Medieval astronomical records, such as the Bayeux Tapestry, could help narrow down the location (or at least infer the existence) of the hypothetical Planet Nine:
Scientists suspect the existence of Planet Nine because it would explain some of the gravitational forces at play in the Kuiper Belt, a stretch of icy bodies beyond Neptune. But no one has been able to detect the planet yet, though astronomers are scanning the skies for it with tools such as the Subaru Telescope on Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano.
Medieval records could provide another tool, said Pedro Lacerda, a Queen's University astronomer and the other leader of the project.
"We can take the orbits of comets currently known and use a computer to calculate the times when those comets would be visible in the skies during the Middle Ages," Lacerda told Live Science. "The precise times depend on whether our computer simulations include Planet Nine. So, in simple terms, we can use the medieval comet sightings to check which computer simulations work best: the ones that include Planet Nine or the ones that do not."
Also at Queen's University Belfast.
Related: "Planet Nine" Might Explain the Solar System's Tilt
Planet Nine's Existence Disfavoured by New Data
Study of ETNOs Supports Planet Nine's Existence
Passing Star Influenced Comet Orbits in Our Solar System 70,000 Years Ago
Related Stories
Two studies published on arXiv have identified the hypothetical ~10 Earth mass "Planet Nine" as an explanation for the tilt of the solar system:
Two recent studies have shown that the existence of a mysterious, hypothetical Planet Nine could explain why the planets in our Solar System don't fully line up with the Sun. Researchers have been speculating about a ninth planet since January this year, and these latest studies add more weight to the hypothesis that, at some point in time at least, there was an extra planet orbiting our Sun. In fact, if Planet Nine does exist (or did), it would help to explain something that scientists have puzzled over for decades - why the Solar System is tilted.
What does that mean? Well, basically, all of the main eight planets that orbit our Sun do so on the same plane, making the Solar System look like a disc. The problem is that the Sun spins at a different angle, with its axis roughly 6 degrees off from the rest of the planets.
In the past, researchers have attempted to explain this slant by blaming the temporary tug of a passing star, or interactions between the Sun's magnetic field and the disc of dust that formed our planets. But none of these hypotheses have fully accounted for the misalignment. But now the two new studies – [completely independent] from one another in the US and France – show that the existence of Planet Nine could explain the tilt.
Solar Obliquity Induced by Planet Nine
Ethan Siegel at Starts With A Bang brings to attention the results of the Outer Solar System Origins Survey (OSSOS). The OSSOS project, which started in 2013 (before the Planet Nine hypothesis was proposed) to survey the minor planets of the outer Solar System, has discovered and determined the orbits of well over eight hundred trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) in its operation. They have recently published a paper that basically puts the kibosh on the Planet Nine hypothesis. Planet Nine was initially proposed to explain an apparent anomalous clustering of orbits of TNOs consistent with them being perturbed by a large planet, but the OSSOS results have found no such anomalous clustering, and are rather seeing a distribution consistent with uniform randomness.
From Forbes' Javascript-required article:
It was perhaps the most exciting idea to come out of science last year: that an undiscovered, giant world exists in our Solar System, far beyond the orbit of Neptune. This wouldn't be some tiny, frozen world like Pluto or Eris, smaller even than Earth's Moon, but a monstrous super-Earth, perhaps ten times as massive as our own world and almost as large as Uranus or Neptune in radius. As the months passed since it was first proposed by Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, they compiled additional evidence for it, and things were looking rosy. But a new study by Shankman et al. has turned the evidence on its head, disfavoring the planet's existence and uncovering a bias in the data itself.
[...] what they found was entirely consistent with no Planet Nine, and that the overall case for Planet Nine's existence was substantially weakened by their study. In particular, the clustering in the orientation of each orbit in space (defined by multiple variables, ω and Ω) that earlier studies, like Batygin & Brown and Trujillo & Sheppard, previously noticed simply doesn't exist in this new, unbiased study.
We find no evidence in the OSSOS sample for the ω clustering that was the impetus for the current additional planet hypothesis.
The data from this new study is quite clear that the previously observed correlation, which was the impetus for hypothesizing Planet Nine, doesn't persist into the new sample.
OSSOS also has a Frequently Asked Questions page about these findings. They don't entirely rule out the existence of a substantial (perhaps Mars-sized) planet in the outer reaches of the Solar System, but their data makes it highly improbable that a super-Earth on the scale of Uranus or Neptune might be out there.
