The explosion was clearly the LOX tank of the upper stage. Very even, intense, centered perfectly around the LOX tank. Furthermore, it emerges as a bright fireball, very clearly already combusting. That's not just pure LOX, that's a fuel-oxidizer explosion. And it occurred during LOX fueling.
Signs point to a common bulkhead failure; that would explain all of the symptoms. The question would be, why.
Here's to hoping that whatever happened, it only applies to upper stages....
The delay may not be as much as expected. As this appears to have been an upper stage failure (or maybe around the umbilical, or a few other possibilities), the returned lower stages should still be fine. Unless there's a more fundamental problem at hand....
Cheaper than who? You might want to look up who makes the Delta and Atlas families of rockets (the US's workhorses before SpaceX showed up, and currently their main domestic competition)
And something basically to that effect was for a period at the IAU conference the definition being haggled over. A lot of people went home at that point thinking that either that would get voted in as the definition, or there would be no definition, and were fine with either outcome. The committee however changed the proposal before the vote came up.
These are what the IAU came up with, in a vote that was very controversial among its membership. An association dominated by astronomers, not planetary scientists, who were by and large against the decision. And a set of terminology that you can often find flatly ignored in scientific papers. Example. In short, the only group that the IAU is able to bludgeon into using their term is the general public (using the "We're scientists, if you don't use our term you're wrong and ignorant" gambit), not the scientific community itself.
Stop feeding the troll;) If a person can't handle an argument without name calling, they're not worth your time.
For what anyone not trolling:) There is nothing magical about existing on Earth that allows a nuclear reactor to run. Earth does provide a few conveniences, mind you - your mass budgets are unlimited, and cooling is easier. But nothing about either bulk nor mass prevents nuclear reactors from operating in space, by any stretch, and the two main things limiting their use have been a lack of need and NIMBY (the former being little applicable in the former USSR, they used them quite a bit, although they still lacked a need for high powers and so generally kept them fairly small; in the US, NIMBY limited the US to just one launch, although the US developed a number of other systems, some to flight-ready status, on the ground).
The typical mass balance for a in-solar system fission fragment rocket (measured simply by MWt, not MWe, since thrust is direct) is about 20% payload, 20% structural, 35% reactor, and most of the rest toward various aspects of cooling. The nuclear fuel makes up only about 2% of the total mass (figures from the Callisto baseline). For an interstellar mission, however, the fuel would make up the a large minority or the majority of the mass, trading significantly reduced acceleration for significantly longer acceleration times. On an in-solar-system version, power density is about 6kWt per kilogram of reactor mass (that 35% figure above). This is actually quite low by large-space-reactor standards; many modern multi-megawatt reactor research projects for NEP and defense purposes (example) often deal with density figures of 50-100 kWe per kilogram, including cooling. But a fission fragment reactor has a sparse core and has to rely extensively on moderation / reflection to keep up a sufficient neutron flux; higher core density is prohibited because then the fragments would thermalize.
One thing that's neat about a fission fragment reactor is that, like systems like VASIMR, it can operate in various output modes, trading ISP for thrust as needed. In pure fission fragment mode it's ISP is is ridiculously high, nearly 1m sec; your thrust is purely the relativistic fission fragments from each reaction, carrying the majority of the reaction's energy away. However, you can inject gas into the stream as reaction mass, limited only by the density to which your magnetic nozzle can keep the stream confined. So where higher thrust maneuvers are needed, you can use the same engine (up to the aforementioned extent, of course; you're not going to take off from a planet with a FFRE!)
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.
So it's up to the planetary scientists to do something about it if they think it makes little sense
Do what? They make up less than 20% of the membership of the IAU. It's a bunch of astronomers. What do you want them to do, file a lawsuit?
They're doing the main thing that they can, which is complain about the "definition" foisted upon them, as Stern was doing above. Something you apparently find fault with.
All I hear is a bunch of bitching about it but no serious counter proposals.
That's your fault if you don't pay attention to the debate, because there have been tons of alternate proposals.
If the IAU decision wasn't scientifically useful then it will be ignored anyway.
And hence a giant stink that lowered the discourse for nothing.
