I wouldn't expect any new planets to be found from gravitational perturbations, at least for a long while. (JPL's orbit is from the direct observations, not predicted from perturbations.)
The orbital periods are long, and generally it takes at least one orbit of observations to say much about whether you have unwanted perturbations. Pluto has an orbital period of 248 years, and about a century of observations, so it's a bit too soon to say much about perturbations yet. Come back in a century.
Plus, Pluto and Neptune are in a 3:2 resonance, and there is a lot of other junk out there also in the 3:2 resonance with Neptune. And it doesn't help much that all Pluto observations are from Earth, and it's pretty far away. But it's the short duration of observations that kills detectablility from orbit perturbations.
Wrong orbit inclination. The ISS is in a high inclination orbit
for servicing from Russia (I can see it rom my house
in Virginia when it launches to the ISS if it's at night and clear.)
The Columbia mission was a science mission, in a lower inclination orbit to get more payload into orbit. They didn't
have enough delta v to get to the ISS.
Having said that, if the Columbia problem had been propagated throughout NASA, there WOULD have been a rescue mission. And every single astronaut in service would have volunteered to be on it. You can bet serious money on both of those if there happens to be a repeat.
I was told by a BSD insider at the last IETF that this was being done becuase of complaints from religious conservatives that the old mascot was satanic.
The Great Big Telescope (officially the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope) at Green Bank, West Virginia has detected the carrier signal from the Huygens probe.
This means that the spacecraft is alive, has made it through re-entry, and the parachute has deployed.
A total of 17 radio telescopes here on Earth are tracking the Huygens probe, using a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry, or VLBI. Using phase referenced VLBI, it should be possible to track the Huygens descent to within about a kilometer on Titan, and to get descent velocities to within a few millimeters / second along the line of site. This will give us a pretty good idea of the winds that the probe encounters as it descends, and also should really nail down the rotation of Titan if the probe makes it to the surface. Here is a more detailed description (pdf file) of what's being done using VLBI from Leonid Gurvits.
While this does not mean that the Huygens mission is a full success (I personally want pictures from the surface!), it does mean that some scientific data will be returned. I can't wait to see more.
Yeah, I remember. I used a Mac at home and Unix at work in the late 1980's. I still use Macs at home and Unix / Linux at work. What, exactly, did Windows do for me ? I do not see it as a technology source, rather as a sink.
I do, however, appreciate the perverse nature of live demo's. My favorite peeve here are the software / hardware faults that only happen to the CEO. This has happened often enough to me that I think it should be an addition to Murphy's Law.
Re:Not only Google looks for big brains
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 1
Arggh Matey's !!! A typo
I meant, of course,
I am pretty sure that this is really a problem withOUT a guaranteed best solution
Re:Not only Google looks for big brains
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 1
I cannot agree with this "solution". It is clearly non-optimal, as it ignores the willness to take risk.
Suppose that I am pirate 1, and there are 3 pirates. Then, I hold the power of life and death over pirate 3. (Pirate 2 will never vote for pirate 3's plan under the rules of the game and game theory, unless pirate 3 gives all the gold to him.)
OK, I just announce that I want 99 gold pieces or pirate 3 will die. True, if pirate 3 dies, I get nothing, but so what. I am willing to take the risk that pirate 3 is suicidal.
Now, it was NOT specified, but suppose that I cannot communicate my demands to the lead pirate. This could be a problem with 3 pirates, but it would not be with 5 ! I can communicate demands by NOT voting for 1 piece of gold - after all, even in the sub-optimal "solution" offered on the web site, this will cost me nothing (as I will still get a shot at a gold piece in the round with 4 pirates).
So there is NO WAY, as pirate 1, that I would vote for the {98,0,1,0,1} solution. I will take the risk that I will get more by voting against it, by training pirate 4 to reward me with more. (Pirate 3 should reason the same way; 2 will vote against it automatically.)
This for me (as pirate 1) is straight game theory, as I am not risking my life, and as a risk of a large reward may well be better than a certainty of a small one, if the risk is small enough.
The really interesting thing is that I am pretty sure that this is really a problem with a guaranteed best solution. It seems like the prisoners dilemma, especially if horse trading is not allowed; there might be winning strategies, but no guarantee.
Remind me not to buy anything from Fogcreek.
