Discovery of Planetoid Hints at Bigger Cousin in Shadows
By KENNETH CHANGMARCH 26, 2014
Astronomers have discovered a second icy world orbiting in a slice of the solar system where, according to their best understanding, there should have been none.
“They’re in no man’s land,” Scott S. Sheppard, of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, said of the objects, which orbit far beyond the planets and even the ring of icy debris beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper belt.
Intriguingly, the astronomers said that details of the orbits hint at perhaps an unseen planet several times the size of Earth at the solar system’s distant outskirts.
The new planetoid, an estimated 250 miles wide, is now 7.7 billion miles from the sun, about as close as it gets. At the other end of its orbit, the planetoid, which for now carries the unwieldy designation of 2012 VP113, loops out to a distance of 42 billion miles. Neptune, by contrast, is a mere 2.8 billion miles from the sun.
Much farther out, a trillion miles, the solar system is believed to be surrounded by a sphere of icy bodies known as the Oort cloud, where many comets are thought to originate. But between the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud, astronomers had expected empty space.
In 2003, astronomers unexpectedly discovered the planetoid Sedna, orbiting the sun beyond the Kuiper Belt, an area of frozen objects just outside Neptune’s orbit. Astronomers have now discovered a second object in this region, which has the current designation 2012 VP113.
Source: Scott S. Sheppard/ Carnegie Institution for Science
The discovery, by Dr. Sheppard and Chadwick A. Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, is reported in the journal Nature.
For convenience, the scientists shortened the 2012 VP113 designation to VP, which in turn inspired their nickname for the planetoid: Biden, after Vice President Joseph R. Biden. Dr. Trujillo said they had not decided what to propose for the official name.
The existence of 2012 VP113 could help explain why there is anything out there at all.
In the 2000s, when Michael E. Brown, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, scanned the outer solar system, his biggest discovery was Eris, a ball of ice in the Kuiper belt that was Pluto-size or slightly bigger, the impetus for the demotion of Pluto to dwarf planet.
Dr. Brown’s oddest discovery, however, came a couple of years earlier: Sedna, a 600-mile-wide planetoid also beyond the Kuiper belt, three times as far from the sun as Neptune. Its 11,400-year orbit stretches farther than that of 2012 VP113.
In the youth of the solar system, there would not have been enough matter out there to coalesce into something as large as Sedna. It was too far out to have been flung by the gravitational slings of big planets, but too close to have been nudged by the gravitational tides of the Milky Way.
Having found one such body, astronomers expected to quickly find more, and they came up with a name for them: Sednoids. But for years, no one found any.
For the latest search, Dr. Trujillo and Dr. Sheppard used a 13-foot telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. In November 2012, they spotted a moving point of light beyond the Kuiper belt — 2012 VP113. Follow-up observations last year confirmed it was a Sednoid. Scientists have come up with various ideas to explain such bodies. Dr. Brown, for one, thinks the Sednoids were pushed there when the sun was part of a dense cluster of stars — “a fossil record of the birth of the solar system,” he said.
Others suggest that a rogue planet, ejected from the inner solar system, dragged the Sednoids along as it flew through the Kuiper belt. Dr
If freedom of the internet loses another notch, yes, I might shed a tear over that, it would "suck". I've cried over less.
He's trying to get re-elected. Maybe blocking free speech is a tactic that will win it for him in his country, I don't know, hence the curiosity and the popcorn popping. I'm curious to see if his 'strategy' works out for him or not.
We have to use nucleur now, and increase solar efficency because we are at or past the halfway point of oil, and oil isn't ever going to get cheaper. We need to encourage electrical motor powered engines for almost all of our future transportation needs.
Future generations will look back and remember our present time as "The Age of Oil", and the time of plentiful oil is quickly running out. If we don't shift to an all electrically based society within the next 50 years or so, well, I suppose we still have a few whales left, don't we?
A few weeks ago someone posted here how he drove like a little old lady for 3 weeks with the Progressive dongle in his car. Then whe sent it back to Progressive and got a big discount on his insurance, though that differs greatly from this always on body scanner in TFS.
Does it really matter 'how' it happened? People are out of money, big time money. Bitcoin has not proven itself to be a reliable way to store money. Blame whatever you wish to. It is not secure to place my money in. And now Bitcoin will have to overcome the "once burned, twice shy'' hurdle.
...except this was no different from someone doing the same thing to a bank. Your arguement is invalid
Real coin has worked for thousands of years. Bitcoins are a new, totally unproven currency. Out of the gate, their track record sucks so far. Reliable? I'd trust my 3rd cousin Wilfred to pay me back first.