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.
No, they don't.
There are species that are considered different based almost entirely based on location
No, there aren't.
but it does happen and it's not irrational.
No, it doesn't, and yes, it is.
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.
Right. Got it. The guy who co-invented the Stern-Levison parameter doesn't know how to calculate a Stern-Levison parameter. But you do. Thank you! I take it your name is Harold Levison?
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?
Pluto is more like Mars than it is Ceres, at the very least. As for other dwarf planets... we have no idea, we've never even been there. Going by things that would be counted as dwarf planets if they were free orbiting, there's a massive range of properties. What's the universal property (apart from size / hydrostatic equilibrium / general terrestrial nature) between Pluto, Luna, Ceres, Ganymede, Callisto, Europa, Io, Titan and Triton? Answer: not a damn thing. They're all radically different environments. Some are more similar to each other than others, but they're anything but a logical "group" distinct from the terrestrial planets.
Versus "big rocks", however, the comparison is even more ridiculous. There is literally nothing beyond "they're both made of solid matter" in common between Pluto and a typical large asteroid. Including, for starters, Pluto isn't made of rock. It has some unknown percentage of rock in its interior, but it's overall made of ices, with a thin gas atmosphere (not all that different, structurally, from the ice giants Neptune and Uranus, although the latter two are obviously on a much larger scale and reach much higher pressures in the gaseous state before transitioning to the ice states).
I'm sorry, I must be a nutter. I was under the mistaken view that we live in a world where there are many dozens of different designs for fission reactors that have been developed, with new designs being developed and prototyped every year, and full scale reactors being produced on scales orders of magnitude larger than is required for spacecraft propulsion. Little did I know! Thank you for correcting me for my sinful error.
Unfortunately, the concept that it's regular baryonic matter that's just cold (MACHOs) has been considered quite a bit, but does not match the data. It's not 100% conclusive, but it is highly indicative.
The most ridiculous thing about the "cleared its orbit" standard is... MOST planets didn't clear their orbit. Jupiter, and to a lesser extent Saturn, did. Particularly in the case of Mars. Mars does not dominate it's neighborhood, a fact clearly reflected by how low of a percentage of asteroids are in a Mars resonance vs. Jupiter. Mars has a significantly lower Stern-Levison parameter than Neptune, and yet Neptune has freaking Pluto in its neighborhood. And even if one wants to argue that Pluto is too small versus Neptune to count as "not cleared", it certainly isn't too small compared to Mars to count. The reason Mars does not have things even bigger than Pluto in its neighborhood comes down to one word: Jupiter.
And I know some people will say, "but the Stern-Levison parameter says Mars would have". It says no such thing. The Stern-Levison parameter is about a body's ability to relatively clear its orbit of asteroids, not protoplanets. It's based around the size and orbital distribution of our current asteroid belt.
But of course, this was not a scientific reality seeking a definition. They had a definition they wanted (that Pluto wouldn't be a planet) and were trying to come up with some sort of scientific reasoning, any reasoning, as to why. This is quite clear from their statements on the topic, they already had the result they wanted and were playing around with different reasonings to get it. And this mangled, self-contradictory definition is what they came up with and passed at the last minute (when most people had left thinking that there either wasn't going to be a new definition or that it would be based around hydrostatic equilibrium, based on what had been discussed previously, and were fine with either outcome). And so now we have a situation where a "dwarf X" isn't an "X" from a body that otherwise declares dwarf things to be smaller versions of the same thing, where exoplanets aren't planets, based on a lie that all planets have "cleared their own neighborhoods", without any sort of clear definition as to what a "neighborhood" or "clear" is.
Heck, if I wanted to be pedantic I could point out that not even Jupiter would meet their definition because - again, to be pedantic - it does not orbit the sun. The point that Jupiter orbits (the Sun-Jupiter barycentre) is almost always outside the sun.
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.
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. Many have taken to just ignoring it, in the peer reviewed research. To give two examples of how absurd the definition is: 1) the definition states that something is only a planet if it revolves around the sun, not other stars - and yet the IAU has an exoplanets working group. Exoplanets aren't planets! 2) The concept that "a dwarf X isn't an X" is not only linguistically absurd, it's a view not even shared by the IAU itself, which is more than happy to consider, for example, dwarf stars to be stars.
