It will likely be a Greek or Roman name in keeping with tradition. The IAU generally let’s the person/group that discovers have an influence in the decision but they’re the final say on the name.
With two exceptions*, the names are from Roman mythology. So I’d expect the new planet to get a definitive name from the same template. (Please be Janus. It’s the gate of the solar system!)
*Uranus is from Greek mythology, with no good Latin equivalent. Terra is trickier; you could argue that it fits the template for Latin and the Romance languages, but most others simply use local words for soil, without a connection to the goddess. That is also called Tellus to add confusion.
Is this the one they’ve decided exists and then narrow down the parameters as what it must look like every time a survey rules out another patch of sky?
In this case, the carbon and oxygen are coming from a much more mundane source: the solar wind.
When high-energy particles from the solar wind collide with molecules in Venus’ upper atmosphere, they carry enough energy to break some of those molecules into their constituent atoms. Since the Venusian atmosphere is almost entirely CO2, you should expect this process to generate C and O ions — which is exactly what we’ve now observed!
If life is proven to exist on Venus, it would be really exciting. Besides the obvious reason to be excited there’s also my thought: If in this planetary system two planets out of 98 have life on them, then that would mean that life isn’t as rare as we conceived it to be.
Edit: Had the tab open for a while without refreshing before posting, so I didn’t see the comment that says it’s just solar wind. :(
I have such mixed feelings about all the time I spent with my cameras during the event. By time I realized I had no practice with the camera and eq mount for daytime use, it was cloudy the whole time at home. Totality is not something you can reasonably practice anyway. So yeah, I have a few cool totality pictures with varying detail and a couple hundred showing the partial phases… But for what? They’re not as good as many other amateurs, let alone professionals. If there was ever a time to deal with the hassle of raw photos, it was then. Part of why I gave up on most astrophotography is because the best I could possibly do is simply match it to scientific equipment. It’s cool to do it, but there’s no personalization. Instead, I look more for nightscapes or wide angle really detailed starfields. I’m still conflicted as to whether or not I experienced it properly. I got to show the pics to some people passing by after, assuming I was the go-to person for info on what they experienced, something I love about night time astronomy, but those aren’t such time-limited events.
I’ll probably revel in memories whenever I actually flip through the pictures. But, personally, I don’t think it was worth spending so much of my time getting pictures of a black hole in a black background rather than just letting my mark 1 eyeballs observe the hole in the blue-fade skies.
However, the one piece I absolutely would bring every single time again is binoculars. Maybe that’s why I feel like I didn’t see the eclipse. The view in my 10x binos was so incredibly detailed, the memory matches the stacked and tweaked pictures. I could see more than just the big laser-don’t flare on the bottom, I saw at least 3. Just unreal, no sight in my life before could explain it. A cartoonishly large corona with a black hole in a black background. Maybe I just couldn’t comprehend.
The light effects near totality were certainly something to experience. Decades of experience being in sunlight just didn’t jive with what the sun was doing then. It was more akin to a distant white streetlight rather than a sun. It dimmed and crisped shadows unlike a sunset by not turning orange and blurring of the edges.
I’m glad you had the emotional experience I was expecting to have.
Yeah, my photography issues were similar, re: unfamiliar context. I’m still puzzled as to why the quicksetting menu works totally differently when using it in mirrorless mode. But oh well. There’s always… 2044??? Oh, crap.
I admit, other than a better lens with a tighter view, the bits of equipment I really wished I’d invested in were a tracking motor and a shutter remote. I paid zero attention to my camera during totality, but I still had this nagging voice in the back of my head telling me that I should check my centering, and I didn’t need that.
To potentially save you the confusion I had, the next popular one in North America will really be 2045. They’re both in August, but the 2044 TSE is a relatively short, northerly event with totality ending in Montana at sunset. Meanwhile, 2045 is more akin to the 2017 path, passing from California to Florida.
Yeah, not much of an emotional reaction from me, beyond a slightly incredulous laugh and an extended wow punctuated by gawking in awe. Definitely should have brought my 'nocs!
I’ve got a few years of waiting on you, but never made an eclipse a priority to see. This one was close enough where I had no excuses. And I had the day off with the kids. We drove many hours to get to Plattsburgh, NY in the hopes that the event wouldn’t be obscured by clouds, we had a choice between that and Ohio. Looks like Ohio did pretty well, we had a high cirrus cloud layer but it wasn’t enough to disrupt the view. I wouldn’t call myself an astronomy buff, but Space has always held huge interest in my life, so dragging the family out for this event was kinda a big ask because they weren’t necessarily into it. I hoped the trip would be worth it, both weather-wise and stellar phenomena-wise.
Worth it. There’s no words to describe the ethereal, silvery ring that magically appears during totality. Bailey’s beads and more. Sure, there are photos and videos, but that doesn’t do justice to the play of light in the environment surrounding the viewer, the night-yet-still-day incongruity.
Everyone is taking home some joy from the experience.
We tried to capture a photo of total, but due to a comedy of errors, it didn’t happen, so the memories will just have to stay in our heads.
I hope anyone near an eclipse’s path of totality won’t write it off if they have a choice. Go see it. Truly a sight.
This is the kind of thing where even if kids don’t seem to really be interested in it, even if they don’t seem impressed, it’s such an incredibly rare and unique event (close enough to home) that they will always remember it. Maybe not to the point of thinking about it every week, but in the sense that every mention of solar eclipses, at the very least, will remind them of this one moment in totality with you. You can plant some seeds for interests without knowing what will take root while still knowing the seed stays there.
They did said “80 years or so” and “around 80 years”, maybe they did their calculation and predicted that this year is likely the time that it happen. They did give a huge margin of when it will happen though.
In March or April 2023, it dimmed to magnitude 12.3. A similar dimming occurred in the year before the 1946 outburst, indicating that it will likely erupt between April and September 2024.
I assume we can’t actually resolve spatial detail on the planet, so the effect must have been temporal. Would it have been something like a spike moving through the visible spectrum as the planet transits its star?
astronomy
Ważne
Magazyn ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.