Additional reading:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/new-haul-distant-worlds-casts-doubt-planet-nine
A new study of the orbits of extreme trans-Neptunian objects has supported the existence of Planet Nine, just weeks after the Outer Solar System Origins Survey cast doubt on the hypothetical object:
Two astronomers from the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain studied 22 "extreme" TNOs (ETNOs), which orbit the sun at an average distance of at least 150 AU and never get closer than Neptune. (Neptune lies about 30 AU from the sun and orbits on a roughly circular path.) Specifically, the duo analyzed the ETNOs' "nodes," the two points at which the objects cross the plane of the solar system. (Distant bodies such as ETNOs tend not to lie in the same plane as the sun and the solar system's eight officially recognized planets.)
The researchers found that the objects' nodes generally aggregate at certain distances from the sun (as do those of 24 "extreme Centaurs," very distant objects with some characteristics of asteroids and others of comets). In addition, they discovered a correlation between the nodes' positions and an orbital parameter known as inclination.
The new results back the Planet Nine hypothesis, said lead author Carlos de la Fuente Marcos. "Assuming that the ETNOs are dynamically similar to the comets that interact with Jupiter, we interpret these results as signs of the presence of a planet that is actively interacting with them in a range of distances from 300 to 400 AU," he told Spain's Information and Scientific News Service, which is known by its Spanish acronym, SINC. "We believe that what we are seeing here cannot be attributed to the presence of observational bias."
Also at EarthSky.
Evidence for a possible bimodal distribution of the nodal distances of the extreme trans-Neptunian objects: avoiding a trans-Plutonian planet or just plain bias? (DOI: 10.1093/mnrasl/slx106) (DX)
Scholz's star, a binary system consisting of a red dwarf and a brown dwarf, changed the trajectory of comets and other distant solar system objects when it passed just 0.82 light years from the Sun around 70,000 years ago:
At a time when modern humans were beginning to leave Africa and the Neanderthals were living on our planet, Scholz's star - named after the German astronomer who discovered it - approached less than a light-year from the Sun. Nowadays it is almost 20 light-years away, but 70,000 years ago it entered the Oort cloud, a reservoir of trans-Neptunian objects located at the confines of the solar system.
This discovery was made public in 2015 by a team of astronomers led by Professor Eric Mamajek of the University of Rochester (USA). The details of that stellar flyby, the closest documented so far, were presented in The Astrophysical Journal Letters [open, DOI: 10.1088/2041-8205/800/1/L17] [DX].
Now two astronomers from the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain), the brothers Carlos and Raúl de la Fuente Marcos, together with the researcher Sverre J. Aarseth of the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom), have analyzed for the first time the nearly 340 objects of the solar system with hyperbolic orbits (very open V-shaped, not the typical elliptical), and in doing so they have detected that the trajectory of some of them is influenced by the passage of Scholz´s star.
"Using numerical simulations we have calculated the radiants or positions in the sky from which all these hyperbolic objects seem to come," explains Carlos de la Fuente Marcos, who together with the other coauthors publishes the results in the MNRAS Letters [open, DOI: 10.1093/mnrasl/sly019] [DX] journal.
Collective gravity, not Planet Nine, may explain the orbits of 'detached objects'
Bumper car-like interactions at the edges of our solar system—and not a mysterious ninth planet—may explain the the dynamics of strange bodies called "detached objects," according to a new study. CU Boulder Assistant Professor Ann-Marie Madigan and a team of researchers have offered up a new theory for the existence of planetary oddities like Sedna—an icy minor planet that circles the sun at a distance of nearly 8 billion miles. Scientists have struggled to explain why Sedna and a handful of other bodies at that distance look separated from the rest of the solar system. [...] The researchers presented their findings today at a press briefing at the 232nd meeting of the American Astronomical Society, which runs from June 3-7 in Denver, Colorado.
[...] [Jacob] Fleisig had calculated that the orbits of icy objects beyond Neptune circle the sun like the hands of a clock. Some of those orbits, such as those belonging to asteroids, move like the minute hand, or relatively fast and in tandem. Others, the orbits of bigger objects like Sedna, move more slowly. They're the hour hand. Eventually, those hands meet. "You see a pileup of the orbits of smaller objects to one side of the sun," said Fleisig, who is the lead author of the new research. "These orbits crash into the bigger body, and what happens is those interactions will change its orbit from an oval shape to a more circular shape." In other words, Sedna's orbit goes from normal to detached, entirely because of those small-scale interactions.
