Posted on 08/23/2005 4:39:11 PM PDT by neverdem
PASADENA, Calif. - Between feedings and diaper changes of his newborn daughter, Michael E. Brown may yet find an 11th planet.
Once conducted almost exclusively on cold, lonely nights, observational astronomy these days is often done under bright California sunshine.
When he has a few spare minutes, Dr. Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, downloads images taken during a previous night by a robotically driven telescope at Palomar Observatory 100 miles away. Each night, the telescope scans a different swath of sky, photographing each patch three times, spaced an hour and a half apart.
In any one of the photographs, a planet or some other icy body at the edge of the solar system looks just like a star. Unlike a star it moves between the exposures.
Dr. Brown's computer programs flag potential discovery candidates for him to inspect. He quickly dismisses almost all of them - double images caused by a bumping of the telescope, blurriness from whirls in the atmosphere or random noise.
Sometimes, like last Jan. 5, he spots a moving dot.
Dr. Brown had rewritten his software to look for slower-moving and more distant objects.
On that morning, he was sitting in his Caltech office - unremarkable university turf sparsely decorated with a not-full bottle of Jack Daniel's, a dragon mobile, a dinosaur toothbrush, a Mr. Potato Head and other toys and knickknacks that long predated parenthood - and re-examining images from nearly a year and a half earlier, Oct. 21, 2003.
The first several candidates offered by the computer were the usual garbled images.
Then he saw it: a bright, unmistakably round dot moving across the star field.
He did a quick calculation. Even if this new object reflected 100 percent of the sunlight that hit it - and...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Interesting the sizes of those bodies are nearly the same.
Ping!
Should bigger then Pluto be the standard for Planetary status?
Planets should have moons. Either that or planets should appear on astrological charts. Something arbitrary we can argue over forever.
Or bigger then Goofy?
A map could probably be made showing the deep space probes and the new planetlike bodies. Probably in most cases we are just as close from here on earth as any of them are.
No one's bigger than Goofy...
unless they stuff.
It just seems like I remember the odd story popping up every so often about the discovery of a 10th planet.
Unproved Lyme Disease Tests Prompt Warnings
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list. Anyone can post these unrelated links as they see fit.
Another catastrophic failure of Bode's Laws. (Gets demoted to theory?)
Planets should be in orbits with low eccentricity near the ecliptic plane or be Pluto. Pluto fails the test, but will be retained for reasons of tradition. Pluto will be the only planet which is also (read: realy just) a Kuiper belt object.
What of Venus and Mercury, then? Are you arguing they should not be planets?
Your right. I was thinking the same thing. What happened to all the other 10th and 11th planets?
I understand that Uranus was found while changing a diaper...
Some folks question that they are actually planets; that they are more likely to be large, comet-like Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). That's part of the reason why a lot of people wanted to reclassify Pluton/Charon as a KBO.
I don't discount Dr. Brown's very thorough work. It's just going to take a bit more to sell me (and a lot of others).
Watch out for the Klingons there.
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