The main reason stated by most astronomers who backed the decision is almost invariably (seriously, read interviews with them), "I don't want my daugther having to memorize the names of sixty different planets". As if that's even slightly a valid reason for making a scientific decision.
Jupiter and Earth bear almost no resemblance to each other and yet they both are planets.
Exactly! And yet rather than kick the gas giants out, they kicked out another solid body that has far more in common with Earth (including, I should add, active geology and weather) rather than the bodies that have almost nothing to do with Earth.
In reality they should probably be different categories of entities. We used to consider Ceres a planet a long time ago
And we should. Believe it or not, because some scientists in the 1800s changed their mind about something doesn't mean that this is some sort of eternally correct decision. They had no clue about the concept of what bodies would end up in hydrostatic equilibrium and the consequences thereof.
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.
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?
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.
So because it hasn't "cleared its neighborhood" does it suddenly become the Mediterranean Pond despite being a size that we traditionally call a sea? Do we arbitrarily declare that there's only 8 mountains in the world and all others are "dwarf mountains" that aren't really mountains because we think there's too many mountain names for kids to memorize?
Umm, ok. Presuming that is true...
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?
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.
Right. Because it totally makes sense to have an perfect copy of Earth orbiting in a larger star's habitable zone (and thus have a lower Stern-Levison parameter) not be a planet while its perfect copy is.
Pluto is very much like Ceres and other big rocks
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. And should I add, one of my greatest peeves about the IAU's decision. Since their discoveries long, long ago both Pluto and Ceres had been nothing more than specks
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?
Under no reasonable standard is Pluto 9th. 10th, fine. I'd go out on a limb and argue at least 17th, also adding in the "planetary moons" that meet a hydrostatic definition even better than Pluto: Luna, Ganymede, Callisto, Europa, Io, Titan, and Triton. Using "planet" on the basis of of "body large enough to assume hydrostatic equilibrium but not undergo fusion" and moon as "body that orbits a planet".
Hydrostatic equilibrium is a very meaningful definition. A body not in hydrostatic equilibrium is made of primitive materials; it's the sort of place you'd go to learn about the formation of our solar system. A body in hydrostatic equilibrium has experienced internal heating, movement of fluids, chemical reactions, etc. It's the sort of place you go to learn about geology and search for life.
Or if you'd rather, you can apply the Captain Kirk test. Put it up alone by itself on a viewscreen. Would Captain Kirk say "Beam me down to that planet" or "Beam me down to that asteroid?" It's silly, but it's basically another way to say, "is the word functioning as normal people would use the word?" Of course, if there was another, bigger body in the background, they might say "beam me down to that moon". But we've all seen sci-fi where we're told that a body is a moon but people keep accidentally referring to it as a planet. The Forest Moon of Endor, for example. If it's a gigantic round thing, a part of us wants to call it a planet, even if we also know it's a moon. No reason not to just have them both as descriptive terms: a "planetary moon".
(And IMHO, if there's anything we should be kicking out of the "planet" club, it should be the gas giants... followed next by the ice giants. Seriously, how much is Jupiter like Mars?)
As for Stern, he once presented a rather interesting classification scheme (ironically, in the same paper as the Stern-Levison parameter was proposed). Basically, forget about all of these nouns, just have a good list of adjectives. You can have various things from sub-dwarf planet to super-giant planet to indicate the mass; prefixes like "gas" or "ice" or "rocky" to indicate the character: other adjectives to indicate its orbital parameters (including its "neighborhood" if you prefer), etc. Why limit yourself? Cite as many adjectives to describe it as are appropriate to the situation.
First off, there is no "theoretical maximum speed" to how fast a given propulsion mechanism can get you. You can get to 0,999c by shooting tennis balls out the back of a spacecraft with a slingshot - if you're willing to build a spacecraft comparable in size to the universe;)
Secondly, nuclear pulse drives really are an antiquated idea, I don't know why people obsess over it. Their minimum sizes are way too large and they're inefficient, with low ISP compared to more modern ideas. Longshot, BTW, is technically NPP, although a more modern variety. Still inefficient and very heavy, and nowhere close to a technology that could be achieved in a reasonable timeframe from where we are today.
