Video Showing Half a Million Asteroid Discoveries 154
An anonymous reader writes "Since 1980 over a half million asteroids have been discovered, mostly between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, now thanks to this video you can see this activity condensed into a few minutes. At full resolution it's a mesmerizing experience as new discoveries are added and the video makes it possible to see patterns in the discovery positions, for example a large number appear in line between Earth and Jupiter as astronomers started looking for smaller jovian moons after Voyagers visit to the system."
Cheers, astronomers! (Score:5, Funny)
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I can't get the video to play. It works on Ilsa's computer.
Come on, IE! You played it for her, you can play it for me!
Cpt Obvious Observation (Score:4, Interesting)
It's interesting how the video highlights the fact that the bulk of the asteroids seem to be discovered in a direction of the earth's orbit opposite the sun. Seems obvious when you think about it, but it really becomes apparent from watching the vid.
Re:Cpt Obvious Observation (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, we call that "nighttime" around here.
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Brilliant! So you're assuming that all the discoveries have been made by people at night using telescopes. Oh, wait...we have these things called satellites around here.
Re:Cpt Obvious Observation (Score:4, Funny)
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are you willing to point millions of dollars of technology to look directly to the sun to see a faint reflection.
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Whether terrestrial or space-based, telescopes are generally going to be pointed away from the sun.
Plus the asteroids in opposition at any given point in time are also the ones closest to earth and thus easiest to see.
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And they're the most "full" in phase, so that they are as bright as they'll ever get.
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Even satellites can't see asteroids on the other side of the sun. Or through the Earth. That doesn't leave a lot of directions to look in...
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You know, satellites have day and night too. Even if they were far from Earth, and lit up by the Sun, it would still make sense to aim the satellites AWAY from the sun.
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Yeah, we call that "nighttime" around here.
Doesn't that mean the region within the earth's orbit will be substantially less studied than the region outside the earth's orbit? Moreover, given the confounding effect of figuratively staring in the direction of the sun, won't the same tools be far less sensitive than when looking at the night-time sky? Could it be that there are many more asteroids closer to the sun than us than we have observed?
Is there a professional astronomer here who can give an authoritative answer?
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That is interesting - I wonder if that was the activation of some new technology (Hubble?).
It's also interesting to note the "blind spots" that are created by Mars.
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Re:Cpt Obvious Observation (Score:5, Informative)
You'll also notice that during much of the 2000s, there is a gap in discoveries at about the 5 o'clock position. This corresponds to monsoon season in the southwest U.S. (roughly July to mid September). Most of the discovered asteroids in the past decade were made by the Catalina Sky Survey, based just outside of Tucson, AZ, and they generally don't bother observing during monsoon season because of the increase in cloud cover.
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You'll also notice that the discovery rate seems to "pulsate" with a period of about 12 times per year (this is most obvious in the 2000s when the discovery rate was mostly uniform throughout the year). I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to explain why that is (hint, skies need to be very dark to observe faint asteroids).
then why wouldn't it be 13 times per year?
I would guess that some of the data is submitted monthly and the tracts show when the data was submitted, not necessarily observed. there's also a lot of big pulses early on, far larger than the overall rate would see to indicate as within the normal deviation of observation rate at that point. hence, the thought that it's mapping based on submission date and some are submitting bulk results on a monthly or quarterly basis.
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then why wouldn't it be 13 times per year?
I would guess that some of the data is submitted monthly and the tracts show when the data was submitted, not necessarily observed. there's also a lot of big pulses early on, far larger than the overall rate would see to indicate as within the normal deviation of observation rate at that point. hence, the thought that it's mapping based on submission date and some are submitting bulk results on a monthly or quarterly basis.
Well, to an astrophysicist "roughly 12 times" is equivalent to 13 times, but your point is taken. I've sat in with the Catalina guys (on a nearly full moon night, so they didn't discover anything while I was there), and they don't wait to submit data. They send candidate objects to a followup telescope to confirm the discovery, then publish any object with the Minor Planet Center as soon as they are confirmed. They need to act quickly, because orbit refinements often rely on followup observations (often
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then why wouldn't it be 13 times per year?
