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Space Science

Another Big Kuiper Belt Object Found 36

Posted by Cliff from the oy-plutino! dept.
DoraLives observes: "According to the BBC a Huge rock-ice body circles Sun. At a shade over 350 miles across, it's not what you'd call planetary in size, but huge enough, I suppose, should it land in your back yard."
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Another Big Kuiper Belt Object Found More

Another Big Kuiper Belt Object Found

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  • Units? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Cyno01 ( 573917 ) <Cyno01@hotmail.com> on Monday November 17, 2003 @11:32PM (#7499234) Homepage
    Miles? Its a celestial body, use proper standard units, either multiples of texas or volkswagons.

    • Re:Units? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by zhenlin ( 722930 )
      0.00000376522681 AU
      0.0000000000595389999 LY

      2,279,474,440,000 litres/acre
      148 800 297 Pascals per Newton US gallons
      6,021,734,370,000,000 ((US gallon per hectare) per (Pascal per Newton)) per acre

      Let's invent more compound measures, shall we?

      1 ((the speed of light per ((((Newton per Pascal) per Joule) per year) per fortnight)) per (mach 1)) = 3.36285379 x 10^19 kilograms

    • Re:Units? (Score:2, Funny)

      by Nos. ( 179609 )
      Where I live (Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada), they've recently finished draining the lake/creek in town. The radio reported that the lake was draining at a rate of one stove per second.

      I propose that for volumes less than one Library Of Congress, we measure volumes in household appliances.

      • Where I live (Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada), they've recently finished draining the lake/creek in town. The radio reported that the lake was draining at a rate of one stove per second.

        I propose that for volumes less than one Library Of Congress, we measure volumes in household appliances.

        "Libraries of Congress" is the unit for information storage (e.g. my harddisk can hold 23 ba'gillion Libraries of Congress). For liquid volume the correct measure is "Olympic Size Swimming Pools". For examples of us

    • Lets see, that would be approx:
      0.4375 Texas Units
      137653.63128 VW Beetles

  • I think we should study a grand tour of the Neptune 2:3 resonance orbit. Perhaps we could fly by several of these objects. Might make an interesting senior thesis for a suitably ambitious young person...

    • Re:On a more serious note.. (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      No ambition required given the point to point flight times in the outer solar system. This would take DECADES.

      • You don't have to cover the whole arc. It depends on the population of objects in that orbit. I would think encounters a few years apart would be at least plausible, with cheap periods of hibernation between. The trick would be to have fallback modes that did respectable science with less and less power as the RTG fades. Enabling technologies like very low power imagers/spectrometers and large, lightweight deployable antennas are not outside the realm of feasibility.

        • You don't seem to have any real comprehension of orbital mechanics, do you? Let me try explain it in small words of a few sylables each.

          Just because they share an orbital resonance with Neptune dosn't mean that they are all in the same place. They are spread out in a roughly donut shaped region. (Pluto is on an inclined orbit which crosses Neptune's.) If you are "flying by" from inside to out, you are moving faster than the orbital speed at that distance. That means that you will soon be further from the s

    • A summary of what's known [aas.org] about Plutino statistics reveals that they're all pretty eccentric (good) and some are reasonably close to the ecliptic (good), but they cluster longitudinally well away from Neptune, which makes a Neptune GA tough to pull off in a reasonable time. That was my main hope for getting there. So, you'd have to fly by one, and hope that you get lucky with another - probably not a Plutino per se at 40 A.U. mean solar distance, but a KBO is certainly possible.

  • but huge enough, I suppose, should it land in your back yard

    If your backyard has somehow found its way to the Kuiper belt, you've got problems of your own!

  • Nicknaming the Rock (Score:4, Funny)

    by GrahamMastaFlash ( 724929 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @12:19AM (#7499506)
    Did anybody else notice that scientists nicknamed the rock "Plutino" after our ninth planet?

    In order to generate public interest in this story, I think "Pluto's bitch" might be more engaging. Or perhaps "the victim of Neptune's drunken advances"

  • Size doesn't matter, or does it? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by barakn ( 641218 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @03:08AM (#7500352)
    Couldn't help but notice that the BBC says it has a diameter of 570 km. (which probably came from some American telling them 350 miles) and the original discoverers [nasa.gov] peg it at 700 km. or 400 miles. You might think that since the BBC was handed the scoop by the NEAT team (they have a link to the BBC article), they'd agree on the size.

    • Very likely, the American astronmers used units of kilometers originally. In mybrief forays into the astronomical literature, I've found A.U.s and kilometers and MKS units, but no miles, feet or pounds.

      • When talking amongst themselves, yes, they'll use metric or lightyears, A.U.'s, etc.. But when trying to communicate with the public they'll use units the public is used to. The BBC number 570 km. is a tipoff that they converted the number. 570 implies the diameter is known to within 10 kilometers, which it most certainly isn't. The NEAT website said 400 miles or 700 km, implying that the diameter is know only to the first digit, i.e. to within 100 km. Usually newspaper editors are ignorant of signific
  • Here is a comprehensive list of TNO's:

    http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/lists/TNOs.html

    Note that you can find the size of the object under the H column... where the lower number is the wider number.

    Also note that on 08-25-2003 'they' discovered another large TNO called 2003 QM91. This one had an H value of 4.2 whereas the newest one (2003 VS2) has an H value of 3.9.

    This is the largest found since 2002 MS4, which also had an H value of 3.9.

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