Of the many, many concepts now available, I'd personally go for fission fragment propulsion. It's so straightforward: get the most out of fission by having individual fission reactions propel your spacecraft directly. And from a design perspective, it's pretty straightforward particle physics / fission reactor design, just in an unusual (suspended) configuration - the suspension already demoed in the lab. But that's, again, just one of many possibilities.
Unfortunately, no. Their gravity is far too weak for them to provide a significant "slingshot" effect.
Also, the fact that there are many of them isn't really the big help that it might sound. One, there's many in a very large volume of space. Two, they have very different orbits. Even if two are physically "close" to each other in a given location at a given point in time, you still have a lot of delta-V to overcome.
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
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.
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?:)
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
Indeed, literally days before the release Sean was at Darmstadt telling a German interviewer that the game is just like in the trailers.
The trailers were, of course, all rigged. You can even find the models they used to rig it in the unpacked game files - lacking the articulations and animations needed for actual use in game.
And then let's not forget the "pretend that the lack of multiplayer is a bug because too many people are playing" aspect once players started discovering the ruse.
Actually, no. It was very explicitly defined. Sean Murray, right up to days before the release, made explicit, yes-or-no responses to things contained in the game. Almost all of which were false. When things started turning out to not be in the game, such as multiplayer, he pretended it was a "bug" that people couldn't see each other - even though it was demonstrably not supported, including there being no real-time network traffic and no player models in the game files.
It's not a case of "buyers filling in the gaps". It's a case of the developer deliberately trying to deceive customers about what the game contained. Including putting a deliberately long painful grind to reach the center of the galaxy, and telling people that all sorts of neat stuff was near the center, to keep them playing for long periods of time. A cynical individual would view that as them deliberately trying to get people to play for too long to get a refund.
Slashdot Mirror
The explosion was clearly the LOX tank of the upper stage. Very even, intense, centered perfectly around the LOX tank. Furthermore, it emerges as a bright fireball, very clearly already combusting. That's not just pure LOX, that's a fuel-oxidizer explosion. And it occurred during LOX fueling.
Signs point to a common bulkhead failure; that would explain all of the symptoms. The question would be, why.
Here's to hoping that whatever happened, it only applies to upper stages....
The delay may not be as much as expected. As this appears to have been an upper stage failure (or maybe around the umbilical, or a few other possibilities), the returned lower stages should still be fine. Unless there's a more fundamental problem at hand....
Cheaper than who? You might want to look up who makes the Delta and Atlas families of rockets (the US's workhorses before SpaceX showed up, and currently their main domestic competition)
And something basically to that effect was for a period at the IAU conference the definition being haggled over. A lot of people went home at that point thinking that either that would get voted in as the definition, or there would be no definition, and were fine with either outcome. The committee however changed the proposal before the vote came up.
These are what the IAU came up with, in a vote that was very controversial among its membership. An association dominated by astronomers, not planetary scientists, who were by and large against the decision. And a set of terminology that you can often find flatly ignored in scientific papers. Example. In short, the only group that the IAU is able to bludgeon into using their term is the general public (using the "We're scientists, if you don't use our term you're wrong and ignorant" gambit), not the scientific community itself.
Stop feeding the troll ;) If a person can't handle an argument without name calling, they're not worth your time.
For what anyone not trolling :) There is nothing magical about existing on Earth that allows a nuclear reactor to run. Earth does provide a few conveniences, mind you - your mass budgets are unlimited, and cooling is easier. But nothing about either bulk nor mass prevents nuclear reactors from operating in space, by any stretch, and the two main things limiting their use have been a lack of need and NIMBY (the former being little applicable in the former USSR, they used them quite a bit, although they still lacked a need for high powers and so generally kept them fairly small; in the US, NIMBY limited the US to just one launch, although the US developed a number of other systems, some to flight-ready status, on the ground).