Because 12.3683 is closer (somewhat) to 12 than it is to 13?
Hint: 12.3683 is the number of synodic months per year
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The grad students at the telescopes need to submit monthly reports, so just before month-end they change the telescope from pointing at the girl's dorm to the sky?
What about the trojans? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm wondering why I see no conspicuous clustering at the trojan points of Earth and Venus. Are asteroids there harder to detect?
Re:What about the trojans? (Score:5, Informative)
There are no known Venus trojans, but they would be hard to detect from Earth. Messenger is looking for Mercury trojans, which should be dynamically stable (and even harder to detect from Earth). While the Earth has a handful of co-orbiting asteroids, I am not aware of any solidly confirmed Earth trojans. There are 4 known Mars trojans [wikipedia.org].
None of these objects are of sufficient numbers to show in this video.
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Startling that many more specks appear in the range of Mercury to Mars in the last half. In grade school, I heard of the asteroid belt beyond Mars, but there is a lot lurking at one astronomical unit from the sun.
With so many pieces even as far as Jupiter one good bump could put the Earth in a collision course - is that enough incentive to do something?
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size of the planets as well as greater interferience from other nearby bodies reducing the stability of the lagrange points.
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In addition to what mbone said, it's also the case that the terrestrial planets should have a much more difficult time capturing asteroids into their trojan points thanks to their smaller masses (and therefore shallower potential wells for the asteroids to get captured into).
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Very true. It's pretty mysterious why Mars should have any trojans at all, or if the ones it has are actually in stable orbits.
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Well, it's also farther from the Sun. I'd have to check the equations, but for orbits around the planet, at least, that affects things in a linear fashion. Plus, it's had a lot of opportunities to capture asteroids, particularly at lower relative speeds. Earth, Venus, and Mercury, have had a lot fewer.
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It is closer to the asteroid belt, where collision debris can provide more potential objects to capture.
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In addition to what's already been said; Trojans are only really stable in a simple (two body) system, or when the Trojan points belong to a body with a large gravity well.
The Earth has the moon disturbing it's Trojans, and Trojan's all over the solar system are effected by Jupiter.
Planets? (Score:2, Insightful)
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The Earth, yes. Mars, no, not really, as you point out. You could consider Mars the largest asteroid.
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It's not about vacuuming the neighborhood (by that measure even Jupiter doesn't count), but whether or not the nearby debris is dominated by the gravitation of the body in question.
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Also, there is something very wrong with saying "meteors in their orbits" (which just shows how much you are into all of this) - check for yourself what, it shouldn't take long.
Re:Planets? (Score:4, Insightful)
It looks like neither planet really meet the guideline of "clearing its neighborhood"...
Sure they have. It doesn't mean there can't be any other object in their orbit. Think of it in terms of ratios. Earth plus its moon, and Mars are both several orders of magnitude more massive than the sum of every other object in their orbits. Non-planets like Pluto or Ceres are several orders of magnitude less massive than the rest of the mass in their orbits.
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Er, okay, "several orders of magnitude less massive" isn't correct... Ceres is about a third as massive as the rest of the belt, and Pluto is under a tenth as massive. They are still less than the mass of the other objects in their zones, while for instance Mars is over 100,000 times more massive than the other objects in its orbit. There's a table here [wikipedia.org] showing these ratios for all the planets and dwarf planets.
Age of Discovery (Score:2)
This past couple of decades has certainly been an age of discovery that equals if not surpasses a similar expansion of knowledge about the universe that happened in the 15th-18th Centuries when knowledge about new continents and islands became common place throughout most of the world. Most of us have been doing mundane things and living our lives, but this is certainly something that deserves note. More planets are also being discovered, including asteroid belts in other star systems as well.
What isn't b
Osmos (Score:2)
Gives me a cool idea... (Score:5, Funny)
I think they should call it The Ship that Shoots a Laser Cannon.
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How about " 'roid rage"?
