of that radius. (That's about 10^20 square miles at the low end, abut three times that at the high end.)
- Divide by the aperture of the x-ray telescope (0.43 sq ft), in square miles. (i.e. multiply by 1.3*10^7.) We're now in the 10^27 order of magnitude.
- Assume the x-rays are ONLY the result of solar wind bombardment? Divide by two. (You'd have to do that more than three times to drop the number by even ONE order of magnitude.)
- Multiply by seven photons detected.
That's a lot of photons emitted by the planet, isn't it?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm gonna start coming to Slashdot on Saturdays more often.
"That's a lot of photons emitted by the planet, isn't it?"
Avogadro's number is only about 6*10^23, so we're talking something like ten thousand gram-moles of x-rays emitted during the observation period.
Ten Thousand Gram Moles of x-ray photons? Yike!
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Probably turn out to be something exotic like a trapped micro-blackhole.
So many important scientific discoveries start with the phrase "huh, that's weird."
emits x-rays after having been hit by the semen rays of her last-night date. So ?
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
No it wasn't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranus
Whoosh!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Can you please convert that to Olympic swimming pools or football fields? I am american. Thanks!
Silence is a state of mime.
... Or, it could just be reflecting X-Rays from nearby space? Nah, that'd be too simple.
It's just mad because it learned it's not deemed a planet anymore. How? Gossip from that probe that went by.
Obviously Pluto is upset at having its status downgraded. As one of the nine planets actually discovered by human eyes and not soulless machines, Pluto is drawing our attention to the mysteries it holds so that we will not dismiss it just to satisfy the metrics of constipated astronomers. If humans persist in disreguarding its proper position in the havens, Pluto will continue to exhibit bizarre and unexplained scientific phenomena to confound the know-it-alls who want to classify everything to fit their tiny little minds. Just sayin...
New Horizons didn't carry a magnetometer, and thus did not provide evidence for Pluto's magnetic field one way or the other.
Can you please convert that to Olympic swimming pools or football fields? I am american. Thanks!
So am I. Let's see...
10,000 gram moles of x-ray photons...
Take 22 pounds of hydrogen. Turn each atom of hydrogen into an x-ray photon.
Hydrogen bombs do something like that... But let's use total annihilation because the numbers are easier to find.
1 gm of antimatter + 1 gm of matter -> 43 kilotons of TNT equivalent. So call it 21.5 kilotons per gram.
Energy equivalent of a proton's mass is really close to 1 GEv. We don't know what energy x-rays they were detecting, so let's use the energy of photons from a typical dental x-ray machine: 70 kEv. So 10^4 * 7*10^4 / 10^9 = 0.7 grams of energy, or about 15 kilotons of TNT-equivalent emitted per measurement interval.
The Hiroshima bomb was estimated at 15 kilotons, Nagasaki at 20. So call it "Almost exactly one Hiroshima bomb" or "3/4 of one Nagasaki bomb" of x-ray energy released during the observation interval.
(Or maybe boost it up a bit, because I assumed perfect efficiency for the x-ray telescope's mirrors and detector, which I suspect is quite optimistic.)
How's that?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I believe the official cheesy-press standard is number of dental x-rays' worth
Table-ized A.I.
Is that "to" or "on"?
Fucking kek
I hate to jump the gun here, but could it possibly be antimatter? I recall reading several planets probably have detectable anti-matter rings. Could it be an anti-matter ring interacting with the solar wind?
Pluton ain't no kinda place / to raise your kids. / In fact, it's a frickin' x-ray generator!
Scansion and rhyming could use some work.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
I hate to jump the gun here, but could it possibly be antimatter?
Then they'd be calling them "gamma rays", not "x-rays", and would have found them with a different orbital telescope.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
7 photos... Plutonians are just playing with Scotch tape.