Lost Cause
It's a wrap!
- Joined
- Oct 7, 2001
- Posts
- 30,949
Just to get off topics to look up and see how small all this petty garbage is....
A billion miles beyond Pluto, astronomers have discovered a frozen celestial body 800 miles across — the biggest find in our solar system since the ninth planet was first spied in 1930.
Astronomers do not consider the newfound object a planet. Instead, it is believed to be icy debris left over from the formation of the solar system 5 billion years ago.
The object was provisionally named Quaoar (pronounced KWAH-oh-wahr) after a creation force in Southern California Indian mythology.
It is about one-tenth the diameter of Earth and orbits the sun once every 288 years at a distance of 4 billion miles. It is only about half the size of Pluto, which some astronomers believe should never have been called a planet in the first place.
But "it's about the size of all the asteroids put together, so this thing is really quite big," said planetary astronomer Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
Brown and postdoctoral scholar Chadwick Trujillo used a telescope at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego to spot the object in images taken June 4. Follow-up observations with the Hubble Space Telescope confirmed its size.
Archival research showed Quaoar had been captured on film as long ago as 1982 but was never noticed, Brown said. He and Trujillo went back and pored over the older images to help pin down the circular path it travels around the sun.
Quaoar lies in the Kuiper Belt, a swarm of objects made of ice and rock that orbit the sun beyond Neptune. The objects are considered fossil remnants of the swirling disk of debris that coalesced to form the solar system. It is also believed to be the source of some comets.
The Kuiper Belt (pronounced KOY-per) contains as many as 10 billion objects at least one mile across; astronomers estimate five to 10 of those are jumbo-size.
"This new discovery fits right in with our expectation that there should be a handful or two of objects as large as Pluto," said astronomer David Jewitt of the University of Hawaii. Jewitt, with then-colleague Jane Luu, discovered the first Kuiper Belt object just a decade ago.
As larger Kuiper Belt objects turn up, the case for Pluto as a planet weakens, astronomers said. Pluto lies within the Kuiper Belt and is considered by many merely among the largest of the bunch, and not a planet in its own right.
"It's pretty clear, if we discovered Pluto today, knowing what we know about other objects in the Kuiper Belt, we wouldn't even consider it a planet," Brown said.
NASA is considering launching a spacecraft to explore Pluto, its moon, Charon, and at least one Kuiper Belt object, but whether it will be funded remains unclear. The New Horizons mission could launch as early as 2006, and would take about a decade to reach Pluto.
A billion miles beyond Pluto, astronomers have discovered a frozen celestial body 800 miles across — the biggest find in our solar system since the ninth planet was first spied in 1930.
Astronomers do not consider the newfound object a planet. Instead, it is believed to be icy debris left over from the formation of the solar system 5 billion years ago.
The object was provisionally named Quaoar (pronounced KWAH-oh-wahr) after a creation force in Southern California Indian mythology.
It is about one-tenth the diameter of Earth and orbits the sun once every 288 years at a distance of 4 billion miles. It is only about half the size of Pluto, which some astronomers believe should never have been called a planet in the first place.
But "it's about the size of all the asteroids put together, so this thing is really quite big," said planetary astronomer Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
Brown and postdoctoral scholar Chadwick Trujillo used a telescope at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego to spot the object in images taken June 4. Follow-up observations with the Hubble Space Telescope confirmed its size.
Archival research showed Quaoar had been captured on film as long ago as 1982 but was never noticed, Brown said. He and Trujillo went back and pored over the older images to help pin down the circular path it travels around the sun.
Quaoar lies in the Kuiper Belt, a swarm of objects made of ice and rock that orbit the sun beyond Neptune. The objects are considered fossil remnants of the swirling disk of debris that coalesced to form the solar system. It is also believed to be the source of some comets.
The Kuiper Belt (pronounced KOY-per) contains as many as 10 billion objects at least one mile across; astronomers estimate five to 10 of those are jumbo-size.
"This new discovery fits right in with our expectation that there should be a handful or two of objects as large as Pluto," said astronomer David Jewitt of the University of Hawaii. Jewitt, with then-colleague Jane Luu, discovered the first Kuiper Belt object just a decade ago.
As larger Kuiper Belt objects turn up, the case for Pluto as a planet weakens, astronomers said. Pluto lies within the Kuiper Belt and is considered by many merely among the largest of the bunch, and not a planet in its own right.
"It's pretty clear, if we discovered Pluto today, knowing what we know about other objects in the Kuiper Belt, we wouldn't even consider it a planet," Brown said.
NASA is considering launching a spacecraft to explore Pluto, its moon, Charon, and at least one Kuiper Belt object, but whether it will be funded remains unclear. The New Horizons mission could launch as early as 2006, and would take about a decade to reach Pluto.