Did anyone hear about procket networks ?
on
Router Wars
·
· Score: 1
Cisco
bought them for pennies on the dollar. I heard from insiders that they immediately sent people into the office and plant and put all of the hardware into crushers. Every box.
The lower kilometer or so of the atmosphere is called the planetary boundary layer (PBL). It is not really modeled well in numerical atmospheric models, but is typically treated as a friction layer (i.e., given a single coefficient of friction). It is very hard to get these "lumped" coefficients of friction right - for example, they tend to be too low over mountain ranges.
The equator to pole temperature exchange occurs in the 20 km or so of the troposphere ABOVE the PBL. The PBL is barely involved, and is frequently ignored entirely in numerical models.
Vertically averaged and spatially averaged, the pole to temperature heat exchange causes a wind of about 10 meters per second (in the 20 km of the troposphere above the PBL). To first order the PBL is decoupled to this and doesn't move at all (mean wind speeds of a few meters / second at most).
So how in the heck are even a forest of wind farms in the PBL (basically all of them except for any on mountain tops will be in the PBL) significantly slow down the heat exchange up in the
troposphere when
- they hardly interact with it and
- the PBL has about 1/1000th of the total kinetic energy of the total heat exchange at most
This doesn't pass the back of the envelope smell test; it's no wonder that they had such a hard time passing peer review.
TCP needs a replacement, but...
on
Replacing TCP?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
TCP uses packet loss (NOT round trip times - where did that come from?) to signal congestion, and thus to implement congestion control. This does not work well in a typical wireless (802.11X, 802.16, etc) environment, where packet losses are to be expected. TCP also does not co-exist well with lots of UDP
streaming.
So, there IS a need for a TCP replacement. However, the one being developed in the
IETF is
DCCP. Basically, the idea is separating congestion control and packet loss replacement.
Maymounkov
and company say that they are preparing RFC's (which implies
that they intend to submit this to the ITEF), but have not yet done so. So, maybe if they do, and if they offer an unencumbered license, their technology could be used, but it is way too soon to tell.
UTC stands for Universal Time Coordinated, and is the modern version of GMT. It has leap seconds to stay within 0.75 seconds of UT1, which is the (solar) time "kept" by the Earth. IAT (International Atomic Time) is the actual time kept by Atomic clocks. Since the Earth's rotation does indeed vary (because of weather changes and motions in the Earth's core, mostly), UT1 (and thus UTC) is slowly drifting off from IAT.
The politics of international time are dominated by the French, and they took advantage of the changes required by more accurate clocks and also more accurate means of measuring Earth rotation to get "Greenwich" out of the name. Technically,
a time system implies a longitude system, and the zero point of longitude implied by IAT/UTC is about 100 meters to the East of the zero longitude strip at Greenwich.
TeleSuite
already has a 4 screen monitor / display unit, 2048
by 480 pixels, and 16 by 3 feet, as part of the 400 series tele-immersion system. This uses NTT projectors and a one throw back-projection system.
Standard use includes 4 scalars to make the display overlap seamlessly and IP multicast transport using multiple video groups.
It's not built for national security, but it does do a good job with telepresence.
Can't see through aluminium foil, if it is truly Al.
My guess is that within 10 years we will see new homes / apartments boasting of how they form Faraday cages, to prevent all kinds of remote monitoring.
It is easy to tell if material has been shocked (accelerated) by looking at the crystal structure in a microscope. As you might expect, many meteorites show clear evidence of being very roughly treated, equivalent to many thousands of g's, which no life can survive.
However, some of the Martian meteorites have hardly been shocked at all, much less melted, in their trip from Mars to Earth.
This seemed very surprising, so there has been a lot of study of this in the last 10-15 years, both theoretical (mathematical modeling) and experimental (high velocity impact tests), mostly funded by NASA.
It turns out that when
there is a large, high velocity impact, on a terrestrial planet (say, a rock 20 kilometers in diameter or larger), the impacting body is vaporized, as is the ground where it hits. This sets up a shock wave in the planet, which can bounce off of internal layers, and push up and out large sections of the surface. Some of this material will go into space, some with escape velocity.
If the body is large enough, accelerations for some of the surface pushed out to escape velocity will be small - less than 10 g's. Translation : If you were wearing a spacesuit, and were incredibly lucky enough to stand in the right place at the right time, you could probably survive this. Bugs certainly could.
