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Solar System Fossils Found By Hubble
Posted by
timothy
on Mon Sep 08, 2003 05:22 AM
from the just-floating-out-there dept.
from the just-floating-out-there dept.
segment writes "Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered three of the faintest and smallest objects ever detected beyond Neptune. Each lump of ice and rock is roughly the size of Philadelphia and orbits just beyond Neptune and Pluto, where they may have rested since the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago. The objects reside in a ring-shaped region called the Kuiper Belt, which houses a swarm of icy rocks that are leftover building blocks, or "planetesimals," from the solar system's creation. The results of the search were announced by a group led by Gary Bernstein of the University of Pennsylvania at a meeting of NASA's Division of Planetary Sciences in Monterey, Calif."
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What can we do with them (Score:5, Funny)
no?
pfft. what use are they then?
Re:What can we do with them (Score:2, Funny)
Re: To stop terrorism, of course (Score:3, Insightful)
> To stop terrorism, of course, as Saddam Hussein was a major source of it.
The sad irony is that the only terrorists operating out of Iraq were the Ansar al Islam, which arose in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region under the no-fly zone, and could not have existed without American bombers to hold Saddam in check. (FYI, terrorists hated Saddam almost as bad as they hate us.)
> Anti-imperialism was also a goal too, given Saddam's track record of attacking neighboring countries with the goal of annexin
Re:Good. then don't comment (Score:2)
Pfft, don't cloud the argument with facts! Let us continue with our ignorant use of the word "imperialism" without anything to back it up! What's wrong with you, man?
Size of Philadelphia (Score:5, Funny)
"The three small objects the astronomers spotted - given the prosaic names 2003 BF91, 2003 BG91 and 2003 BH91 - range in size from 15 to 28 miles
Hence the size of Philadelphia varies from 15 to 28 miles. Oh, and Philadelphia is a also an irregular sphere.
Re:Size of Philadelphia (Score:3, Funny)
Not that I'm a jaded Philadelphia fan or anything...
Re:Size of Philadelphia (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Size of Philadelphia (Score:2)
Didn't work though...
I love these invented-for-the-moment units.
The next time I need to order something I'll try make up my own and wait with excitement for what I'll get. Use an area unit for a room mesurement must give bonus points (and vise-versa).
"Hello, I would like 10 keyboard units of sand, please".
Re:Size of Philadelphia (Score:2)
Re:Size of Philadelphia (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Size of Philadelphia (Score:2)
I was planning on posting an answer myself, but my math skills are a little rusty. Does anyone remember the fomula's for Elephant Packing an Irregular Sphere?
Re:Size of Philadelphia (Score:2)
Did you notice this fact?
The results of the search were announced by a group led by Gary Bernstein of the University of Pennsylvania
I imagine if it had been an MIT group, they would have said the objects were the size of Massachusetts. Thank heavens they weren't from Alaska!
creation of the solar system (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:creation of the solar system (Score:2, Informative)
Re:creation of the solar system (Score:2, Informative)
This New Horizons mission was hit by a big funding cut early this year, although that decision has now been reversed [space.com]. However it is still not certain that the mission is going to happen, which is a shame because this really is a mission to go where none has gone before...
Re:creation of the solar system (Score:3, Insightful)
"roughly the size of Philadelphia" (Score:5, Funny)
In Armageddon, the meteor was "as big as Texas", now, this one is "roughly the size of Philadelphia".
Now, for the non-US guys here, could you translate ?
Re:"roughly the size of Philadelphia" (Score:2)
Re:"roughly the size of Philadelphia" (Score:3, Funny)
a. Americans who use geo-centric descriptions like "roughly the size of Philadelphia
-or-
b. People from the rest of the world who don't bother to read the article and find out the actual size of the objects and instead simply bitch about the geo-centric descriptions?
Actually, the answer is actually:
c. People like me who live in the Philadelphia suburbs but have no idea how big the city actually is in terms of miles/km/whatever.