Well, you don't get to the political level Feinstein is at by playing totally a fair game, seems being at least somewhat immoral and bribe-able is all part of the power game. The only hope for us is once you reach that level of power, you use it to do actual good for the country/people. The way the whole game is set up is disgusting to me.
Meanwhile, it will get you all riled up and distracted from not having a job and from paying more for your "affordable" health care, if you can even find a doctor in your town anymore.
Agreed. Is this news release all a magician's distraction trick being employed by the so called 'good' party? Watch the left hand waving about, but don't pay any attention to that right hand sneaking into your pocket? Hmmm....
I submitted this story, and yes I now see it was already posted ( http://yro.slashdot.org/story/... ). I guess I've been too busy with things in my little 'busy' life to notice that it was already submitted, and for this I apologize.
I don't blame Timothy, perhaps he's been having a busy life also, and remember, this did get upvoted through the/. system.
Though it is a heck of an admission by a politician in today's world that a government entity has purposely deleted many files from another government entity's computers. This story would never have gotten any play in the U.S. news 10 or 20 years back. The internet has changed how news is reported, and that is 'a good thing'.
Will it change anything, or is it a story that will just blow away with the next Kardashian disclosure? Is Feinstein rightously mad over this, or is she just acting up the part for possible future re-election? I don't know the answer to those questions, but I do know that "evil triumphs when good men and women do nothing".
In May of 2010, as the documents continued to stream in, some of the committee staffers realized documents they had looked at earlier had disappeared. As it turned out, in two separate incidents, CIA employees had accessed the network without committee approval and had deleted approximately 920 documents from the network’s storage.
Sen. Feinstein said that “CIA staff first denied they had removed the documents, then they blamed IT support personnel and then said removal of the documents was ordered by the White House.” Feinstein went to White House counsel about the removal, and the complaint was rapidly escalated. The CIA apologized for the removal and gave assurances that it wouldn’t happen again.
But it would happen again, later in 2010, according to Feinstein, after the discovery of draft documents within the shared data that were part of an internal review ordered by Leon Panetta. The so-called Panetta review documents were actually summaries of the same documents that made up the majority of what the committee staff was reviewing for its report, but they included “analysis and acknowledgement of signs of wrongdoing,” Feinstein said.
The documents were marked as “deliberative” and “privileged”—meaning that they were intended not to be shared with the Senate under claims of executive privilege. But since they had been shared as part of the data dump, Feinstein said, there was no legal reason for the staff to not review the documents.
It is not known whether the CIA inadvertently shared the documents that somehow made it through the contractor’s screening process or if they were deliberately added to the data dump by the CIA or possibly by an internal whistleblower. Regardless, shortly after the draft documents were discovered, they started disappearing from the document store—so staffers copied the ones that remained to their local hard drives and printed out copies to preserve them. Staffers also made their own redacted copies of the documents—removing CIA non-executive employee names and locations, as the CIA would have done with other documents—and transported them back to the Hart SCIF for safekeeping.
Do you really believe that the current administration wants to encourage the use of electricity to power the mass'es vehicles? While half of the world's oil has still to be extracted?
'Those' people need the populace to stay addicted to oil for as long as possible, at least until 'those' people can get a grasp onto the future tech that did not forsee correctly.
Just saying, watch out for your personal liability nowadays. In Long Island, New York, a homeowner re-filled the 5 or 6 potholes on his cul-de-sac street and got a cease and desist order from the town. Later dismissed as long as he doesn't try doing it again. He had reported the huge holes in his road to the town and got no action for months.
Thank you, and everyone else here, for making it all clear. It was a sensationalist story, and no, I did not RTFA. From reading the early comments, it looked to me like it was a b.s. way of making $$$ on the 'computing disadvantaged'.
I'd happily pay $3,500 out of pocket for 5 lights to get safer streets in my immediate neighborhood.
But then you would have to take on any liability lawsuits privately if the poles ever fell and caused damage to vehicle/ property/ injury. And cost of their eventual safe removal.
Did it need to be? Why would you check the box if you don't know what Firefox is? Is there any evidence at all that *anyone* ordered this by mistake?
> "Accidents" don't happen in large tech companies.
Large tech companies don't make mistakes? Ever?
... since when?
Overbilling isn't a "mistake", unless your'e caught at it, of course.
As I just said above, I admit to not even reading TFA and taking TFSynopis as true. If it's large companies that were charged, fine. If it was done to individuals buying from Dell for their own personal use, that might be considered undue taking advantage.
Note also that the product in question is one sold almost exclusively to, you guessed it, large companies. So I guess it was impossible for anyone to order this by mistake, so there's no problem, right?
I was assuming that it was Ma & Pa types this was being done to. (Yes, I know what happens when you 'ass-u-me' something after not even RTFA). I'm shocked large companies buy from Dell, actually.