Also at Popular Mechanics, where Planet Nine proposer Konstantin Batygin disputes the findings:
Batygin, of Caltech, tells Popular Mechanics that any sufficiently strong gravitational encounter could detach an object from Neptune's embrace, but for the distant small bodies of the Kuiper belt to have done so through "self-gravity"—as the CU model proposes—there would need to be about five to ten times the mass of Earth in the outer parts of the Kuiper belt. There isn't.
"Unfortunately, the self-gravity story suffers from the following complications," Batygin says. "Both observational and theoretical estimates place the total mass of the Kuiper belt at a value significantly smaller than that of the Earth [only 1 to 10 percent Earth's mass]. As a consequence, Kuiper belt objects generally behave like test-particles enslaved by Neptune's gravitational pull, rather than a self-interacting group of planetoids."
Related: Planet Nine's Existence Disfavoured by New Data
Medieval Records Could Point the Way to Planet Nine
Another Trans-Neptunian Object With a High Orbital Inclination Points to Planet Nine
Outer Solar System Origins Survey Discovers Over 800 Trans-Neptunian Objects
LSST Could be the Key to Finding New Planets in Our Solar System
2015 BP519, nicknamed "Caju", is another extreme trans-Neptunian object that points to the existence of Planet Nine. Discovered with data from the Dark Energy Survey, Caju has a relatively large diameter, estimated at around 400-700 km, meaning the object could be a gravitationally rounded dwarf planet. It also has a highly inclined orbit of 54°, which a team of scientists says can be explained by the presence of the hypothetical Planet Nine:
After discovering it, the team tried to investigate 2015 BP519's origins using computer simulations of the Solar System. However, these tests were not able to adequately explain how the object had ended with such an orbit.
But when the team added a ninth planet with properties exactly matching those predicted by the Caltech scientists in 2016, the orbit of 2015 BP519 suddenly made sense. "The second you put Planet Nine in the simulations, not only can you form objects like this object, but you absolutely do," Juliette Becker, a Michigan graduate student and lead author of the study told Quanta.
Some researchers, however, caution that Planet Nine may not be the only explanation for 2015 BP519's strange orbit. Michele Bannister, a planetary astronomer from Queen's University Belfast, in Ireland, who was not involved in the study, told Newsweek that while the latest findings were "a great discovery," other scenarios could account for its tilt. "This object is unusual because it's on a high inclination," she said. "This can be used to maybe tell us some things about its formation process. There are a number of models that suggest you can probably put objects like this into the shape of orbit and the tilt of orbit that we see today."
Also at Quanta Magazine.
Discovery and Dynamical Analysis of an Extreme Trans-Neptunian Object with a High Orbital Inclination (arXiv:1805.05355)
Related: Medieval Records Could Point the Way to Planet Nine
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) may be able to find new planets in our solar system, including the hypothesized planets Nine and Ten:
Overall, these estimates indicated that Planet 9/X was a super-Earth with anywhere between 5 to 20 Earth masses, and orbited the Sun at a distance of between 150 – 600 AU. Concurrently, these studies have also attempted to narrow down where this Super-Earth's orbit will take it throughout the outer Solar System, as evidenced by the perturbations it has on KBOs.
Unfortunately, the predicted locations and brightness of the object are not yet sufficiently constrained for astronomers to simply look in the right place at the right time and pick it out. In this respect, a large area sky survey must be carried out using moderately large telescopes with a very wide field of view. As Dr. Trilling told Universe Today via email:
"The predicted Planet X candidates are not particularly faint, but the possible locations on the sky are not very well constrained at all. Therefore, what you really need to find Planet X is a medium-depth telescope that covers a huge amount of sky. This is exactly LSST. LSST's sensitivity will be sufficient to find Planet X in almost all its (their) predicted configurations, and LSST will cover around half of the known sky to this depth. Furthermore, the cadence is well-matched to finding moving objects, and the data processing systems are very advanced. If you were going to design a tool to find Planet X, LSST is what you would design."
Where *Isn't* Planet 9? Search for Planet Nine still continues
Not long ago astronomers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin (the two original people proposing the existence of the planet) used the alignments of the TNO orbits to back-calculate the potential location of the unseen planet in space. It's a kind of treasure map to find the planet.
In a new paper they've put that map to use, looking through survey data in a hunt for Planet 9.
[...] Brown and Batygin wrote software that simulates where Planet 9 would be and how bright it would appears for various values of its size, reflectivity, and orbital shape. They created a database of positions and brightnesses for it, and then combed through the [Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF)] database to look for it, going through the past three or so years of observations since the facility started its survey campaign.