The typical mass balance for a in-solar system fission fragment rocket (measured simply by MWt, not MWe, since thrust is direct) is about 20% payload, 20% structural, 35% reactor, and most of the rest toward various aspects of cooling. The nuclear fuel makes up only about 2% of the total mass (figures from the Callisto baseline). For an interstellar mission, however, the fuel would make up the a large minority or the majority of the mass, trading significantly reduced acceleration for significantly longer acceleration times. On an in-solar-system version, power density is about 6kWt per kilogram of reactor mass (that 35% figure above). This is actually quite low by large-space-reactor standards; many modern multi-megawatt reactor research projects for NEP and defense purposes (example) often deal with density figures of 50-100 kWe per kilogram, including cooling. But a fission fragment reactor has a sparse core and has to rely extensively on moderation / reflection to keep up a sufficient neutron flux; higher core density is prohibited because then the fragments would thermalize.
One thing that's neat about a fission fragment reactor is that, like systems like VASIMR, it can operate in various output modes, trading ISP for thrust as needed. In pure fission fragment mode it's ISP is is ridiculously high, nearly 1m sec; your thrust is purely the relativistic fission fragments from each reaction, carrying the majority of the reaction's energy away. However, you can inject gas into the stream as reaction mass, limited only by the density to which your magnetic nozzle can keep the stream confined. So where higher thrust maneuvers are needed, you can use the same engine (up to the aforementioned extent, of course; you're not going to take off from a planet with a FFRE!)
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.
Do what? They make up less than 20% of the membership of the IAU. It's a bunch of astronomers. What do you want them to do, file a lawsuit?
They're doing the main thing that they can, which is complain about the "definition" foisted upon them, as Stern was doing above. Something you apparently find fault with.
That's your fault if you don't pay attention to the debate, because there have been tons of alternate proposals.
And hence a giant stink that lowered the discourse for nothing.
No, they don't.
No, there aren't.
No, it doesn't, and yes, it is.
Right. Got it. The guy who co-invented the Stern-Levison parameter doesn't know how to calculate a Stern-Levison parameter. But you do. Thank you! I take it your name is Harold Levison?
Pluto is more like Mars than it is Ceres, at the very least. As for other dwarf planets... we have no idea, we've never even been there. Going by things that would be counted as dwarf planets if they were free orbiting, there's a massive range of properties. What's the universal property (apart from size / hydrostatic equilibrium / general terrestrial nature) between Pluto, Luna, Ceres, Ganymede, Callisto, Europa, Io, Titan and Triton? Answer: not a damn thing. They're all radically different environments. Some are more similar to each other than others, but they're anything but a logical "group" distinct from the terrestrial planets.
Versus "big rocks", however, the comparison is even more ridiculous. There is literally nothing beyond "they're both made of solid matter" in common between Pluto and a typical large asteroid. Including, for starters, Pluto isn't made of rock. It has some unknown percentage of rock in its interior, but it's overall made of ices, with a thin gas atmosphere (not all that different, structurally, from the ice giants Neptune and Uranus, although the latter two are obviously on a much larger scale and reach much higher pressures in the gaseous state before transitioning to the ice states).
I'm sorry, I must be a nutter. I was under the mistaken view that we live in a world where there are many dozens of different designs for fission reactors that have been developed, with new designs being developed and prototyped every year, and full scale reactors being produced on scales orders of magnitude larger than is required for spacecraft propulsion. Little did I know! Thank you for correcting me for my sinful error.
Unfortunately, the concept that it's regular baryonic matter that's just cold (MACHOs) has been considered quite a bit, but does not match the data. It's not 100% conclusive, but it is highly indicative.
The most ridiculous thing about the "cleared its orbit" standard is... MOST planets didn't clear their orbit. Jupiter, and to a lesser extent Saturn, did. Particularly in the case of Mars. Mars does not dominate it's neighborhood, a fact clearly reflected by how low of a percentage of asteroids are in a Mars resonance vs. Jupiter. Mars has a significantly lower Stern-Levison parameter than Neptune, and yet Neptune has freaking Pluto in its neighborhood. And even if one wants to argue that Pluto is too small versus Neptune to count as "not cleared", it certainly isn't too small compared to Mars to count. The reason Mars does not have things even bigger than Pluto in its neighborhood comes down to one word: Jupiter.