Re:"roughly the size of Philadelphia" (Score:2, Informative)
Re:"roughly the size of Philadelphia" (Score:3, Funny)
Re:"roughly the size of Philadelphia" (Score:2)
Re:"roughly the size of Philadelphia" (Score:2)
> Philadelphia: Think 6 Million Fat Americans
So Texas is less than four times the size of Philadelphia? Granted, I've never been to Texas, but that seems a bit off. (I can ruin any joke)
Slashdot Effect (Score:5, Informative)
Contact: Steve Bradt bradt@pobox.upenn.edu 215-573-6604 University of Pennsylvania
Solar system 'fossils' discovered by Hubble Telescope
PHILADELPHIA -- Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered three of the faintest and smallest objects ever detected beyond Neptune. Each lump of ice and rock is roughly the size of Philadelphia and orbits just beyond Neptune and Pluto, where they may have rested since the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago. The objects reside in a ring-shaped region called the Kuiper Belt, which houses a swarm of icy rocks that are leftover building blocks, or "planetesimals," from the solar system's creation.
The results of the search were announced by a group led by Gary Bernstein of the University of Pennsylvania at today's meeting of NASA's Division of Planetary Sciences in Monterey, Calif.
The study's big surprise is that so few Kuiper Belt members were discovered. With Hubble's exquisite resolution, Bernstein and his co-workers expected to find at least 60 Kuiper Belt members as small as 10 miles in diameter -- but only three were discovered. "Discovering many fewer Kuiper Belt Objects than was predicted makes it difficult to understand how so many comets appear near Earth since many comets were thought to originate in the Kuiper Belt," said Bernstein, associate professor of physics and astronomy at Penn. "This is a sign that perhaps the smaller planetesimals have been shattered into dust by colliding with each other over the past few billion years." Bernstein and his colleagues used Hubble to look for planetesimals that are much smaller and fainter than can be seen from ground-based telescopes. Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys was pointed at a region in the constellation Virgo over a 15-day period in January and February. A bank of 10 computers on the ground worked for six months searching for faint moving spots in the Hubble images. The three small objects the astronomers spotted - given the prosaic names 2003 BF91, 2003 BG91 and 2003 BH91 - range in size from 15 to 28 miles and are the smallest objects ever found beyond Neptune. At their current locations, these objects are a billion times fainter than the dimmest objects visible to the naked eye. But an icy body of this size that escapes the Kuiper Belt to wander near the sun can become visible from Earth as a comet as the wandering body starts to evaporate and form a surrounding cloud. Astronomers are probing the Kuiper Belt because the region offers a window on the early history of our solar system. The planets formed more than 4 billion years ago from a cloud of gas and dust that surrounded the infant sun. Microscopic bits of ice and dust stuck together to form lumps that grew from pebbles to boulders to city- or continent-sized planetesimals. The known planets and moons are the result of collisions between planetesimals. In most of the solar system, all of the planetesimals have either been absorbed into planets or ejected into interstellar space, destroying the traces of the early days of the solar system. Around 1950, Gerard Kuiper and Kenneth Edgeworth proposed that in the region beyond Neptune there are no planets capable of ejecting the leftover planetesimals, so there should be a zone, now called the Kuiper Belt, filled with small, icy bodies. Despite many years of searching, the first was not discovered until 1992; nearly 1,000 have since been discovered from telescopes on the ground. Most astronomers now believe that Pluto, discovered in 1930, is in fact a member of the Kuiper Belt. Astronomers now use the Kuiper Belt to learn about the history of the solar system, much as paleontologists use fossils to study early life. Each event that affected the outer solar system -- such as possible gravitational disturbances from passing stars or long-vanished planets -- is frozen into the properties of the Kuiper Belt members that we see today.
If the Hubble telescope could search the entire sky, it would find perhaps a half-million pla
Aha! (Score:3, Funny)
Comets (Score:2, Interesting)
Pluto express.. (Score:5, Interesting)
This could be bad news for the New Horizons (Pluto-Kuiper Belt) [nasa.gov] mission, which plans to visit some as-yet undiscovered Kuiper belt objects after swinging by Pluto - but if there are a lot fewer than first thought..
Discovering many fewer Kuiper Belt Objects than was predicted makes it difficult to understand how so many comets appear near Earth since many comets were thought to originate in the Kuiper Belt,..
Re:Pluto express.. (Score:2)
Or worse, it's a dust cloud resulting from Kupier belt objects that collided with each other over the billions of years. Single objects you could avoid, but how would you like to slam into a sandstorm at 26,000 mph?
I didn't see it stated, but is this cloud expected to lie in the orbital plane only, or does it envelope the Solar System like a sphere? If the latter, and it is a dust cloud, it could make extra-system exploration very difficult...
Unit conversion (Score:3, Funny)
Does the Google calculator convert between Philadelphia's and metric units for us non-Americans?