Slashdot Mirror
Discovery of Planetoid Hints at Bigger Cousin in Shadows
By KENNETH CHANGMARCH 26, 2014
Astronomers have discovered a second icy world orbiting in a slice of the solar system where, according to their best understanding, there should have been none.
“They’re in no man’s land,” Scott S. Sheppard, of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, said of the objects, which orbit far beyond the planets and even the ring of icy debris beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper belt.
Intriguingly, the astronomers said that details of the orbits hint at perhaps an unseen planet several times the size of Earth at the solar system’s distant outskirts.
The new planetoid, an estimated 250 miles wide, is now 7.7 billion miles from the sun, about as close as it gets. At the other end of its orbit, the planetoid, which for now carries the unwieldy designation of 2012 VP113, loops out to a distance of 42 billion miles. Neptune, by contrast, is a mere 2.8 billion miles from the sun.
Much farther out, a trillion miles, the solar system is believed to be surrounded by a sphere of icy bodies known as the Oort cloud, where many comets are thought to originate. But between the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud, astronomers had expected empty space.
In 2003, astronomers unexpectedly discovered the planetoid Sedna, orbiting the sun beyond the Kuiper Belt, an area of frozen objects just outside Neptune’s orbit. Astronomers have now discovered a second object in this region, which has the current designation 2012 VP113.
Source: Scott S. Sheppard/ Carnegie Institution for Science The discovery, by Dr. Sheppard and Chadwick A. Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, is reported in the journal Nature.
For convenience, the scientists shortened the 2012 VP113 designation to VP, which in turn inspired their nickname for the planetoid: Biden, after Vice President Joseph R. Biden. Dr. Trujillo said they had not decided what to propose for the official name.
The existence of 2012 VP113 could help explain why there is anything out there at all.
In the 2000s, when Michael E. Brown, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, scanned the outer solar system, his biggest discovery was Eris, a ball of ice in the Kuiper belt that was Pluto-size or slightly bigger, the impetus for the demotion of Pluto to dwarf planet.
Dr. Brown’s oddest discovery, however, came a couple of years earlier: Sedna, a 600-mile-wide planetoid also beyond the Kuiper belt, three times as far from the sun as Neptune. Its 11,400-year orbit stretches farther than that of 2012 VP113.
In the youth of the solar system, there would not have been enough matter out there to coalesce into something as large as Sedna. It was too far out to have been flung by the gravitational slings of big planets, but too close to have been nudged by the gravitational tides of the Milky Way.
Having found one such body, astronomers expected to quickly find more, and they came up with a name for them: Sednoids. But for years, no one found any.
For the latest search, Dr. Trujillo and Dr. Sheppard used a 13-foot telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. In November 2012, they spotted a moving point of light beyond the Kuiper belt — 2012 VP113. Follow-up observations last year confirmed it was a Sednoid. Scientists have come up with various ideas to explain such bodies. Dr. Brown, for one, thinks the Sednoids were pushed there when the sun was part of a dense cluster of stars — “a fossil record of the birth of the solar system,” he said.
Others suggest that a rogue planet, ejected from the inner solar system, dragged the Sednoids along as it flew through the Kuiper belt. Dr
You gonna cry?
If freedom of the internet loses another notch, yes, I might shed a tear over that, it would "suck". I've cried over less.
He's trying to get re-elected. Maybe blocking free speech is a tactic that will win it for him in his country, I don't know, hence the curiosity and the popcorn popping. I'm curious to see if his 'strategy' works out for him or not.
Since the elections come up in less than a week from now, I'm cooking up my popcorn.
Future generations will look back and remember our present time as "The Age of Oil", and the time of plentiful oil is quickly running out. If we don't shift to an all electrically based society within the next 50 years or so, well, I suppose we still have a few whales left, don't we?
Get ready kids... Car are about to become extremely annoying.
ding You door is ajar ding You door is ajar ding ...
Done been there.
If your door is ajar, do you screw it shut?
(ducks!)
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
A piece of electrical tape will defeat this nicely.
A few weeks ago someone posted here how he drove like a little old lady for 3 weeks with the Progressive dongle in his car. Then whe sent it back to Progressive and got a big discount on his insurance, though that differs greatly from this always on body scanner in TFS.
Does it really matter 'how' it happened? People are out of money, big time money. Bitcoin has not proven itself to be a reliable way to store money. Blame whatever you wish to. It is not secure to place my money in. And now Bitcoin will have to overcome the "once burned, twice shy'' hurdle.
...except this was no different from someone doing the same thing to a bank. Your arguement is invalid
Real coin has worked for thousands of years. Bitcoins are a new, totally unproven currency. Out of the gate, their track record sucks so far. Reliable? I'd trust my 3rd cousin Wilfred to pay me back first.