Some of this material, once ejected, will get to the Earth from Mars (or, Vice Versa), pretty quickly, in a few orbits (years). This is not long enough to sterilize a reasonably big chunk of rock (say, 1 meter diameter), which also will not be sterilized on re-entry in our atmosphere. We know that bacteria can survive in space for a decade as spoors - we've brought them back.
So, there is a good mechanism to transfer biological material from Earth to Mars and Mars to Earth. The inescapable conclusion is that the biological histories of these two planets are linked together. This has not yet percolated much down into the popular culture, but it will.
The Viking Landers carried, during their descent, mass spectrometers which sampled the Martian atmosphere on the way down. These provided our only measurements of Martian atmosphere isotope ratios to date.
It turns out that isotope ratios tell you a lot about the history of an atmosphere, as different isotopes get lost at different rates by different mechanisms.
The gas isotope ratios in these meteorites are unique to Mars, as measured by Viking. There are many other indications (most meteorites can be traced back to specific asteroid "families", these cannot, etc.), but it was the gas isotope ratios that were convincing.
I saw a debate about this in Paris back in 1985. The "non-Martian" advocate finally had to concede that these meteorites had to come from a planet very much like Mars in its size and history, and distance from the Sun, and were too new to come from any disrupted planet, so basically the only possible source was Mars.
The attention is definitely waning - here is
plot of the NASA web site traffic.
(The plot is courtesy of
Alexa and may not work in all browsers, so
I put a JPEG of today's ranking up.)
You can clearly see peaks for both Landings - according to Alexa, greater than the peak at the time of the Columbia disaster and a decline more or less to baseline since.
Of course it was. But you do these things in stages - first you have a brief "warranty period" (with full funding) and then "mission extensions" (with ever decreasing funding) as the spacecraft keeps on going.
This keeps the initial cost under control - if you plan for 90 days, things need to work for several times that. If the mission goal is, say, four years, then you have to test things accordingly - which really drives up the cost.
The perfect example of this is Voyager - still going after 26 years, although the primary mission was only to get to Saturn (6 years) - and Congress specifically refused to fund a mission going to Uranus and Neptune. Of course, once the spacecraft was actually _going_ to Uranus and Neptune, getting the money to complete the tour was pretty easy.
Also, as the mission wears on, you can do ever riskier things with the spacecraft. You've already completed the mission, so there is less of a downside if it breaks.
As the mission wears on, the staff keeps decreasing, which is a danger in and of itself. The Viking 1 Lander was killed after 4 years by a bad software upload - at a time when no remaining Viking staff member was fluent in the assembly language used to program the Lander !
I remember Viking very well, as I worked on analysis of its tracking data. They had 3 biology experiments, plus a mass spectrometer (and various other instruments for other purposes, such as weather monitoring.)
Before the mission, they published the criteria for a postitive result from each biological experiment (along the lines of, add water to Martian soil and CO2 is given off; sterilize another soil sample and add water, and CO2 is not given off). The biology tests passes _every one_ of the pre-published tests, albeit with some variations.
However, the mass spectrometer saw no significant organic molecules (and there were no obvious large critters visible through the camera). This, more than anything, made them discount the biology results. If they had detected large organiic molecules in the soil, they would have claimed life, in my opinion. Instead, they came up with non-biological explanations.
However, this was all before we knew about the ability of life to exist deep underground and buried in rocks, etc., While the Viking results are not generaly regarded as requiring life, they are certainly not against a biological explanation of the Methane findings.
Out in the
Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud
there are thought to be as many as one trillion objects - most small 1 to 10 km chucks of ice.
The really interesting question is, what is the mass distribution ? (I.e., how does the number of objects scale with their mass ?) This is basically unconstrained by real data. All such cosmic mass distributions are steep, but many (for example, planets in the Solar System, Asteroids in the Asteroid belt) are dominated by the most massive bodies.
If this holds true in the Oort cloud, in particular, there could be some pretty big objects. Even a Jupiter sized object might be able to hide from the Infrared surveys (the best way of detecting such an object).
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't expect any new planets to be found from gravitational perturbations, at least for a long while. (JPL's orbit is from the direct observations, not predicted from perturbations.)