[...] They ran 100,000 simulations of various parameters for the planet, and looked to see if the ZTF would've seen it if it were indeed smaller and closer to us. They determined that it would've been seen in the survey about 56,000 times out of the 100,000, so just looking at that their non-detection indicates the chance it's smaller and closer is now less than 50%, making it more likely it's farther out, bigger, and fainter.
The larger Vera C. Rubin Observatory is expected to find many previously hidden objects in the solar system, and is scheduled to begin full operations in October 2023. It will accumulate all-sky survey data around 10 times faster than the Zwicky Transient Facility.
Also at ExtremeTech.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @02:03PM (5 children)
Nibiru is coming!
(Score: 4, Funny) by takyon on Sunday May 06 2018, @02:26PM (2 children)
Earth gets gravity desist from Nibiru, retreats to 1.1 AU from the Sun, curing global climate warming.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Funny) by Thexalon on Sunday May 06 2018, @03:08PM (1 child)
A gravity desist? Is that where Niberu sends a letter to Earth reading "Stop making gravity, or we'll see you in court!"?
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Sunday May 06 2018, @05:08PM
No, no, no. It's the opposite wave function, so that those of us who don't insist on Gravity have spatial ontology.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by The Archon V2.0 on Monday May 07 2018, @03:13PM
> Nibiru is coming!
Call in the Navy, we'll sink the bastard!
https://youtu.be/JBAY_dIVd-A?t=207 [youtu.be]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @03:53PM
What about the Old Biru? Obsolescence?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Sunday May 06 2018, @05:06PM (8 children)
It's an interesting theory. Immediate problems I see would be:
a) Trying to use pre-Copernican data has always struck me as a crapshoot. It's always speculation that the item observed *might be* the item you're looking for, with certain degrees of confidence. I think I've usually seen Ptolemaic data used to help confirm Copernican observations as opposed to the reverse. (There's no modern observation here being confirmed, only speculation.) Which isn't to say Ptolemaic observations weren't precise or detailed, within limits.
b) The data creating the speculation about Planet Nine all came from trans-or-post-Neptunian objects. (Though I'll admit being away from the data for awhile - maybe something has changed.) Given the speculated distance to Planet Nine I'd be rather amazed if it affected a periodic cometary orbit in any measurable way at all. Though I'd love to be proven wrong and will defer to peer review of the idea by other professional astronomers.
c) "Precise times depend on whether our computer simulations include Planet Nine." Hmmm. I would think you'd have to know not only the radial distance to Planet Nine (which is still a HUGE toroid of space incredibly far out last time I checked), but you'd also have to have a clue of the angular vector to speculate if it was affecting a particular orbit or not. That's what made the initial discovery so interesting - someone took the time to backtrack six objects to a potential gravitational well. Doing that for RANDOM_COMET_X seems a lot more dicey - how do you test for if the comet orbit was "affected" without knowing Planet Nine's location in space? Another way to put it would be that if we had a clue about the exact angular vector that toroid being searched would narrow down the search to a particular torus segment but that wasn't known.
But that's why the professional astronomers get paid the big bucks I suppose.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @05:50PM (6 children)
I'm pretty sure that the big-bucks professional astronomers are aware of those problems :)
I'm pretty sure that they wouldn't use that data as direct proof. They would run simulations without Planet Nine (let's call it ⑨, read as Cirno [touhouwiki.net]), and see if the results fit the observations. If they do, exit(0). If they don't, the simulations would be rerun with numerous parameters (orbital radius, inclination, orbital velocity, position) for ⑨, to see if there's a configuration that would explain the discrepancy. Now, here's the kick: if you find where a planet was 500 years ago, and it's orbit, you can calculate where it would be now. Even if each particular record is unreliable, with enough records, they could whittle down the possible orbits quite a bit. So if the astronomers find a configuration that fits the records, they can turn the telescopes to that area and check.
They wouldn't use the simulations and records to "prove" that there is ⑨. They would use them to narrow the mindbogglingly big search space.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday May 06 2018, @06:35PM
Haha, nice use of unicode [wikipedia.org].