With a ship captain named Preparation H
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Oooh! And then you could have a CPA in a Ford rental drive past every few minutes you have to shoot before he bean counts all your asteroids and audits you. Or, maybe something more contextual.
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Too bad so very few will have the chance to teleoperate future moon rovers / robots. I hope anybody doing them will at least put a live stream on the web...
Cool. And Scary. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm going to focus, instead, on just how cool it was because, really, it was damn cool.
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I know that there are a ton of rocks floating around out there
A lot more than a ton. If you put all the rocks in the asteroid belt together you'd probably have a new planet. The asteroid Ceres [wikipedia.org] is called a "dwarf planet" in wikipedia. The protoplanet Vesta [wikipedia.org] is 530 km in diameter.
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Yeah, you'd probably get a planet, but not a very large one. From the wiki [wikipedia.org]:
The total mass of the asteroid belt is estimated to be 3.0×1021 to 3.6×1021 kilograms, which is just 4% of the Moon.
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Space is big, really big. Still a scary video, though.
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Yes, but even so, there's evidence that at least two major extinction events were caused by asteroid impacts here on Earth over the last billion years, most notably the K-T event. Because of the relative emptiness of space, these impacts don't happen very often, but it's been tens of millions of years since the last major impact, so it'd really suck if the next one were only a few decades away.
For the religious people out there: maybe God has been protecting us from these asteroids for a while, while we ha
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Like what?
Sure, hurricanes are far more frequent, with big ones hitting every decade or less. However, the damage they cause is very minimal: at most, they might destroy one city. Big deal.
Tsunamis can cause more damage, mainly because so many people live near oceans. But these happen even less frequently than hurricanes, but they kill more people. The one in 2004 killed 250,000, in several locations such as India and Indonesia.
Tornadoes are scary-looking, but basically harmless. The most they usually
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Considering that we actually have the technology now to 1) locate, observe, and track Earth-crossing asteroids, 2) launch spacecraft to intercept asteroids, and 3) change the course of asteroids (thanks to the thermonuclear bomb), keeping our heads in the sand because we're too lazy to watch out for and deal with exterior threats is inexcusable.
BBC filmed some penguins fighting off seal attacks, the pitiful little black flipper trying to slap away the oncoming hungry seal looks like it has a better chance than we do of redirecting a direct hit, such as might come from a close approach redirection from Mars or even Ceres or similar planetoids. Those rocks have been orbiting for billions of years, so most of the radical restructuring of their orbits has happened already, the cloud is mostly stable, but once in awhile one of them does get flung in a
My God (Score:2)
It's full of rocks!
Next blink, 2012. (Score:3, Funny)
Lookie, you heathen scum! Creationism is vindicated! What's that you see glimmering by the end of the video? It's the eye of God!!! That proves He exists. Y'all scientists done hoist yerselves by your own atheistic little petards, aincha? Gaze into His ocular glory, that greenish, ominous, malevolent, downright wicked...hey wait a second, you're not fooling me, you used summa that false color tricknology to make Him look evil didn't ya?
Next time show us His true colors -- red, white and blue.
Creepy (Score:2)
Very creepy...
Some notes From The Creator (Score:5, Informative)
I hadn't quite finished this, I wanted to record a voiceover, but a friend submitted it before I was ready.
So essentially the video shows asteroids which are known, so in the early portions around 1980 we have less than 10,000 and by the start of this month we have over half a million. Asteroids are highlighted on discovery and within a second they fade to the colour appropriate to their orbit (Green, Yellow and Red), asteroids are usually observed intensely around discovery and once an orbit is determined observers can go back and follow up to refine the exact elements, I only show the discovery, not follow up measurements. This does mean that a number of the objects that are being plotted have orbits that may be so poorly determined that they are 'lost in space' because they were only observed for a short time and by the time people attempted to follow up they were lost.