And I know some people will say, "but the Stern-Levison parameter says Mars would have". It says no such thing. The Stern-Levison parameter is about a body's ability to relatively clear its orbit of asteroids, not protoplanets. It's based around the size and orbital distribution of our current asteroid belt.
But of course, this was not a scientific reality seeking a definition. They had a definition they wanted (that Pluto wouldn't be a planet) and were trying to come up with some sort of scientific reasoning, any reasoning, as to why. This is quite clear from their statements on the topic, they already had the result they wanted and were playing around with different reasonings to get it. And this mangled, self-contradictory definition is what they came up with and passed at the last minute (when most people had left thinking that there either wasn't going to be a new definition or that it would be based around hydrostatic equilibrium, based on what had been discussed previously, and were fine with either outcome). And so now we have a situation where a "dwarf X" isn't an "X" from a body that otherwise declares dwarf things to be smaller versions of the same thing, where exoplanets aren't planets, based on a lie that all planets have "cleared their own neighborhoods", without any sort of clear definition as to what a "neighborhood" or "clear" is.
Heck, if I wanted to be pedantic I could point out that not even Jupiter would meet their definition because - again, to be pedantic - it does not orbit the sun. The point that Jupiter orbits (the Sun-Jupiter barycentre) is almost always outside the sun.
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. Many have taken to just ignoring it, in the peer reviewed research. To give two examples of how absurd the definition is: 1) the definition states that something is only a planet if it revolves around the sun, not other stars - and yet the IAU has an exoplanets working group. Exoplanets aren't planets! 2) The concept that "a dwarf X isn't an X" is not only linguistically absurd, it's a view not even shared by the IAU itself, which is more than happy to consider, for example, dwarf stars to be stars.
The main reason stated by most astronomers who backed the decision is almost invariably (seriously, read interviews with them), "I don't want my daugther having to memorize the names of sixty different planets". As if that's even slightly a valid reason for making a scientific decision.
Exactly! And yet rather than kick the gas giants out, they kicked out another solid body that has far more in common with Earth (including, I should add, active geology and weather) rather than the bodies that have almost nothing to do with Earth.
And we should. Believe it or not, because some scientists in the 1800s changed their mind about something doesn't mean that this is some sort of eternally correct decision. They had no clue about the concept of what bodies would end up in hydrostatic equilibrium and the consequences thereof.
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?
So because it hasn't "cleared its neighborhood" does it suddenly become the Mediterranean Pond despite being a size that we traditionally call a sea? Do we arbitrarily declare that there's only 8 mountains in the world and all others are "dwarf mountains" that aren't really mountains because we think there's too many mountain names for kids to memorize?
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?
Right. Because it totally makes sense to have an perfect copy of Earth orbiting in a larger star's habitable zone (and thus have a lower Stern-Levison parameter) not be a planet while its perfect copy is.
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. And should I add, one of my greatest peeves about the IAU's decision. Since their discoveries long, long ago both Pluto and Ceres had been nothing more than specks
(Pedantry warning: Yes, I know some red giants/supergiants fall into class M... they're a tiny percentage, I'm not talking about 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?
You mean 10th. You forgot about Ceres.
Under no reasonable standard is Pluto 9th. 10th, fine. I'd go out on a limb and argue at least 17th, also adding in the "planetary moons" that meet a hydrostatic definition even better than Pluto: Luna, Ganymede, Callisto, Europa, Io, Titan, and Triton. Using "planet" on the basis of of "body large enough to assume hydrostatic equilibrium but not undergo fusion" and moon as "body that orbits a planet".
Hydrostatic equilibrium is a very meaningful definition. A body not in hydrostatic equilibrium is made of primitive materials; it's the sort of place you'd go to learn about the formation of our solar system. A body in hydrostatic equilibrium has experienced internal heating, movement of fluids, chemical reactions, etc. It's the sort of place you go to learn about geology and search for life.
