Even more amazing that it was found in the era it was. People were pouring over the skies looking for the next big planet, and instead they found this little guy.
There are still some orbital dynamics suggestions that something large and dark is lurking out there – an ice giant. But it’s still largely conjecture. It’d be interesting to see how they define it should they find something very large (say Neptune mass), but it hasn’t cleared its orbit. Is it a planet or not? :D
Actually 🤓 it was James Cook who found Australia and he didn’t go there by ski but by ship and he didn’t find one little guy but exterminated a whole indigenous population
They only found it because it’s more like a binary dwarf planet system than a planet/moon system, so the telescopes were able to pick up light reflected from both Pluto and Charron, while Pluto alone might have not been bright enough.
Friday was amazing, tonight was a bust (but just looking at stars on their own was pretty cool, so no regrets)… Fingers crossed for tomorrow and Monday!
Where abouts?
Where I’m at - northern Baja - of course there had to be a persistent nighttime marine layer, which only starts to clear once the sun is up.
Agreed. I’m not looking forward to it either. I’ll be at work, most people are probably going to call in, and there will be hours of traffic when get off.
Best chance I’ll ever have personally. Live in the path, work from home, good time. Plan is to just step outside for a bit, look at it (with protection) then back to work.
I'm glad the article mentions that in this case, it really doesn't matter; like, there seems to be nothing to 'pollute' on Mars (also 7 tonnes is not much at all). Bit of a strange headline to me.
You’re not wrong with your sentiment but i think it’s pretty safe to say that if we find life on Mars it’s gonna be trapped in ice somehow or deep below the surface. Besides having next to no atmosphere, it also has no magnetosphere which means it takes the full blast from solar radiation. Nothing living on Earth could survive outside on the surface of Mars.
we have quite a bit of life that thrives just under the surface… within nooks and crannies of dust particles… inside Chernobyl… in ocean volcanic vents…
i think mycelia are the only thing that can live off of just raw rock though (the vanguards of life)
but, spores are pretty small and everywhere…
personally i think we should get over looking for life on mars and seed it with whatever has the best chances…
a deep valley has a thicker atmosphere and more shade from the sun, btw…
I suppose so, but I believe they always make sure not a single trace of Earth life is left on the equipement they sent to Mars, for obvious reasons. So they already control for that.
Besides looking pretty messy, I'm not sure this does any harm.
nasa sure puts a lot of effort into it… can’t say i feel confident about other countries that crash into it…
on top of that, nasa has recently found that they’ve been breeding bacteria that lives off of their disinfectant, and so no they don’t already control for that.
Sad news for the tardigrades that were on board Israel’s Beresheet mission, which crash-landed on the Moon in 2019. Researchers have learnt that the microscopic animals, which can survive the vacuum of space and heavy-duty doses of radiation, wouldn’t have lived through the crash.
Wrong country and wrong outcome, I really nailed it. Given how hardy they are, I can’t say I’m convinced they’re all dead. Not that they’d actually be active without air and water
Elon is probably mad it launched on an Ariane 5 and it went so perfectly, we’ll get an extra decade of science out of it.
The Ariane 5 really was a reliable rocket. It had some failures early on, like basically all rockets, but then it had 82 successful launches in a row and then one partial failure before having another long perfect streak.
Obviously, more expensive than modern reusable rockets but JWST was important enough of a payload, that I’m glad NASA/ESA chose Ariane. (Plus, given JWST’s delays, I imagine when that decision was made, SpaceX was still iterating and having occasional explosions.)
Absolute size isn’t really in the criteria for a planet though. Pluto isn’t a planet because it shares its orbit with lots of other icy bodies in the Kuiper belt.
Do you mean the Trojans? They’re excluded from the mass calculation of ‘clearing the neighbourhood’ because they’re in a resonant orbit - their orbit is a consequence of Jupiter’s mass.
I don’t know. I don’t think we should make excuses for Jupiter just because of its size. Pluto’s doing the best it can. Could any of us do any better, so far out from the sun?
Thanks to your comments, I went looking at more about Jupiter’s influence on us and read that most of the other planets are more in line with Jupiter’s orbital plane than the Sun’s equatorial plane (which sounds impressive, but maybe only makes complete sense since the planets would have all initially formed from the same disk). Anyway, thanks
That’s really interesting!
I just discovered a theory about the cause of the ‘late heavy bombardment’, which is thought to have delivered water to earth via comets.
Essentially the gas giants all orbited much closer, but Jupiter and Saturn got into resonance and flung Uranus and Neptune way out (and Saturn too). Uranus and Neptune flew out into the path of a heap of ice, and their gravity pulled the ice into an orbit that collided with the terrestrial planets.
There are five confirmed dwarf planets in the solar system: Ceres, Haumea, Eris, Makemake and the ex-planet Pluto. All of these planetary pretenders, apart from Ceres, are located in or around the Kuiper Belt, a disk of comets and other small objects beyond the orbit of Neptune.
Pluto is so far from the sun and still has never seen such shade.
Na du push xidawang kaka felota shukumi ere milowda, mi beratna (o’ sésata), na! Milowda ge da kaka end fo da shetéxeting na materi keting fong da tumang, amash ye. 😱🙅🏽
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