Scientists Discover Ring Around Dwarf Planet Haumea Beyond Neptune 49
A ring has been discovered around one of the dwarf planets that orbits the outer reaches of the solar system. Until now, ring-like structures had only been found around the four outer planets -- Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The Guardian reports: "In 2014 we discovered that a very small body in the Centaurs region [an area of small celestial bodies between the asteroid belt and Neptune] had a ring and at that time it seemed to be a very weird thing," explained Dr Jose Ortiz, whose group at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia in Granada made the discovery described in the journal Nature. "We didn't expect to find a ring around Haumea, but we were not too surprised either." Haumea was recognized by the International Astronomical Union in 2008 and is one of five dwarf planets, alongside Pluto, Ceres, Eris and Makemake. They are located beyond Neptune -- 50 times farther away from the sun than Earth. Haumea, named after the Hawaiian goddess of childbirth, is unusual because of its elongated shape, comparable to a rugby ball, and its rapid rotation, spinning around once every 3.9 hours. Its diameter is approximately a third of the size of Earth's moon.
Nasty impact I would say (Score:2)
Its pretty clearly collided with something fairly large, splashing debris all over the place, leaving it with an uneven shape, and a lot of material in orbit.
Fashion trend (Score:1)
It is peer pressure.
The little planets look at the big planets and see rings as status symbols.
Soon there will be little moons and asteroids with fucking rings.
Then the big planets will think rings are lame -- and do something new like giant blotchy red spots or maybe giant hexagons at the poles.
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And of course Uranus had to have large gas clouds. But you have to hand it to him, he's a really good sport and doesn't even take the jokes about his name with good humor, no, he goes out of his way to make them possible!
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I cannot really tell whether this is informative, insightful, a rather ingenious attempt at trolling or you forgot to take your pills...
Well done. *golfclap*
It's been a while since I've read anything remotely that wacky at /.
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"It's been a while since I've read anything remotely that wacky at /."
Well, thank you... I think.
In the old USENET days, we often strung each other along in these trains of thought, very early in our mornings.
We were the Owl Shift. We weren't supposed to use UUCP, we were just supposed to do Sys stuff, and backups, but we did UUCP anyway.
Pretty much the very best USENET string was, of course, based on a Monty Python bit: Crunchy Frog.
How a tasty morsel called "Crunchy Frog" ended up being a "Spring Loaded D
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Racists make poor trekkies. You just don't get it do you.
Re:Nasty impact I would say (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh I dunno.
You can make a case for Trek being very racist. All Vulcans are logical and inscrutable and a bit uptight. All Klingons are aggressive and warlike.
Ferengi look and act like a Nazi caricature of Jews.
I.e. in each case races have a well defined trait and all examples of that race seem to share. So I could see why someone who thinks that racial traits dominate over individual ones would like Trek even if Roddenberry would have been appalled by this.
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"Alien race" is a pretty common expression, even if it makes taxonomists twitch.
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Right, and that's another way that Trek and similar series are a bit lacking in imagination.
Of course you can handwave it a bit on the ground that special effects are expensive and an actor with some shit glued to their forehead is cheap.
I'm actually more bothered by the fact that aliens act too human in Trek than look to human. It's a strange, Californian view of multiculturalism where everyone at least in the main cast is the same under the forehead bumps and ignoring their dietary preferences.
Of course o
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Oh I dunno.
You can make a case for Trek being very racist. All Vulcans are logical and inscrutable and a bit uptight. All Klingons are aggressive and warlike.
Ferengi look and act like a Nazi caricature of Jews.
I.e. in each case races have a well defined trait and all examples of that race seem to share. So I could see why someone who thinks that racial traits dominate over individual ones would like Trek even if Roddenberry would have been appalled by this.
You're confusing races with species.
Do people think I'm racist if I start saying "all gorillas are herbivores?"
And before anyone shouts "what about Miral Paris?", I redirect you to Beefalo.
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As I understand it, the Ferengi are a piss-take of Jewish stereotypes, developed by Jewish writers which were at the time about half the team. Failure to grasp satire is not the same as actual racism.
As for other races, I think the stereotyping exists because they just don't want to make the viewers work too hard. You may like grit and shadow and depth like DS9 (I do), but a whole lot of people just don't want to work that hard, or have moral quandaries put in front of them that can't be resolved in 43 minu
So Many (Score:2)
First line of TFS and Guardian article are wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Ring systems had already been found around asteroid Chariklo [wikipedia.org] and Chiron [wikipedia.org]. So Haumea is the 7th object in the solar system known to have rings.
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There's rings, and then there's RINGS. Jupiter has rings, too.
Topic switch: seems like the hundreds of dwarf planets in the far reaches of the solar system would be an interesting setting for a future fiction universe - one without FTL travel, transporters, etc. All you would need out there is a fusion power source to replace the sun, and I'm guessing that there's plenty of water hanging around in pockets out there.
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Didn't wotsisface do it - the space tyrant series?
So? (Score:2)
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I would go so far as to say ANY object probably has rings if there isn't anything to disrupt them (where anything can include 'sufficiently long periods of time').
If you think about it, stars are like galactic rings, the Kuiper belt and asteroid belt are rings around the Sun... it's no surprise to me that something that forms from particle collisions has some leftovers spinning around it.
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Presence of the ring should not be unexpected. The particles were probably launched into space from the surface because of planetoid's low gravity and fast rotation. Of course I'm assuming that the ring is perpendicular to the rotation axis.
TFA says there are two small moons, one of which is in the ring plane. For the Jovian planets, the rings seem to be fed by debris from impacts on their small moons near the ring planes: so this same story seems plausible here, too.
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The ring is above the equator. I was surprised to read the rotation period is 3.9 hours for something that large. Then I started wondering, "that's gotta create some significant (relative to gravity) centripetal force. How much would gravity be reduced if you were standing on the equator on the long axis?" Calculemus!
Haumea (according to Wikipedia):
Size along longest axis: 2322 km
Mass: 4e21 kg
Based on this we can calculate centripetal acceleration using a = v^2/r:
v = angular velocity = 2.322e6 m * pi / 1
Dwarf planet location correct, Ceres (Score:3)
article has fact errors about location of dwarf planets.
Article states that all dwarf planets are beyond neptune but that's not true. Ceres is in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. the rest of the dwarf planets are indeed in the kuiper belt beyond neptune.
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Don't you mean "sends you to heaven"?
All the Single Planets (Score:2)
Someone must like Haumea.
Uranus (Score:2)
Make your own joke.