Philadelphia? (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah but how much would they weigh at sea level in metric elephants?
Re:Philadelphia? (Score:2, Funny)
It's all the cheese steaks, you know...
Re:Philadelphia? (Score:2)
Yeah but how much would they weigh at sea level in metric elephants?
African or European?
In other news (Score:2, Funny)
In other news, Bob Vila will be demonstrating how to build a solar system from scrap in his series This Old House. Also, a hotel chain in Sweden has threatened to sue God for patent infringement citing illegal use of icy blocks for construction. [head-space.org]
Media Size Scale (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Media Size Scale (Score:2)
What an anti-climax. (Score:2, Insightful)
"Solar System Fossils Found By Hubble"
When I saw this in my newsfeed I thought they'd found an alien fish or lizard.
Re:What an anti-climax. (Score:2)
conversion probs (Score:2, Funny)
solar system is one messy ass place (Score:4, Funny)
Semi Offtopic mass summation and star birth (Score:2)
From the horse's mouth (Score:5, Informative)
How do we know these things came from our Solar System and not another one? The response about the directions of orbits is good; all the Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) and all the known planets orbit in the same direction around the Sun. Wouldn't happen if things were falling in randomly, so almost certainly reflects the rotation of the disk of gas & dust from which our solar system formed. Also, why would it be any easier to make a chunk of ice/rock around another star and have it accidentally caught be our star thousands of light years away, then to just make it around our star? There are grains of dust moving through our Solar System that appear to come from interstellar space, but no big chunks.
Another posts said that comets are the true fossils; in fact short-period comets (including the ones targeted by the spacecraft) are believed to be escapees from the Kuiper Belt. Comets are being evaporated by the Sun (that's why they look so big, they have clouds around them) and so they'll evaporate to nothing but rubble in 10,000 years or so. Not very long by astronomy standards. So there must be unborn comets in "cold storage" somewhere far from the Sun.
The New Horizons mission to Pluto & Kuiper Belt object(s) is alive & kicking. Our discovery means it will be a little harder to find a Kuiper Belt target for them to hit, but it should still be possible. There probably is a dust cloud associated with the Kuiper Belt (debris from collisions), which is doughnut-shaped, but this cloud is not very dense and won't be a threat to the spacecraft. Space is very empty, even in a "crowded" neighborhood like the inner Solar System.
Philadelphia (Score:3, Funny)
Religious zealots on the atheist side, too. (Score:2, Insightful)
Or people like the original poster who can twist any subject into a platform to bash people who do not have the same religious views as the poster.
Re:I have a strange feeling (Score:2)
While I may disagree with your theme, I can't argue much of it, as I don't have "God's viewpoint." One problem, however, arises with this statement you made. Humans are not "inarguably inifinitely more complex." I can argue the point that humans aren't infinitely anything.
Perhaps you chose the wrong words?
We believe we know how almost all parts of the human body work, just as we believe we know how a computer works, bu
Re:Interesting... (Score:2, Informative)
The intresting part of the search was the discovery of lots of big icy rocks there compared to the relatively very low amounts of small ones.
Its not yet known why there is a lack of the small rocks..
Re:Interesting... (Score:3, Informative)
First, creation of the solar system happened about 10 billion year later than the big bang. Second, planets do not just magically appear, they slowly form when smaller particles and rocks lump together because of either gravity or impact. Therefore small blo
Not big bang. Our sun is 2nd generation. (Score:5, Interesting)
After the big bang, you had the cooling out of our different forces, the formation of subatomic particles, the formation of Hydrogen atoms, and then the formation of giant stars.
Those stars all exploded long ago, creating the wealth of other elements that we see today. Life may or may not have formed at that time, but if it did, it is my guess that all such lifeforms would have been destroyed in the supernovaes of the first generation of stars. Our solar system formed from the exploded remains of one or more of those.
All of which makes these fossils impressively old, the moreso because it is not inconcievable to me that bacteria could predate planetary formation. It would indeed be interesting to look at them, and see what we see.
Parent
Re:Interesting... (Score:3, Informative)
Stardust [nasa.gov]
Contour (failed) [contour2002.org]
Rosetta (to be launched) [esa.int]
Re:Philadelphia (Score:2)
Imagine... (Score:2)
Millions of beetle-sized rocks hurtling through space in our direction to the tune of the 'Pods Unite' commercial (Light & Day by the Polyphonic Spree).