Pluto Is Emitting X-Rays (digitaltrends.com) 106
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Digital Trends: Scientists have noticed the tiny trans-Neptunium object emitting X-rays, which, if it is confirmed, is both a baffling and exciting discovery. Carey Lisse and Ralph McNutt from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and a team of colleagues detected the X-rays by pointing the Chandra X-Ray Obervatory telescope in Pluto's direction four different times between February 2014 and August 2015. Seven photons of X-ray light were detected during these observations, confirming the team's hypothesis that the dwarf planet is detectable on the X-ray spectrum, potentially due to the presence of an atmosphere. Their findings have been published in the scientific journal Icarus. Why is this such a big deal? First of all, it would challenge what scientists have previously believed to be true of Pluto's nature. Until now, the popular description of the dwarf planet is as a tiny ball of frozen rock slowly meandering around the sun some 3.6-billion miles away. One of the possible explanations for why Pluto is emanating X-rays would be that the high energy particles emitted by the sun are stripping away and reacting with Pluto's atmosphere, producing the X-rays that are visible to Chandra. There are other potential explanations, such as haze particles in Pluto's atmosphere scattering the sun's X-rays are possible, though unlikely given the temperature of the X-rays observed. It is also possible that these X-rays are actually bright auroras produced by the atmosphere, but that would require Pluto to have a magnetic field -- something that would have been detected during New Horizon's flyby, yet no evidence of one was found.
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No, seriously, seven photons? (Score:2)
I'm not saying it's aliens, but . . . (Score:2)
. . . it's aliens.
(Semi-seriously, it doesn't have to be a buried monolith; we haven't taken sufficiently high-resolution images yet to have been able to see one on the surface, eh?)
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The one in the movie 2001 was buried. They found it because it generated an anomalous magnetic field, hence the name "Tycho Magnetic Anomaly One", or TMA-1
Really. Seven photons? (Score:3)
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The interesting part is not the number of photons, it's the fact that we registered them at all.
If me rubbing my shoes on the carpet generated 7 photos it wouldn't be all that interesting. If however they came from my penis then that would be very interesting indeed.
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Glowing condoms? Your tiny wanker only emitted 6.
Re:Scale (Score:4, Funny)
"I appreciate that "dwarf" planet doesn't sound too PC but I do wonder whether we should reserve the adjective "tiny" for items too small for their own gravitational mass to pull them into a sphere."
If you're going to invent your own classification system, then I propose we make everyone feel better by classififying them as follows:
'Tall' - A body too small to form a sphere.
'Grande' - Forms a sphere but does not clear its orbit.
'Venti' - Clears its orbit.
'Trenta' - Gas giants.
Just desserts (Score:1)
So much for all those nay-sayers who thought the Mi-Go would just sit quietly by when we insulted Yuggoth by denying it the full status of a planet. We'll see how the people of Earth stand up to an onslaught of X-Ray photons. 7 is just the beginning, at full power this weapon could probably deliver 20 to 30 in one blast!
Editors on top of their game again... (Score:5, Informative)
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Yeah well, it's trans THAT too!
-Editors
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"Not trans-NEPTUNIUM. Neptunium is an element (Np. Atomic Number 93).
""
Since elemnts with that big a nucleus tend to be radioactive, I am not surprised it would emit x-rays
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It's a trans-NEPTUNIAN object. Not trans-NEPTUNIUM. Neptunium is an element (Np. Atomic Number 93).
Its a direct quote from TFA so technically TFA say something like (with my emphasis)
Scientists have noticed the tiny trans-Neptunium[sic] object emitting X-rays, which, if it is confirmed, is both a baffling and exciting discovery.
But given that we have script kiddies and not editors, we get what we get.
Re:Editors on top of their game again... (Score:5, Funny)
It's a trans-NEPTUNIAN object. Not trans-NEPTUNIUM. Neptunium is an element (Np. Atomic Number 93).
The term was invented so that cis-neptunian objects can spend the rest of their eons apologizing for their existence.
oh Pluto (Score:2)
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> it is a good thing for pluto's sake that public schools have no money
> for new textbooks, the ones here are from the 90s at best when pluto
> was still a respected ninth planet of our little corner of the universe.
Actually, Pluto's "planetary status" has been suspect since just after its discovery. Here's an article featuring a snippet from 1934 (YES!)... http://blog.modernmechanix.com... [modernmechanix.com]
> So that Pluto ranks as the largest asteroid, rather than the smallest
> planet; and it may be necessary
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Taxonomy (Score:2)
Preach it, Brother! I memorized one fucking mnemonic back in grade school and I really don't want to have to come up with another one!
Unclear if you are being sarcastic but is abject laziness really the best argument someone can come up against changing planetary taxonomy?
I don't really get the furor over how we classify Pluto. It doesn't really matter if it is a bucket we label planets or a bucket we label something else. The point is to label similar objects into sensible categories. If you think the categories are poor ones then come up with a better one. But it is clear that Pluto is definitely something different than the other e
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Laziness is the best argument for using imperial units of measurement and daylight savings time, I say it's good enough for planetary taxonomy as well.
First Photon! (Score:3)
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They are interesting, IMHO, and do warrant a proper explanation.