The orbital periods are long, and generally it takes at least one orbit of observations to say much about whether you have unwanted perturbations. Pluto has an orbital period of 248 years, and about a century of observations, so it's a bit too soon to say much about perturbations yet. Come back in a century.
Plus, Pluto and Neptune are in a 3:2 resonance, and there is a lot of other junk out there also in the 3:2 resonance with Neptune. And it doesn't help much that all Pluto observations are from Earth, and it's pretty far away. But it's the short duration of observations that kills detectablility from orbit perturbations.
What part of Europe is that ?
And THEY had "Scientific Socialism", which had about much science in it as do the wing-nuts in Kansas.
The USSR fell when it became a joke to everyone, and so will these clowns.
...if you see me there.
Wrong orbit inclination. The ISS is in a high inclination orbit for servicing from Russia (I can see it rom my house in Virginia when it launches to the ISS if it's at night and clear.)
The Columbia mission was a science mission, in a lower inclination orbit to get more payload into orbit. They didn't have enough delta v to get to the ISS.
Having said that, if the Columbia problem had been propagated throughout NASA, there WOULD have been a rescue mission. And every single astronaut in service would have volunteered to be on it. You can bet serious money on both of those if there happens to be a repeat.
No, this is not April Fools. This is just the Post's slow descent into a government propaganda organ, which has been going on for at least a decade.
The only joke is the part about the Post being a liberal paper.
I was told by a BSD insider at the last IETF that this was being done becuase of complaints from religious conservatives that the old mascot was satanic.
Sigh...
Obviously, a lot - ever try and decipher one of his songs ?
Good News from Titan !
The Great Big Telescope (officially the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope) at Green Bank, West Virginia has detected the carrier signal from the Huygens probe.
This means that the spacecraft is alive, has made it through re-entry, and the parachute has deployed.
A total of 17 radio telescopes here on Earth are tracking the Huygens probe, using a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry, or VLBI. Using phase referenced VLBI, it should be possible to track the Huygens descent to within about a kilometer on Titan, and to get descent velocities to within a few millimeters / second along the line of site. This will give us a pretty good idea of the winds that the probe encounters as it descends, and also should really nail down the rotation of Titan if the probe makes it to the surface. Here is a more detailed description (pdf file) of what's being done using VLBI from Leonid Gurvits.
While this does not mean that the Huygens mission is a full success (I personally want pictures from the surface!), it does mean that some scientific data will be returned. I can't wait to see more.
First, remember computing before Windows.
Yeah, I remember. I used a Mac at home and Unix at work in the late 1980's. I still use Macs at home and Unix / Linux at work. What, exactly, did Windows do for me ? I do not see it as a technology source, rather as a sink.
I do, however, appreciate the perverse nature of live demo's. My favorite peeve here are the software / hardware faults that only happen to the CEO. This has happened often enough to me that I think it should be an addition to Murphy's Law.
Arggh Matey's !!! A typo
I meant, of course,
I am pretty sure that this is really a problem withOUT a guaranteed best solution
I cannot agree with this "solution". It is clearly non-optimal, as it ignores the willness to take risk.
Suppose that I am pirate 1, and there are 3 pirates. Then, I hold the power of life and death over pirate 3. (Pirate 2 will never vote for pirate 3's plan under the rules of the game and game theory, unless pirate 3 gives all the gold to him.)
OK, I just announce that I want 99 gold pieces or pirate 3 will die. True, if pirate 3 dies, I get nothing, but so what. I am willing to take the risk that pirate 3 is suicidal.
Now, it was NOT specified, but suppose that I cannot communicate my demands to the lead pirate. This could be a problem with 3 pirates, but it would not be with 5 ! I can communicate demands by NOT voting for 1 piece of gold - after all, even in the sub-optimal "solution" offered on the web site, this will cost me nothing (as I will still get a shot at a gold piece in the round with 4 pirates).
So there is NO WAY, as pirate 1, that I would vote for the {98,0,1,0,1} solution. I will take the risk that I will get more by voting against it, by training pirate 4 to reward me with more. (Pirate 3 should reason the same way; 2 will vote against it automatically.) This for me (as pirate 1) is straight game theory, as I am not risking my life, and as a risk of a large reward may well be better than a certainty of a small one, if the risk is small enough.
The really interesting thing is that I am pretty sure that this is really a problem with a guaranteed best solution. It seems like the prisoners dilemma, especially if horse trading is not allowed; there might be winning strategies, but no guarantee.
