Posted on 06/05/2018 12:03:18 PM PDT by BenLurkin
The Kuiper Belt, the region immediately beyond Neptune, harbors TNOs of many sizes. The largest is Pluto, which was discovered more than 60 years before any of the others.
Some TNOs are "detached objects," which orbit so far from the sun that they're not appreciably affected by the gravity of Neptune or any other known planet. Perhaps the most famous of these is Sedna, which takes 11,400 years to make a single orbit and never comes closer to the sun than 20 times farther out than Pluto.
In 2016, astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown announced that a distant undiscovered planet could have created the unusual signatures of some TNO orbits in the Kuiper Belt and sent Sedna and other detached objects out to even more distant realms. Batygin and Brown calculated that this world, dubbed Planet Nine, may be 10 times more massive than Earth and orbit the sun about 20 times farther away than Neptune does.
But not everybody is on board with the Planet Nine hypothesis. The skeptics include Madigan and Fleisig, who, along with study co-author Alexander Zderic, a UC Boulder graduate student, think they've found an alternate solution to the weird orbital signatures.
According to the researchers' simulations, the TNOs move like hands on a clock, with the most massive objects moving slowly, like the hour hand, and the smaller ones ticking along quickly, like the minute hand. The result is that the smaller bodies pile up quickly — and their accumulated gravity is strong enough to reshape the paths of larger TNOs that get close.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
It is wonderfully awful.
“National Moonshine Day”
Yaaahhhooo!
I remember seeing it as a kid, 9-10 years old, and I thought it was great!...............
I’d almost agree, but scientists now surmise a brown dwarf could be a lot smaller than originally envisaged (most thought it would be slightly bigger than Jupiter, but you never know). If a very faint brown dwarf about the size of Neptune is out there as a faint companion to our Sun, that may explain all the orbital irregularities we’ve seen from the orbits of Neptune, Pluto and the Kuiper Belt dwarf planets.
It is a hoot.
Every time Eros says, “Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!”, I lose it, and am reduced to laughing to tears.
But much more dense and a higher gravity effect! NO WAY we would not know that it was there. Not to mention it would have a big IR image.
I now look for the screw-ups.
Police car changes models in middle of chase scene, headstones made of cardboard blowing in wind, etc.................
The James Webb Telescope won't be launched until 2020.
It's construction hasn't even been completed.
Indeed!
The airline cockpit set looks like something a High School theatre class might make if they had a budget of $20. :)
Save the Solar System!
Stop driving SUVs.
Vote for Hillary in 2020.
Kill big Oil and Republicans.
Major problem is that galaxies ignore that law. After reaching about two thirds of the radius out everything orbits at the same rate regardless of mass. To account for that big problem, Cosmologists invented magical unseen things composed of undetectable but somehow massive dark matter. . . which to this day they still can’t find, no matter where they look.
As a B-Movie fan, I am well aware of Ed Wood’s shoestring budget filmmaking. :)
But did you know he was a Marine who served at Guadalcanal and Tarawa?...........................
“National Moonshine Day
Yaaahhhooo!”
It’ll tickle yer innards.
Yep.
And when the earth was flat as a pancake - except for the mountains and valleys, of course...
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