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Posted on 10/01/2005 5:10:46 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
LOS ANGELES - The astronomers who claim to have discovered the 10th planet in the solar system have made another intriguing announcement: it has a moon.
While observing the new, so-called planet from Hawaii last month, a team of astronomers led by Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology spotted a faint object trailing next to it. Because it was moving, astronomers ruled it was a moon and not a background star, which is stationary.
The moon discovery is important because it can help scientists determine the new planet's mass. In July, Brown announced the discovery of an icy, rocky object larger than Pluto in the Kuiper Belt, a disc of icy bodies beyond Neptune. Brown labeled the object a planet and nicknamed it Xena after the lead character in the former TV series "Xena: Warrior Princess."
By determining the moon's distance and orbit around Xena, scientists can calculate how heavy Xena is. For example, the faster a moon goes around a planet, the more massive a planet is.
But the newly discovered moon, nicknamed Gabrielle after Xena's faithful traveling sidekick in the TV series, likely will not quell the debate over what exactly is a planet and whether Pluto should keep its status. The problem is there is no official definition for a planet and setting standards like size limits potentially invites other objects to take the "planet" label.
Possessing a moon is not a criteria of planethood since Mercury and Venus are moonless planets. Brown said he expected to find a moon orbiting Xena because many Kuiper Belt objects are paired with moons.
The moon is about 155 miles wide and 60 times fainter than Xena, the farthest-known object in the solar system. It is currently 9 billion miles away from the sun, or about three times Pluto's current distance from the sun.
Scientists believe Xena's moon was formed when Kuiper Belt objects collided with one another. The Earth's moon formed in a similar way when Earth crashed into an object the size of Mars.
The moon was first spotted by a 10-meter telescope at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii on Sept. 10. Scientists expect to learn more about the moon's composition during further observations with the Hubble Space Telescope in November.
Brown planned to submit a paper describing the moon discovery to the Astrophysical Journal next week.
The International Astronomical Union, a group of scientists responsible for naming planets, is deciding on formal names for Xena and Gabrielle.
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On the Net:
California Institute of Technology: http://www.caltech.edu
W.M. Keck Observatory: http://www2.keck.hawaii.edu
You mean the mother ship has launced a probe? Maybe Louis Fairy-Khan's days are numbered after all.
Cisco & Pancho. Panch has to be the planet, though, since he is the fat one.
At least Xena and Gabby set an example of TV characters that look like healthy women and not emaciated heroin waifs.
I think they should stick with Roman mythology though.
Who's left among the Olympians?
Juno (too far away from Jupiter?)
Hades (Hmm...)
Vesta (I think there already is an asteroid)
Minerva (Hmm..)
Apollo (no -- associated with the Sun)
Diana (maybe...the huntress and all)
Vulcan (would make people think of Star Trek)
Ceres (already an asteroid)
Bacchus (Hmm...)
Also, does the position of this new planet contradict Bode's law?
While the debate is meaningless, the continuing discovery of planets or whatever they are called out beyond Pluto/Neptune, way beyond, probably means there are planets all the way to the next star. It is possible a starship might go directly to the next star, but it is more likely that the Kuiper objects and Oort objects present a natural evolution--stepping stones--in the same direction.
regarding supposed impact origin of the Moon:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1234919/posts?page=10#10
She can't a whole moon!
A partial moon maybe...
As a poet I once knew said, "... her ass
looked like the bottom of heaven!"
Why is there no difinition of 'plantet'?
I would think that anything massive enough to shape itself into a shpere would be a good definition.
there is a huge ring of debri between earth and mars- they think that may have once been a planet
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I read somewhere that it had been named “Eris”.
Today we call the resulting post crash debris by the unimaginative names, "Earth" and "Moon".
Facts are elusive and science does often produce absolutes, but the crash hypothesis explains why the Earth's spin axis is titled so profoundly with respect to its orbital plane and that huge gash west of California called the Pacific Ocean, and why the Earth-Moon system is the closest thing to a double planet in the solar system, inter alia.
Right — but this is the Greek name. The Roman equivalent is “Discordia.” It’s not an attractive name for a planet, though.
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