The statement that "Pluto does not have a magnetic field", I'm not sure how definitively one can say that. It's long been assumed that it doesn't.... which is part of the reason why the magnetometer was cut from New Horizons. So we got no magnetic field measurements during the flyby.
That said, it's not likely. After all, Pluto did have SWAP and PEPSSI to study particles interacting with / leaving Pluto, and as far as I'm aware they didn't sh
editurds (Score:2)
One, it should be trans-Neptunian object, even if it isn't trans all the time.
Two, it's a planet.
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So it just wears skirts on casual Fridays but pants and a tie the rest of the workweek?
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"F.U. TYSON"
I guess it just took this long for the message to get there and back.
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You talking to me, porky?
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You'll have to file the case on Pluto, though. Feel free to take as many lawyers as you can.
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It's not really a planet, but it identifies as one, so, that's OK.
Nothing special (Score:1)
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and it leads me to posts like this which are basically apropros (sic) of nothing
So's your post. You must be from the department of redundant redundancies.
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The Palainian Galactic Patrol base.
Why this insistence on atmosphere? (Score:3)
Why all this insistence on mechanisms involving an atmosphere? X-ray tubes don't require gas.
You get X-rays whenever you abruptly stop or deflect a fast enough charged particle (such as an electron). Pluto is a ("dwarf") PLANET, with no (known) planetary magnetic field to deflect the solar wind or cosmic radiation. Such a BIG solid body, even 'way out there from the sun, should be stopping LOTS of charged particles all the time.
(Sure, charged particles stop more "abruptly", and thus release more energetic photons, when hitting heavy atoms rather than things like hydrogen. But some of the incoming stuff will be fast enough to emit x-rays even when slamming into the bare photon of a hydrogen nucleus. And then there's the inverse case when an incoming heavy nucleus from cosmic radiation hits an electron.)
Planetary object detector opportunity? (Score:2)
By the above argument, ANY planet, dwarf planet, moon, or other solid object of substantial size, without a strong magnetic field (which would ALSO be noticeable), should be emitting some x-rays from solar wind and cosmic ray bombardment.
If this is true, perhaps this x-radiation could be used as a basis for detection of such objects?
Scientific discovery (Score:2)
So many important scientific discoveries start with the phrase "huh, that's weird."
My sister, too (Score:2)
emits x-rays after having been hit by the semen rays of her last-night date. So ?
No magnetometer (Score:2)
New Horizons didn't carry a magnetometer, and thus did not provide evidence for Pluto's magnetic field one way or the other.
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I've read it had instruments that could have indirectly detected one.
Pluton ain't no kinda place (Score:1)
Pluton ain't no kinda place / to raise your kids. / In fact, it's a frickin' x-ray generator!
Scansion and rhyming could use some work.
Or... (Score:2)
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Is that "to" or "on"?
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But what about Uranus?
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Whoosh!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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So you're postulating an alien on a treadmill? Or maybe that rubber or carpet exists in an area of Pluto at room temperature? This is exciting.
Now before we talk about the fact that Slashdot didn't wake you up, maybe you should consider how many things on earth generate x-rays which wouldn't otherwise do so at -230degC
Re: Seven phucking photons? (Score:2)
Re:Seven phucking photons? (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously? You woke me up to read about seven photons from across the other side of the solar system?
How big is the detector? How far is it from Pluto?
They detected them from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, which is in orbit around the Earth. That puts the distance between the detector and Pluto at somewhere between 29 and 50 astronomical units of about 93 million miles each, depending on where the Earth and Pluto were in their orbits during the observations.
- Calculate the area of a sphere of that radius. (That's about 10^20 square miles at the low end, abut three times that at the high end.)
- Divide by the aperture of the x-ray telescope (0.43 sq ft), in square miles. (i.e. multiply by 1.3*10^7.) We're now in the 10^27 order of magnitude.
- Assume the x-rays are ONLY the result of solar wind bombardment? Divide by two. (You'd have to do that more than three times to drop the number by even ONE order of magnitude.)
- Multiply by seven photons detected.
That's a lot of photons emitted by the planet, isn't it?
Re:Seven phucking photons? (Score:5, Interesting)
"That's a lot of photons emitted by the planet, isn't it?"
Avogadro's number is only about 6*10^23, so we're talking something like ten thousand gram-moles of x-rays emitted during the observation period.
Ten Thousand Gram Moles of x-ray photons? Yike!
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Can you please convert that to Olympic swimming pools or football fields? I am american. Thanks!
So am I. Let's see...
10,000 gram moles of x-ray photons...
Take 22 pounds of hydrogen. Turn each atom of hydrogen into an x-ray photon.
Hydrogen bombs do something like that... But let's use total annihilation because the numbers are easier to find.
1 gm of antimatter + 1 gm of matter -> 43 kilotons of TNT equivalent. So call it 21.5 kilotons per gram.
Energy equivalent of a proton's mass is really close to 1
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I hate to jump the gun here, but could it possibly be antimatter?
Then they'd be calling them "gamma rays", not "x-rays", and would have found them with a different orbital telescope.
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I believe the official cheesy-press standard is number of dental x-rays' worth