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Space Science

Solar System Fossils Found By Hubble 237

Posted by timothy 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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Solar System Fossils Found By Hubble More

Solar System Fossils Found By Hubble

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  • What can we do with them (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 08, 2003 @06:32AM (#6898254)
    Can we invade them for oil? take over their population, oust their government and continue to wage war on their surface for another decade?

    no?

    pfft. what use are they then?
    • I for one welcome our Useless Icy Floating rock overlords.
    • no?

      Well what use are they then? I agree with the parent, hubble should be looking for more oil to improve the economy! That's why we built the thing, isn't it?

  • Size of Philadelphia (Score:5, Funny)

    by bartyboy ( 99076 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @06:35AM (#6898260)
    In case you didn't read it, the article says:

    "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.

    • They may be roughly the same size as Philadelphia, but I'm sure they'll win a Stanley Cup before WE do.

      Not that I'm a jaded Philadelphia fan or anything...

      • Space Hockey (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        " They may be roughly the same size as Philadelphia, but I'm sure they'll win a Stanley Cup before WE do. "

        But of course. They will change the face of the NHL forever, as they have had millions of years of hockey experience: these icey planetoids are really nothing but hockey rinks.

        In other news, Mike Illitch has launched a space probe that is expected to drop a dead octopus on one of these icy surfaces by the year 2017.
    • But how many elephants is that?
    • My first thought was to try it in googles calculator:

      1 cubic Philadelphia in cubic meters


      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".
    • It one of the standard canonical Astronomical units:
      • Breadboxes (0.25 m)
      • Elephants (3.0 m)
      • Empire State Buildings (443.2 m)
      • Philadelphia (40 km)
      • Texas (1600 km)
      • Radius of the Earth (6400 km)
      • Light Second (299,792.458 km)
      • Distance from the Earth to the Sun (149,597,870.691 km)
      • Light Year (9.461 e+15 m)
      • Parsec - (3.016 e+16m)
    • But how many volkswagons per library of congress is it travelling at?
    • We need to put this into units people can understand [slashdot.org].

      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?
    • Hence the size of Philadelphia varies from 15 to 28 miles.

      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!
    • How many volkswagons to a Philadelphia anyway? Or do we only use Volkswagons if it enters the earth's atmosphere? This is so confusing. I can't help but think that metric would be useful here.

      -Hope
    • Hmmm, the story is from the University of Pennsylvania and the objects are coincidentally the size of Philadelphia? Sorry, but I smell a pretty hefty conspiracy here!

  • creation of the solar system (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jlemmerer ( 242376 ) <xcom123.yahoo@com> on Monday September 08, 2003 @06:36AM (#6898261) Homepage
    I would fond it interesting how the scientists can be sure that there objects have originated when our solar system was created. Wouldn't it be also possible that the asteroids traveled vast distances, having originated in stellar events far away, and eventually gor captured by sub's gravity? This would be even more interesting for us, wouldn't it. I just would like to know if it would be feasible to launch a probe to one of those objects, as to look of what materials it is composed. But can you hit an object that small across this distance and, even more land a probe safely there?
    • They are sending one to have a look around in 2006 [jhuapl.edu] but it will take a few years to get there.
      • They are sending one to have a look around in 2006 but it will take a few years to get there.

        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...

    • Can't you say something about the origin because of the orbit of the rock and the other rocks around it? Isn't it unlikely that all the rocks in the belt entered the sun's orbit from the same direction with and with the same velocity? If not, they'd be orbiting all over the place, like comets, not organized in a neat belt.
    • The orbital charactistics of an object coming in from outside the solar system would be very different from Kuiper Belt objects, and while it would be somewhat more difficult to tell the difference between an Oort cloud comet and an external comet/asteroid, there would be differences. Most notably, objects captured or "scattered" into the solar system will have higher orbital energies. eg. They will likely be coming in at velocities large enough to escape from the solar system to begin with, while objects
  • The article goes on to say:
    "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," ... "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."
    Wasn't there a NASA theory about space junk threshold and how big bits collide and divide into smaller bits which in turn divide etc..