Cirno's Perfect Math Class (NSFW) [youtube.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by aristarchus on Sunday May 06 2018, @09:39PM
Not the alleged planet itself, but the results of it perturbation of the Ort Cloud objects: Comets, to you non-astronomers. Problem is, Bayeux Tapestry depicts Halley's Comment, which is kind of the "Old Faithful" of Comets, being usually very visible, and coming around every 76 years, or so. Not sure how it being observed in the Middle ages as anything to do with Planet Nine, we will probably find out more about Wormwood, and the end of times, if the unruly Brits do not accept Norman (North-men) rule. Billy the Conqueror had a book, a list of names, if you will, called the "Doomsday Book", and he took Halley's for a sign.
(And, Medieval Europe was hardly a hot-bed of observational astronomy. For example, slightly prior to this, in 1054 (1066 is William the Conqueror's invasion of England), there was a supernova in Taurus, that has left us Messier object #1, the Crab Nebula. The Nova was recorded by Chinese astronomers, a "guest star" that was even visible during the day, since it was so bright. Lasted for weeks. Absolutely no mention of it in Medieval European records. Could they just not have seen it? Unlikely. More to the point, Aristotle's (and the Church's) position was that the heavens are unchanging, perfect, eternal. So you should not have any stellae novae, nor should there be anything like Comets, even periodic ones, so they were considered harbingers of disaster. Not until Tycho Brahe (1572) [wikipedia.org] and Johannes Kepler (1604) [wikipedia.org] discovered novae stellae did this presumption about the heavens begin to be challenged.)
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday May 07 2018, @02:29AM (1 child)
They are. ;)
Rethinking and re-reading, I get the picture now. It actually is taking our current data and back-checking it to Pre-Copernican observations, a different kettle of fish. Much as you said, though they can simplify it further and walk it backwards. Since we know those parameters for existing comets to a very high degree of precision, the data can be walked back and we can predict where it would have been 500 years ago instead sans anomaly. If that data matches to the tapestry (or other observation) then there was no anomaly along the orbital path. If an anomaly is discovered, though, it is data for checking to see if it is a refinement. It still takes that "leap of faith" that the discovered anomaly is in fact the same object and the data would have to be scrutinized to see if the anomalous information is consistent with Planet Nine's toroid. It doesn't take knowing where Planet Nine was 500 years ago, it takes discovering a comet was not in location or timing where the math says it must have been consistent with all the major gravitational objects in the system we know about now.
It still seems like a time intensive thing to backcheck, even with computers. But then again, maybe the data of the tapestries have already been fed to database by enterprising grad students.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Monday May 07 2018, @03:03PM
The approach is still subject to issues with the medieval/ancient astronomical observations. If there are not many data points and they are off, they could suggest an anomaly that doesn't exist, or hide an anomaly that does. We'll see if these astronomers come up with anything useful in time, since Brown and Batygin say that Planet Nine could be discovered any day now (if they get lucky at Subaru [wikipedia.org]).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday May 07 2018, @06:53AM (1 child)
Not quite. It would be so if you include some assumptions - like the ecliptic plane somehow aligned with the rest in a smallish angle (which will imply some eccentricity limits, otherwise its orbit would not be stable).
While the knowledge of a single point is more than nothing, it doesn't make your job easier in the general sense.
I have a hunch it will require enough records about different positions at different times.
You can whittle down an infinity of possible orbits and still have an infinity of them still possible (as in: a straight unbound line has as many points as any segment. Even if you divide a segment, the resulting two segments will still have the same number of points)
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @07:28AM
Well, yeah, when I said "and it's orbit", I thought it was obvious that you'd need several points to define it. Sorry about that.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday May 06 2018, @06:07PM
I'll admit there isn't a lot of substance to this story. For example, no paper published. But they say this much:
In some cases, there may be sightings of the same comet in different countries, making it easier to get an accurate date/time. Hopefully, somebody will find some truly overlooked sightings and be able to plug them into a formula. But it would be truly amazing if they can get enough accurate data to actually come up with new, tighter constraints on where to look for Planet Nine (as well as confirming that Mike Brown and co.'s current search area is correct).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @05:46PM (9 children)
We call it "Pluto".
Going by the current definition of a planet, Earth itself isn't one. There are bits of crap in our orbit at the Lagrange points. This disqualifies Earth. Such a definition is stupid and useless.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by takyon on Sunday May 06 2018, @06:02PM (3 children)
The smallest official planet in the solar system is Mercury. It's smaller (although more massive) than Ganymede and Titan. But Mercury is more than 25 times more massive than Pluto.
