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.
Seriously? You woke me up to read about seven photons from across the other side of the solar system? I generate that many damn x-rays dragging my feet across the treadmill in the morning with my damn static cling.
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?
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!
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?
Is there really any other explanation?
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.
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
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
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
... 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.
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.
7 photos... Plutonians are just playing with Scotch tape.