At the start of the videos, the 1980's, CCD's weren't used for astronomy, photographic plates were the primary technology for imaging the sky, furthermore, there were no digital systems for identifying asteroids on these plates, so while many asteroids were no doubt imaged they were generally not of interest to the observers who were probably taking nice pictures of nebula or other photogenic phenomena. Many of the discoveries in the 1980's were still made visually by minor planet hunters who knew what they were looking for. One of the earliest 'bursts' in the video is most likely related to observations of Jupiter searching for new moons around the giant planet, they'd look for objects moving on the plates and then make an orbit determination to see if it was a moon, it's waaaaay cooler to find a moon since they're a rarer commodity, but if you merely find an asteroid at least you get a chance to name it.
By the time we get to the mid 1990's we start to see automated sky search programmes like LINEAR, LONEOS, Spacewatch and the Catalina Sky Survey and these are primarily searching for asteroids in opposition since they're closer to Earth and at peak brightness so you can see a discovery cluster radiating out from the Earth.
In the last 8 months you see WISE which is a satellite performing a full sky survey in the Infrared, its scans the sky at 90 degrees to the sun, so its discovery pattern is very distinctive.
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I'd love to see more of the animation at the end, showing the dynamics of all these objects. That's fascinating!
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I would love to see the original, full resolution video. Could you upload it somewhere, or perhaps put it up on BitTorrent?
Also, what data sets did you use in the preparation of this movie? I would be interested to see the orbit specifications for all of these asteroids.
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Have you considered a horizontal split-screen, with the current perpendicular angle above the ecliptic, and another view parallel (or maybe offset 15 degrees or so) to the ecliptic?
Again, awesome work, thanks for making it.
Asteroids do not concern me (Score:2)
Unless they're red
remnants of a planet? (Score:2)
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The orbital mechanics of that is insanely complicated (and unlikely). Plus, where is this "twelfth planet" now? Why did it cause so much havok on only a single approach and hasn't done squat since?
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Size and Why No Planet? (Score:2)
How big are these asteroids? They must be tiny on average otherwise I don't see how we can still be here. We are swimming in the things.
Also why hasn't the asteroid belt become a planet? What prevents the rocks for grouping together?
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How big are these asteroids? They must be tiny on average otherwise I don't see how we can still be here. We are swimming in the things.
From a few hundred kilometers across down to dust particles. There are around a million objects over 1km in size.
Also why hasn't the asteroid belt become a planet? What prevents the rocks for grouping together?
I think the leading theory is that Jupiter's gravity disturbs the belt enough that it can't accrete into a planet.
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They're tiny. And the probably didn't become a planet (or large planetoid - even all together they're not very big) because Jupiter's gravity keeps things well stirred up.
Considering Future Applcations... (Score:2)
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Double-click on the video to reach the YouTube page. To the right of the summary (left of the number of views) is a down-chevron icon. Click on that for the full description.
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Double-click on the video to reach the YouTube page. To the right of the summary (left of the number of views) is a down-chevron icon. Click on that for the full description.
Or, just copy and paste that description here:
View of the solar system showing the locations of all the asteroids starting in 1980, as asteroids are discovered they are added to the map and highlighted white so you can pick out the new ones. The final colour of an asteroids indicates how closely it comes to the inner solar system.
Earth Crossers are Red
Earth Approachers (Perihelion less than 1.3AU) are Yellow
All Others are Green
Notice now the pattern of discovery follows the Earth around its orbit, most discoveries are made in the region directly opposite the Sun. You'll also notice some clusters of discoveries on the line between Earth and Jupiter, these are the result of surveys looking for Jovian moons. Similar clusters of discoveries can be tied to the other outer planets, but those are not visible in this video.
As the video moves into the mid 1990's we see much higher discovery rates as automated sky scanning systems come online. Most of the surveys are imaging the sky directly opposite the sun and you'll see a region of high discovery rates aligned in this manner.
At the beginning of 2010 a new discovery pattern becomes evident, with discovery zones in a line perpendicular to the Sun-Earth vector. These new observations are the result of the WISE (Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer) which is a space mission that's tasked with imaging the entire sky in infrared wavelengths.
Currently we have observed over half a million minor planets, and the discovery rates snow no sign that we're running out of undiscovered objects.
