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Space NASA

'Something Weird Is Going On' as New Horizons Approaches Distant Asteroid (popularmechanics.com) 83

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft passed Pluto in 2015. But now it's getting strange readings while approaching its next destination, the Ultima Thule asteroid.

Popular Mechanics reports: Ultima Thule appears to not have a light curve, which is perplexing scientists... Asteroids like Ultima Thule reflect sunlight -- that's why they're bright spots instead of dark spots -- but the amount of light they reflect depends on how much of their surface is facing the Sun. The bigger their surface area, the brighter they become. Small asteroids like Ultima Thule aren't perfectly round, which means how much of their surface is facing the Sun changes as they rotate....

Ultima Thule isn't changing its brightness at all. New Horizons has been watching Ultima Thule for three months and hasn't spotted any brightness change, which is really odd. Ultima Thule is definitely not spherical -- astronomers determined that a year ago -- so why doesn't its brightness change?

One theory is that the New Horizon's probe is perfectly aligned with the asteroid's axis of rotation, so it's only seeing Ultima Thule's north (or south) pole. Another is that the asteroid is surrounded by dust clouds that "even out" its light curve. But that usually only happens when asteroids are near the sun and heating up, whereas Ultima Thule "is cold and dark and shouldn't have any dust...."

"Fortunately, we might not have to wait long for an answer to this problem. New Horizons will fly by Ultima Thule on January 1, and should give us high-resolution photos of the entire system," the article concludes. "With any luck, those photos will solve the mystery."
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'Something Weird Is Going On' as New Horizons Approaches Distant Asteroid

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  • ,,,alien spaceship theories.

    • "The Red Stuff", by John Wyndham.

    • They'll probably just probe Uranus and leave.
    • Re:And Cue (Score:5, Funny)

      by pslytely psycho ( 1699190 ) on Sunday December 23, 2018 @08:20AM (#57848940) Journal
      That's no moon...
    • Re:And Cue (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Paul Johnson ( 33553 ) on Sunday December 23, 2018 @09:55AM (#57849176) Homepage
      "First, there was the problem of Rama's light curve. It didn't have one." From "Rendevous with Rama" by Arthur C. Clarke.
      • "And on far-off Earth, Dr. Carlisle Perera had as yet told no one how he had wakened from a restless sleep with the message from his subconscious still echoing in his brain: The Ramans do everything in threes."

    • by jythie ( 914043 )
      Also cue the electric universe people with some explanation involving plasma.
    • ",,,alien spaceship theories."

      Wot? Then those aliens can just fly over the beautiful wall?

    • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      Well if you are going to go Alien, I would suggest that a field suppressing Alien transmissions to allow distinctly human social evolution could be distorting other forms of radiation. Good luck finding them in the Oort cloud, especially if the Oort cloud itself is being used to block Alien transmissions from reaching this solar system. Kind of ruin the mud monkey evolutionary show if we could just tune into their signals and well copy their technology or societal adaptations, we would hardly be us any more

    • by Calydor ( 739835 )

      It's just the Mass Effect relay out past Pluto. Nothing to worry about, the chance of an eldritch horror from beyond the galactic rim to come bomb our planet is astronomically low.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 23, 2018 @07:49AM (#57848870)

    As the apocryphal quotation goes, "The most exciting phrase in science is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny ’."

    • by DCFusor ( 1763438 ) on Sunday December 23, 2018 @09:45AM (#57849154) Homepage
      And all real scientists live to hear, or better, speak just that phrase. It's the payoff for all that work.
      • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        No, "something weird is going on" could mean your probe will be destroyed by a cloud of pebbles. This mystery has got to be making the route planners nervous.

        True, a cloud of pebbles would be an interesting find out this far, but it also means we won't know much more about it for at least another 20 years.

      • My commonly used versions are:

        What the fucking fuck.

        Well, that's problematic.

        I usually cycle through the two until I figure it out.
    • by jythie ( 914043 ) on Sunday December 23, 2018 @10:46AM (#57849322)
      Yeah.. any time I hear people complaining that scientists are dogmatic and hate anything new or novel, I wonder if they have ever actually met a scientist outside having their ideas debunked.
      • by Kjella ( 173770 )

        Well where I left experimental science in high school it was more like math, you either solved it right and got points or you did it wrong and at best got a partial score. At no point did "oh, that's funny" mean anything other than "oh my god, we'll have to do it again". Sometimes we just gave up finding the problem and invented the results we should have gotten instead. It's not until you hit the research stage that you go off the rails and start looking at questions where the answers aren't already preord

  • Not rotating ? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Alain Williams ( 2972 ) <addw@phcomp.co.uk> on Sunday December 23, 2018 @07:55AM (#57848880) Homepage

    But it is a bit far out to be gravitationally locked to the sun.

    It can't be covered by an ocean as it is not perfectly round, so there would be islands/continents that would have a different albedo. What would be liquid that far out (ie cold) ?

    • It may be rotating very slowly, which sometimes happens.
    • Re:Not rotating ? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by RockDoctor ( 15477 ) on Sunday December 23, 2018 @10:43AM (#57849302) Journal
      When a satellite and it's primary are gravitationally (tidally) locked, the locked component rotates at the same period as the rotation of the secondary around the primary. That's the situation we have between Earth and Moon - the Moon goes around the Earth every 29.x days (x varies on which version of "around" you want) and the Moon rotates on it's axis every 29.x days (same caveat). It is also possible for the primary to become tidally locked to the secondary, which is the situation between Pluto and Charon.

      What would be liquid that far out (ie cold)

      H2, He (miscible above 3.x K, IIRC), Ne. Nitrogen is close to it's triple point on Pluto, so it can slip in and out of fluidity.

    • My guess is that at this distance it’s going to be a featureless ballbearing of ice. If so, then whatever rotation it may have is moot.

  • Aliens obviously! ;-)
  • They tend to be able to convince themselves out of most problematic observations
  • God continuously invents science

  • Maybe the virtual world where we live can only maintain a logically consistent simulation when the observer is "inside" the "solar system"?

    If something goes "physically out", then empirical and sensory experience is reduced in quality?

    Maybe the end game scenario is when we collectively conclude we are in a simulation? Maybe we are almost winning...

  • Simple, an alien spacecraft, like the Oumuomua

  • then it could be intelligent.
  • We have information suggesting that it may be a binary contact pair, could it be tidally locked to the sun and thus have no light curve? Another possibility is that being out so far with so little gravitational interference maybe it is encased in a relatively uniform "snowdrift" of ice and dirt. Either way we should know in a week or so, hopefully it will be a heck of a show no matter what.

    • by robbak ( 775424 )

      No, it's too far away from the sun for it to have tidal effects that could lock it.Tidal effects come from the objects having a reasonable size compared to the distance between them - and the difference between it and the sun is huge.

  • an alien Starbucks.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    I thought that one of the attractions of visiting these far-away Kuiper Belt objects, was that they were "pristine", unaffected by collisions or the heat of the sun. And there is a general belief that such objects may have a lot of organic compounds in their makeup, with the result that they may be very dark and have little reflectivity.

    If the albedo is low enough, it may simply reflect too little light to detect a decent light curve. Regardless of it's shape, orientation or spin.

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