Or if you'd rather, you can apply the Captain Kirk test. Put it up alone by itself on a viewscreen. Would Captain Kirk say "Beam me down to that planet" or "Beam me down to that asteroid?" It's silly, but it's basically another way to say, "is the word functioning as normal people would use the word?" Of course, if there was another, bigger body in the background, they might say "beam me down to that moon". But we've all seen sci-fi where we're told that a body is a moon but people keep accidentally referring to it as a planet. The Forest Moon of Endor, for example. If it's a gigantic round thing, a part of us wants to call it a planet, even if we also know it's a moon. No reason not to just have them both as descriptive terms: a "planetary moon".
(And IMHO, if there's anything we should be kicking out of the "planet" club, it should be the gas giants... followed next by the ice giants. Seriously, how much is Jupiter like Mars?)
As for Stern, he once presented a rather interesting classification scheme (ironically, in the same paper as the Stern-Levison parameter was proposed). Basically, forget about all of these nouns, just have a good list of adjectives. You can have various things from sub-dwarf planet to super-giant planet to indicate the mass; prefixes like "gas" or "ice" or "rocky" to indicate the character: other adjectives to indicate its orbital parameters (including its "neighborhood" if you prefer), etc. Why limit yourself? Cite as many adjectives to describe it as are appropriate to the situation.
First off, there is no "theoretical maximum speed" to how fast a given propulsion mechanism can get you. You can get to 0,999c by shooting tennis balls out the back of a spacecraft with a slingshot - if you're willing to build a spacecraft comparable in size to the universe ;)
Secondly, nuclear pulse drives really are an antiquated idea, I don't know why people obsess over it. Their minimum sizes are way too large and they're inefficient, with low ISP compared to more modern ideas. Longshot, BTW, is technically NPP, although a more modern variety. Still inefficient and very heavy, and nowhere close to a technology that could be achieved in a reasonable timeframe from where we are today.
Of the many, many concepts now available, I'd personally go for fission fragment propulsion. It's so straightforward: get the most out of fission by having individual fission reactions propel your spacecraft directly. And from a design perspective, it's pretty straightforward particle physics / fission reactor design, just in an unusual (suspended) configuration - the suspension already demoed in the lab. But that's, again, just one of many possibilities.
Unfortunately, no. Their gravity is far too weak for them to provide a significant "slingshot" effect.
Also, the fact that there are many of them isn't really the big help that it might sound. One, there's many in a very large volume of space. Two, they have very different orbits. Even if two are physically "close" to each other in a given location at a given point in time, you still have a lot of delta-V to overcome.
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.
I love Alan Stern :) Indeed, there's so many things wrong with that decision that I don't even know where to start.
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? :)
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
Indeed, literally days before the release Sean was at Darmstadt telling a German interviewer that the game is just like in the trailers.
The trailers were, of course, all rigged. You can even find the models they used to rig it in the unpacked game files - lacking the articulations and animations needed for actual use in game.
And then let's not forget the "pretend that the lack of multiplayer is a bug because too many people are playing" aspect once players started discovering the ruse.
Actually, no. It was very explicitly defined. Sean Murray, right up to days before the release, made explicit, yes-or-no responses to things contained in the game. Almost all of which were false. When things started turning out to not be in the game, such as multiplayer, he pretended it was a "bug" that people couldn't see each other - even though it was demonstrably not supported, including there being no real-time network traffic and no player models in the game files.
It's not a case of "buyers filling in the gaps". It's a case of the developer deliberately trying to deceive customers about what the game contained. Including putting a deliberately long painful grind to reach the center of the galaxy, and telling people that all sorts of neat stuff was near the center, to keep them playing for long periods of time. A cynical individual would view that as them deliberately trying to get people to play for too long to get a refund.
Apparently you don't know the difference between a statement of opinion and a statement of fact.
Ad: "Ghostbusters is funny"
You: "It wasn't funny."
Liability: None. Because that's an opinion.
Vs.
Ad: "Ghostbusters stars Tom Hanks."
You: "No, it doesn't."
Liability: Yes. Because that's false advertising.
Understand the difference?
It takes about fifty hours to reach the center, where all the promised great things that are missing are said to be (hint: they're not).