New Horizons To Pluto

"GALACTIC Shoes!"​

 

OT: pretty cool thing! Space exploration is a field where mankind has still so much to learn, but we are slowly starting to make our way. I am happy to live in a time where I can see all these discoveries going on!

 

I long for the day when we can go to the stars commercially and explore. Unfortunately i doubt that will be in my time. but a first step?

 

That's pretty cool!

 

ninth planet—at 5,000 times the mass of Pluto—is sufficiently large that there should be no debate about whether it is a true planet. Unlike the class of smaller objects now known as dwarf planets, Planet Nine gravitationally dominates its neighborhood of the solar system. In fact, it dominates a region larger than any of the other known planets—a factmakes it "the most planet-y of the planets in the whole solar system."

 

That is interesting as hell you two. It make me wander though, if this new planet is so much larger than earth how is it that we have never seen it before now. How could we have missed something so large? It sure doesn't instill a lot of confidence that our astronomers have the ability to find asteroids that are heading toward us.

 

The Astronomical Journal has published tremendous results of the new research conducted by CalTech professors Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin. They claim there is the ninth planet that is floating in the farthest space of our solar system—the area where the sunlight does not reach.
You will be surprised to know that it was Brown and Batygin who declared Pluto a dwarf planet in 2006. The main reason for such conclusion was the contemplation that Pluto was one of those small icy celestial bodies that were allocated in the Kuiper belt, the area far away from Neptune’s orbit. Pluto, like other objects in that area of our solar system, does not have the basic features of a planet, which are: the object has to be of spherical shape only, it has to orbit the Sun, and it must be able to clear own orbit from debris.
Our mysterious “Planet X” (that is its unofficial name) supposedly meets all of the essential requirements for being named a planet according to the calculations of Brown and Batygin. During the research of six tiny objects in the Kuiper belt, the scientist noticed the specific arrangement of their orbits—they create a funnel toward the Sun, and it may not be a simple coincidence.
The research explains this event with the fact that the new “Planet X” pulls their orbits into its own.
In the case when the theory is confirmed by subsequent investigations, it will in fact mean that Planet X is orbiting the Sun from such a distance that seemed unthinkable just yesterday. So the question is—where is “Planet X”? Well, it is so far away that to complete the only trip around the Sun it needs 15 000 years, while Neptune, which has the longest orbit ever known, needs only 164 years to finish the trip.
The obvious evidence of existence of the ninth planet is the constant movement of a half- dozen celestial bodies in the Kuiper belt. The discovery of the new sterling planet is a unique case in history. This was the first time when astronomers could make themselves certain in the existence of a planet by evaluating the movement of other celestial bodies in our solar system.
However, in 1846, Neptune was discovered by the attentive astronomers that noticed irregular movement around Uranus and predicted the presence of another planet that influenced Uranus’ orbit. No one denies that the history may repeat itself in this case as well.

 

This is what amazes me about you Amy. You grace us with massive uploads of incest related stuff, cartoons, etc. Then, Boom! You drop some Astrological know how on us like it's no big deal.

The diversity of what you bring us here is what I admire most about you.

i h s

 

Thank you.

 

WOW!!! Thank you Amy for that fantastic bit of information. You never cease to amaze me on what you post for all of us. Your post explained it perfectly. I figured it had to be extremely far out for it to be just now noticed by our astronomers.

 

Pluto, our solar system’s former ninth planet and current dwarf planet, has another surprise for us: landscape features seen on only one other planet—Earth.
Called “penitentes” after their resemblance of a crowd in kneeling penance, these icy spires can reach over 1,600 feet tall. Here on Earth, the same features are found in the Dry Andes above 13,000 feet, but they only grow to about 16 feet. Scientists suspected Europa might have these icy towers as well, but Pluto’s the first world to show real evidence of them outside Earth. The spires are rather young, and formed by erosion. Penitentes need atmosphere to form, but Pluto’s colder, thinner and darker atmosphere—combined with the ice forming from methane and nitrogen instead of water—allow these icy structures to stretch to fantastical heights as never seen before.
The signature of methane ice where the penitentes form on the Tartarus Dorsa mountains of Pluto is different from other parts of the surface, where ice is mostly nitrogen. This ice is transitioning straight from solid to gas, in a process called sublimation.



Fun fact: In Greek mythology, Tartarus is the lowest part of Hades where the wicked were thrown to suffer eternal torment—Pluto, of course, being the god of the underworld. So, we have a crowd of penitent people kneeling in the -400 degree frozen hellscape of Pluto’s backside. Neat!

Amy

 

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Thank you Amy - your posts are fascinating, and I enjoy them.​

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Now that New Horizons is leaving the vicinity of Pluto and Charon, it is heading for a visit to MU69, another Kuiper Belt Object.​

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MU69 was discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014, eight years after the launch of New Horizons. It is a smaller object than Pluto, and lies about a billion miles farther away.​

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" MU69 has a special kind of orbit that makes it possibly a type of object that is left over from early solar system formation. So we think that we'll be able to look at what the building blocks of the solar system were like. "​

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http://www.space.com/35411-beyond-pluto-new-horizons-spacecraft-next-adventure.html​

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The expected arrival date is New Years Day, 2019.​

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Your welcome my friend i love this kind of thing. And thank you for your post.

 

Wow another billion miles thats on real.

 

As we wait for our probe to reach another cold and distant world, there's one much MUCH warmer that's coming right on us! [Well, almost.] Researchers have known for some time that the dim red star Gliese 710 is bound to pass close to the Sun in the future. But only after the new Gaia probe accurately measured its position and movement, they realized how close it would be. Five times closer than previously thought! That star is going to pass 13,365 AU from the Sun – still over ten times farther than the hypothetical Planet Nine... But deep inside the Solar System's Oort cloud, where billions of comets are lurking in the dark. The star will disrupt the cloud, vaporizing and ejecting millions of comets, and some of them may come much too close to the Earth. Fortunately we have 1.35 million years to prepare

More: https://gizmodo.com/incoming-star-could-spawn-swarms-of-comets-when-it-pass-1790406698

What the article doesn't say, is that this is a freaking STAR and as we now know, they often harbor their own planetary systems. Red dwarfs included. Gliese 710 may come with its own planets - which is fascinating - and also its own "Oort cloud" full of comets (potentially bad news). In fact a recent hypothesis says that Planet Nine (if it exists) may have been stolen by our naughty Sun from another star:

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/06/02/health/planet-nine-solar-system-irpt/index.html

It could've happened in its early days, when it resided in a crowded neighborhood of a stellar cluster, but maybe it snatched the planet during such encounter later in our past?

 

now i know why they call you DoomGuy.