Oh yes, I totally trust easily manipulated computer bits over paper money.
Well, you don't get to the political level Feinstein is at by playing totally a fair game, seems being at least somewhat immoral and bribe-able is all part of the power game. The only hope for us is once you reach that level of power, you use it to do actual good for the country/people. The way the whole game is set up is disgusting to me.
Maybe.
Meanwhile, it will get you all riled up and distracted from not having a job and from paying more for your "affordable" health care, if you can even find a doctor in your town anymore.
Agreed. Is this news release all a magician's distraction trick being employed by the so called 'good' party? Watch the left hand waving about, but don't pay any attention to that right hand sneaking into your pocket? Hmmm....
Though it is a heck of an admission by a politician in today's world that a government entity has purposely deleted many files from another government entity's computers. This story would never have gotten any play in the U.S. news 10 or 20 years back. The internet has changed how news is reported, and that is 'a good thing'.
Will it change anything, or is it a story that will just blow away with the next Kardashian disclosure? Is Feinstein rightously mad over this, or is she just acting up the part for possible future re-election? I don't know the answer to those questions, but I do know that "evil triumphs when good men and women do nothing".
---------
Just think, in a 100 years, all new people!
In May of 2010, as the documents continued to stream in, some of the committee staffers realized documents they had looked at earlier had disappeared. As it turned out, in two separate incidents, CIA employees had accessed the network without committee approval and had deleted approximately 920 documents from the network’s storage.
Sen. Feinstein said that “CIA staff first denied they had removed the documents, then they blamed IT support personnel and then said removal of the documents was ordered by the White House.” Feinstein went to White House counsel about the removal, and the complaint was rapidly escalated. The CIA apologized for the removal and gave assurances that it wouldn’t happen again.
But it would happen again, later in 2010, according to Feinstein, after the discovery of draft documents within the shared data that were part of an internal review ordered by Leon Panetta. The so-called Panetta review documents were actually summaries of the same documents that made up the majority of what the committee staff was reviewing for its report, but they included “analysis and acknowledgement of signs of wrongdoing,” Feinstein said.
The documents were marked as “deliberative” and “privileged”—meaning that they were intended not to be shared with the Senate under claims of executive privilege. But since they had been shared as part of the data dump, Feinstein said, there was no legal reason for the staff to not review the documents.
It is not known whether the CIA inadvertently shared the documents that somehow made it through the contractor’s screening process or if they were deliberately added to the data dump by the CIA or possibly by an internal whistleblower. Regardless, shortly after the draft documents were discovered, they started disappearing from the document store—so staffers copied the ones that remained to their local hard drives and printed out copies to preserve them. Staffers also made their own redacted copies of the documents—removing CIA non-executive employee names and locations, as the CIA would have done with other documents—and transported them back to the Hart SCIF for safekeeping.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
edit### that 'they' did not forsee correctly.
'Those' people need the populace to stay addicted to oil for as long as possible, at least until 'those' people can get a grasp onto the future tech that did not forsee correctly.
http://www.howtogeek.com/18415...
How much is infinity divided by infinity?
42, of course.
Just saying, watch out for your personal liability nowadays. In Long Island, New York, a homeowner re-filled the 5 or 6 potholes on his cul-de-sac street and got a cease and desist order from the town. Later dismissed as long as he doesn't try doing it again. He had reported the huge holes in his road to the town and got no action for months.
Consider my panties to be now, 'unbunched'. :^0
I'd happily pay $3,500 out of pocket for 5 lights to get safer streets in my immediate neighborhood.
But then you would have to take on any liability lawsuits privately if the poles ever fell and caused damage to vehicle/ property/ injury. And cost of their eventual safe removal.
Did it need to be? Why would you check the box if you don't know what Firefox is? Is there any evidence at all that *anyone* ordered this by mistake?
> "Accidents" don't happen in large tech companies.
Large tech companies don't make mistakes? Ever?
Overbilling isn't a "mistake", unless your'e caught at it, of course.
As I just said above, I admit to not even reading TFA and taking TFSynopis as true. If it's large companies that were charged, fine. If it was done to individuals buying from Dell for their own personal use, that might be considered undue taking advantage.
Note also that the product in question is one sold almost exclusively to, you guessed it, large companies. So I guess it was impossible for anyone to order this by mistake, so there's no problem, right?
I was assuming that it was Ma & Pa types this was being done to. (Yes, I know what happens when you 'ass-u-me' something after not even RTFA). I'm shocked large companies buy from Dell, actually.
I'll know robots are intelligent when they start calling in sick to work.