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Its not that hard to understand, right?
Otherwise, if you are really dense you could have read the video descriptions:
Flashing points are discovery events, the rest are the orbits of the known objects.
And of course discoveries _require_ and observation (more than one, but that doesnt matter on that time scale). They even explain the reason for the patterns.
Re:Needs a caption (Score:4, Informative)
I think you need to watch the video again, in 1080p resolution. It DOES show plenty of Jupiter trojans, but they don't stand out as much because not as many of those individual objects have been formally observed and catalogued (a requirement to be displayed in this particular video).
If you were reviewing this for publications, I hope you would read (and understand) the caption provided with it a bit more thoroughly, and watch the highest resolution version, before making your evaluation.
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The major planets are light blue, not green. I certainly don't want you as a reviewer.
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It does appear that the white pixels represent observations of objects for which a solid orbit has not been calculated. The colored pixels appear to be objects for which an orbit is known. You will note that during the last few seconds of the video that the density of "known" objects is high, and that few(er) new objects were being displayed.
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Uh... so they see an asteroid, it pops up on the video and then continues in it's observed orbit. How is that observation not a discovery? What's the difference?
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A discovery is when it passes from unknown to known. Once you know the asteroid is there, you can't discover it anymore.
Re:Needs a caption (Score:4, Funny)
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Better than when I worked on Mars. Then I had to take the subway.
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View of the solar system showing the locations of all the asteroids starting in 1980, as asteroids are discovered they are added to the map and highlighted white so you can pick out the new ones.
The final colour of an asteroids indicates how closely it comes to the inner solar system.
Earth Crossers are Red
Earth Approachers (Perihelion less than 1.3AU) are Yellow
All Others are Green
Notice now the pattern of discovery follows the Earth around its orbit, most discoveries are made in the region directly opposit
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I have worked on asteroids,
Which one was that?
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I'm interested in the dynamic influence of all of the asteroids on spacecraft navigation and the celestial mechanics of the solar system. There are lots of asteroids that influence the orbit of Mars at the meter level, and lesser but still substantial numbers that significantly perturb the Earth and the other planets. Even the large Kuiper belt objects like MakeMake have a significant effect.
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The possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1.
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Never tell me the odds!
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Nope, discoveries. They occur at opposition because that's the best time to do deep imagine of a patch of sky, of course.
There's a caption to this on the YouTube page for this video that highlights most of the patterns I noticed myself, including the advent of automated surveys in the late 90s/early 2000s.
What sort of work? (Score:2)
Did you work as a miner? Shuttle pilot? What??
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Bruce? Is that you? I thought you died when you stayed behind to set off the nuclear device.
Re:Needs a caption (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, and there is a difference between "smaller jovian moons" (which would all be indistinguishable from Jupiter on this scale) and the Trojan asteroids (which are all more or less at Jupiter's orbital radius, and a good 3-6 AU from Jupiter, not "between Earth and Jupiter." There have been a lot of Trojans found recently.
Right, which is why one would expect that if astronomers were pointing their telescopes at Jupiter in order to find new Jovian moons, they'd be likely to find asteroids between earth and Jupiter in the main asteroid belt, which is what the summary says, and the video seems to bear it out.
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Natalie Portman, of course.
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Asteroids.
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You mean like the little counter in the bottom left telling you what year it is? Can't tell if you're just being overly sarcastic here..
Re:Time (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, you can't see that on the 4:3 cropped version linked into Slashdot, but if you go to the actual YouTube video [youtube.com] you can see the counters for the current year and the currently discovered number of asteroids.
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One Sun to rule them all, One Sun to find them,
One Sun to bring them all and with its gravity bind them
In the Solar System where the asteroids fly.
Re:I see you! (Score:4, Funny)
Ehm, you mean:
One Oracle to rule them all, One Oracle to find them,
One Oracle to bring them all and with its gravity bind them
In the Oracular System where the asteroids fly.
Re:"That's some mighty fine science, Lou." (Score:5, Funny)
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Remember the 3rd dimension