Remind me not to buy anything from Fogcreek.
Cisco bought them for pennies on the dollar. I heard from insiders that they immediately sent people into the office and plant and put all of the hardware into crushers. Every box.
That's one way of dealing with competition.
There is something wrong with this study.
/1000th of the total kinetic energy of the total heat exchange at most
The lower kilometer or so of the atmosphere is called the planetary boundary layer (PBL). It is not really modeled well in numerical atmospheric models, but is typically treated as a friction layer (i.e., given a single coefficient of friction). It is very hard to get these "lumped" coefficients of friction right - for example, they tend to be too low over mountain ranges.
The equator to pole temperature exchange occurs in the 20 km or so of the troposphere ABOVE the PBL. The PBL is barely involved, and is frequently ignored entirely in numerical models. Vertically averaged and spatially averaged, the pole to temperature heat exchange causes a wind of about 10 meters per second (in the 20 km of the troposphere above the PBL). To first order the PBL is decoupled to this and doesn't move at all (mean wind speeds of a few meters / second at most).
So how in the heck are even a forest of wind farms in the PBL (basically all of them except for any on mountain tops will be in the PBL) significantly slow down the heat exchange up in the troposphere when
- they hardly interact with it and
- the PBL has about 1
This doesn't pass the back of the envelope smell test; it's no wonder that they had such a hard time passing peer review.
TCP uses packet loss (NOT round trip times - where did that come from?) to signal congestion, and thus to implement congestion control. This does not work well in a typical wireless (802.11X, 802.16, etc) environment, where packet losses are to be expected. TCP also does not co-exist well with lots of UDP streaming.
So, there IS a need for a TCP replacement. However, the one being developed in the IETF is DCCP. Basically, the idea is separating congestion control and packet loss replacement.
Maymounkov and company say that they are preparing RFC's (which implies that they intend to submit this to the ITEF), but have not yet done so. So, maybe if they do, and if they offer an unencumbered license, their technology could be used, but it is way too soon to tell.
UTC stands for Universal Time Coordinated, and is the modern version of GMT. It has leap seconds to stay within 0.75 seconds of UT1, which is the (solar) time "kept" by the Earth. IAT (International Atomic Time) is the actual time kept by Atomic clocks. Since the Earth's rotation does indeed vary (because of weather changes and motions in the Earth's core, mostly), UT1 (and thus UTC) is slowly drifting off from IAT.
The politics of international time are dominated by the French, and they took advantage of the changes required by more accurate clocks and also more accurate means of measuring Earth rotation to get "Greenwich" out of the name. Technically, a time system implies a longitude system, and the zero point of longitude implied by IAT/UTC is about 100 meters to the East of the zero longitude strip at Greenwich.
TeleSuite already has a 4 screen monitor / display unit, 2048 by 480 pixels, and 16 by 3 feet, as part of the 400 series tele-immersion system. This uses NTT projectors and a one throw back-projection system.
Standard use includes 4 scalars to make the display overlap seamlessly and IP multicast transport using multiple video groups.
It's not built for national security, but it does do a good job with telepresence.
Can't see through aluminium foil, if it is truly Al.
My guess is that within 10 years we will see new homes / apartments boasting of how they form Faraday cages, to prevent all kinds of remote monitoring.
Also, now would be a good time to GO TO THE APPLE STORE in person.
I have gotten great deals on older units once the new ones come out - ask if they have any returns still in the original packaging.
There is a lot of very hard science behind this.
It is easy to tell if material has been shocked (accelerated) by looking at the crystal structure in a microscope. As you might expect, many meteorites show clear evidence of being very roughly treated, equivalent to many thousands of g's, which no life can survive.
However, some of the Martian meteorites have hardly been shocked at all, much less melted, in their trip from Mars to Earth.
This seemed very surprising, so there has been a lot of study of this in the last 10-15 years, both theoretical (mathematical modeling) and experimental (high velocity impact tests), mostly funded by NASA.
It turns out that when there is a large, high velocity impact, on a terrestrial planet (say, a rock 20 kilometers in diameter or larger), the impacting body is vaporized, as is the ground where it hits. This sets up a shock wave in the planet, which can bounce off of internal layers, and push up and out large sections of the surface. Some of this material will go into space, some with escape velocity.