One solution that could satisfy everyone would be to call Pluto both a planet *and* a dwarf planet. Just define dwarf planets as the subset of planets under a certain mass. If Pluto was the most massive Kuiper belt object, we would have a convenient cutoff using an arbitrary limit of 1/25 Mercury mass. But we now know that Eris is 27% more massive than Pluto. And Neptune's moon Triton is thought to be a captured KBO, and is in turn about 29% more massive than Eris. There are probably some more massive KBOs out there with long orbital periods that haven't been spotted yet.
There has also been talk of a "Planet Ten" [soylentnews.org] (closer than "Planet Nine") of about 1 Martian mass around ~60 AU. If that one exists, there could be a number of undiscovered icy bodies in between the mass of Pluto/Eris/Triton and Mars.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday May 07 2018, @05:53PM (2 children)
Aside that as you point out we then open the door to admitting other KBOs as planets (machts nichts), if/when Planet Ten is discovered one then messes up all descriptions... "Ninth planet... which one? Pluto? Newbie?" which we already get anyway. It's like Doctor Who counting has come to be, but at least that has the fun of David Tennant's regeneration and John Hurt's performance.
And I'm going there! Real Soon! [youtube.com]
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday May 07 2018, @06:07PM (1 child)
It doesn't matter. The objects currently nicknamed Planet Nine and Ten will almost certainly be considered planets if they are found to exist at around their estimated masses. They'll be given new designations after discovery.
All planets that aren't considered dwarf planets can be called main/major/primary/large/dominant/whatever planets. Schoolchildren may or may not have to memorize the names of two more of those. If it turns out we have many more undiscovered Mercury and Mars sized objects, they can just be ignored by most people. We don't expect anyone to know that Jupiter has 69 known moons, or the names of all of the 51 properly named ones, including Mneme [wikipedia.org], Herse [wikipedia.org], Kale [wikipedia.org], and Megaclite [wikipedia.org].
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday May 07 2018, @07:57PM
True, but I was referring to if Pluto is allowed to be designated the ninth planet by some, but not all, then any other planet(s) found after that will have a numbering controversy. Is Planet Ten going to be the tenth planet or the eleventh, depending on how you happen to feel about Pluto?
This sig for rent.
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Sunday May 06 2018, @07:33PM (3 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearing_the_neighbourhood [wikipedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @01:46AM
Boy, that takes me back. They were a great band.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @10:53AM
The plutinos don't count against Neptune, but they do count against Pluto.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @09:27PM
The whole way that reclassification mess went down was an ugly political mess and a stain on the image of science. You spend two years working on a new definition and go into the IAU meeting with the definition, have the vote scheduled on the last day when 95% of the attendees will have left, change the definition the night before, then require that only those in attendance are allowed to vote, who SURPRISE are mostly the dynamicists because they're sessions were the last ones at the meeting. So you (Brown and company) change the rules, stack the deck, have less than 5% of your membership vote on it, then claim victory and declare that "the IAU has decided". I don't even have a horse in that race and I find the whole thing very unappealing.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Sunday May 06 2018, @10:15PM
If that was the definition - "no bits of crap at Langrange points" - then it'd rule out Jupiter, too.
But it isn't, so it doesn't.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 4, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday May 06 2018, @09:40PM (5 children)
The stupid Live science article states that 1066 was in the Dark Ages, which is wrong. It was firmly in the Middle Ages, and in fact Dark Ages is not a thing. It is now known as the Early Middle Ages.
Sorry, this annoyed me more than it should perhaps and I had to get it off my chest.
Carry on now.
(Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Monday May 07 2018, @01:01AM (4 children)
I was there! Pretty frigging dark! More darkness than light! People becoming illiterate, travel was very dangerous, roving bands of deplorables (we called them "Germanic Barbarians"), and Twitter was the dominate mode of communication. There was an idiot king, and a mad man for a pope, but fortunately the Idiot King fired the pope, and he had to go back to Brietbart, so things were not as bad as they could have been. Kinda like now, actually.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @01:22AM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday May 08 2018, @02:58PM
Still disapproves of women's reproductive rights, though, and still adamant there's a sky fairy.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday May 07 2018, @07:08AM (1 child)
Well, only about 100 or so years later, there was a mongol who got annoyed by that darkness and started to lit villages and cities - as in "setting them alight".
Needless to say, after a while it was even darker and somehow colder.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday May 07 2018, @10:36AM
If you have not seen it, check out "Urga",
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_to_Eden [wikipedia.org] English language title sucks, as usual. But, Mongol enlightenment? Sounds good to me! Compared to the Lombogards in the Dark Ages!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @02:53AM
Shhh, it's only a model