  • "roughly the size of Philadelphia" (Score:5, Funny)

    by mirko ( 198274 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @06:39AM (#6898272) Journal
    Excuse me, Sir :
    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 ?

  • Slashdot Effect (Score:5, Informative)

    by Cavalkaf ( 656724 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @06:40AM (#6898273) Homepage Journal
    I hope this helps....

    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)

    by Fex303 ( 557896 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @06:49AM (#6898296)
    So that's where Darl McBride and the rest of SCO are from!

  • Comets (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Nyphur ( 514992 )
    Comets are as much the remnants of the formation of teh solar system as the belt is. In fact, I would go as far as to say that the belt is in face a string of comets whicha re being held in place by centripetal forces. Asteroid belts and such tend to hang around for that very reason. It's the natural order of things. Everything is in a constant state of transition and by definition, once it reaches a more stable state, it is inclined not to leave that state, but remain in a state of stability. Thus, when t

  • Pluto express.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by adeyadey ( 678765 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @06:52AM (#6898307) Journal

    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,..


    • 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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 08, 2003 @06:52AM (#6898308)
    Each lump of ice and rock is roughly the size of Philadelphia

    Does the Google calculator convert between Philadelphia's and metric units for us non-Americans? :P

  • Philadelphia? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Dazhel ( 171866 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @07:07AM (#6898339)
    ...Each lump of ice and rock is roughly the size of Philadelphia...

    Yeah but how much would they weigh at sea level in metric elephants?
  • How large is this in Libraries of Congress ?
  • The objects reside in a ring-shaped region called the Kuiper Belt, which houses a swarm of icy rocks that are leftover building blocks...

    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)

    by Sr. Zezinho ( 16813 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @07:10AM (#6898346) Homepage Journal
    Official Media Size Scale:

    • 1 - VW Beetle
    • 2 - Schoolbus
    • 3 - Football Field
    • 4 - Philadelphia
    • 5 - Texas
    • 6 - ??????
    • 7 - Profit!
  • "The objects reside in a ring-shaped region called the Kuiper Belt"

    So?... They found slightly bigger rocks between all the other rocks?

  • What an anti-climax. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by mantera ( 685223 )

    "Solar System Fossils Found By Hubble"
    When I saw this in my newsfeed I thought they'd found an alien fish or lizard.
  • So how much does that weigh in clouds?

  • solar system is one messy ass place (Score:4, Funny)

    by gelfling ( 6534 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @08:07AM (#6898565) Homepage Journal
    When I was a kid there were 9 planets, the asteriod belt a few moons and we were happy with it. Now with this new fangled Hubble stuff they're finding new spitwads everyother damn day. This ones' the size of Bangor Maine, that one's the result of two K Mart parking lot sized iceballs crashing into each other. What the f---?
  • I just wondered while reading this article, for no particular reason, what it would take to make Jupiter (or any massive gas giant circling a star) gain enough mass to ignite into a star? The collision of Saturn, Uranus and Neptune with Jupiter? The sum of all the rest mass of all the solar system? I was wondering this as I'm tired as hell and not thinking clearly and came across the thought that that could be how binary and ternary stellar systems are created: With a gas giant gaining enough mass (Jupiter

  • From the horse's mouth (Score:5, Informative)

    by Gary Bernstein ( 705249 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @11:21AM (#6900053)
    Some answers to posted questions from the one who did the research & wrote the press release:

    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)

    by BryanL ( 93656 ) <lowtherbfNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday September 08, 2003 @01:03PM (#6901094)
    Oh great another unit of measurement. I already have a hard time converting US Standard to metric, much less elephants, LOCs, and VWs. Now this.
  • The big question is whether they could spot any Toynbee Tiles inlaid in the remnants?
  • Each lump of ice and rock is roughly the size of Philadelphia and orbits just beyond Neptune and Pluto. ... making them roughly the temperature of Philadelphia around the time the observations were made (January?)

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