If the body is large enough, accelerations for some of the surface pushed out to escape velocity will be small - less than 10 g's. Translation : If you were wearing a spacesuit, and were incredibly lucky enough to stand in the right place at the right time, you could probably survive this. Bugs certainly could.
Some of this material, once ejected, will get to the Earth from Mars (or, Vice Versa), pretty quickly, in a few orbits (years). This is not long enough to sterilize a reasonably big chunk of rock (say, 1 meter diameter), which also will not be sterilized on re-entry in our atmosphere. We know that bacteria can survive in space for a decade as spoors - we've brought them back.
So, there is a good mechanism to transfer biological material from Earth to Mars and Mars to Earth. The inescapable conclusion is that the biological histories of these two planets are linked together. This has not yet percolated much down into the popular culture, but it will.
We have met the Martians and they are us.
The Viking Landers carried, during their descent, mass spectrometers which sampled the Martian atmosphere on the way down. These provided our only measurements of Martian atmosphere isotope ratios to date.
It turns out that isotope ratios tell you a lot about the history of an atmosphere, as different isotopes get lost at different rates by different mechanisms.
The gas isotope ratios in these meteorites are unique to Mars, as measured by Viking. There are many other indications (most meteorites can be traced back to specific asteroid "families", these cannot, etc.), but it was the gas isotope ratios that were convincing.
I saw a debate about this in Paris back in 1985. The "non-Martian" advocate finally had to concede that these meteorites had to come from a planet very much like Mars in its size and history, and distance from the Sun, and were too new to come from any disrupted planet, so basically the only possible source was Mars.
The attention is definitely waning - here is plot of the NASA web site traffic. (The plot is courtesy of Alexa and may not work in all browsers, so I put a JPEG of today's ranking up.)
You can clearly see peaks for both Landings - according to Alexa, greater than the peak at the time of the Columbia disaster and a decline more or less to baseline since.
Of course it was. But you do these things in stages - first you have a brief "warranty period" (with full funding) and then "mission extensions" (with ever decreasing funding) as the spacecraft keeps on going.
This keeps the initial cost under control - if you plan for 90 days, things need to work for several times that. If the mission goal is, say, four years, then you have to test things accordingly - which really drives up the cost.
The perfect example of this is Voyager - still going after 26 years, although the primary mission was only to get to Saturn (6 years) - and Congress specifically refused to fund a mission going to Uranus and Neptune. Of course, once the spacecraft was actually _going_ to Uranus and Neptune, getting the money to complete the tour was pretty easy.
Also, as the mission wears on, you can do ever riskier things with the spacecraft. You've already completed the mission, so there is less of a downside if it breaks.
As the mission wears on, the staff keeps decreasing, which is a danger in and of itself. The Viking 1 Lander was killed after 4 years by a bad software upload - at a time when no remaining Viking staff member was fluent in the assembly language used to program the Lander !
I remember Viking very well, as I worked on analysis of its tracking data. They had 3 biology experiments, plus a mass spectrometer (and various other instruments for other purposes, such as weather monitoring.)
Before the mission, they published the criteria for a postitive result from each biological experiment (along the lines of, add water to Martian soil and CO2 is given off; sterilize another soil sample and add water, and CO2 is not given off). The biology tests passes _every one_ of the pre-published tests, albeit with some variations.
However, the mass spectrometer saw no significant organic molecules (and there were no obvious large critters visible through the camera). This, more than anything, made them discount the biology results. If they had detected large organiic molecules in the soil, they would have claimed life, in my opinion. Instead, they came up with non-biological explanations.
However, this was all before we knew about the ability of life to exist deep underground and buried in rocks, etc., While the Viking results are not generaly regarded as requiring life, they are certainly not against a biological explanation of the Methane findings.
Out in the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud there are thought to be as many as one trillion objects - most small 1 to 10 km chucks of ice.
The really interesting question is, what is the mass distribution ? (I.e., how does the number of objects scale with their mass ?) This is basically unconstrained by real data. All such cosmic mass distributions are steep, but many (for example, planets in the Solar System, Asteroids in the Asteroid belt) are dominated by the most massive bodies.
If this holds true in the Oort cloud, in particular, there could be some pretty big objects. Even a Jupiter sized object might be able to hide from the Infrared surveys (the best way of detecting such an object).