Scientists Discover Tenth Planet

[SuperJerk 0]

A planet larger than Pluto has been discovered in the outlying regions of the solar system.

 

The planet was discovered using the Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory near San Diego, Calif. The discovery was announced today by planetary scientist Dr. Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., whose research is partly funded by NASA.

The planet is a typical member of the Kuiper belt, but its sheer size in relation to the nine known planets means that it can only be classified as a planet, Brown said. Currently about 97 times further from the sun than the Earth, the planet is the farthest-known object in the solar system, and the third brightest of the Kuiper belt objects.

 

"It will be visible with a telescope over the next six months and is currently almost directly overhead in the early-morning eastern sky, in the constellation Cetus," said Brown, who made the discovery with colleagues Chad Trujillo, of the Gemini Observatory in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and David Rabinowitz, of Yale University, New Haven, Conn., on January 8.

 

Brown, Trujillo and Rabinowitz first photographed the new planet with the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope on October 31, 2003. However, the object was so far away that its motion was not detected until they reanalyzed the data in January of this year. In the last seven months, the scientists have been studying the planet to better estimate its size and its motions.

 

"It's definitely bigger than Pluto," said Brown, who is a professor of planetary astronomy.

 

Scientists can infer the size of a solar system object by its brightness, just as one can infer the size of a faraway light bulb if one knows its wattage. The reflectance of the planet is not yet known. Scientists can not yet tell how much light from the sun is reflected away, but the amount of light the planet reflects puts a lower limit on its size.

 

"Even if it reflected 100 percent of the light reaching it, it would still be as big as Pluto," says Brown. "I'd say it's probably one and a half times the size of Pluto, but we're not sure yet of the final size.

 

"We are 100 percent confident that this is the first object bigger than Pluto ever found in the outer solar system," Brown added.

 

A name for the new planet has been proposed by the discoverers to the International Astronomical Union, and they are awaiting the decision of this body before announcing the name.

 

http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solars...net-072905.html

 

Sadly, I got this link from Scott Keith.

 

A Google search revealed that CNN did an inconclusive article on this back in March, but the story had few details. Another batch of stories appeared late last week, so its now official.

[snuffbox 0]

It will only get press if Natalee Halloway there.

[MrRant 0]

Or one of the following people:

 

Jesus

Elvis

[The Czech Republic 0]

Well as long as nobody tries to mess with Gustav Holst's best work again.

[CheesalaIsGood 0]

We should blow it up. Right after we get rid of that pesky MOON!

[The Metal Maniac 0]

Depending on who you ask, they actually discovered the ninth planet in the solar system. Pluto was downgraded from planet to big space rock a little while back by a few scientists.

 

That said, they *have* to name the planet Vulcan.

[ZGangsta 0]

Here's a post from Slashdot.org when the news first broke that gives a good discussion on what can be considered a "planet."

 

Amongst professional astronomers (which includes me), Pluto is generally not considered a planet. It is the largest member of the Kuiper Belt. It is historical accident that Pluto was discovered almost 50 years before the second Kuiper Belt object, Charon, in 1978. The third KBO was found in 1993. Since then, over 700 other KBOs have been found, several of which rival Pluto in size.

 

What we have here is one that could be larger than Pluto. This is not unexpected, but has been predicted ever since we started discovering KBOs in serious numbers. There is always a distribution of sizes, and Pluto lies near the upper end, but it is unlikely that it is the largest, and even less likely that it would be distinctly larger than the rest of the population.

 

To call Pluto a planet is to create a category of "ice planets" which contains only one object. That is scientifically silly. To call it a Kuiper Belt Object fits it in with a family of other objects whose characteristics in composition, orbit size, orbit shape, orbit inclination, companions, etc are shared amongst the group. That is a scientific classification.

 

The solar system does not contain "the Sun and

9 planets" as so many of us incorrectly learned. Rather, it contains 6 families: a star, the rocky planets, the asteroid belt, the gas giant planets, the Kuiper belt, and the Oort cloud. Each of these families shares common characteristics that are the basis for this classification. Pluto, and this new discovery,

fit squarely in the Kuiper belt.

 

Now for the truth about planets. The IAU, which

governs these things, has no official definition of what constitutes a planet. There is a reasonable upper limit in mass (i.e., not so larger as to create fusion at it core), but there is no lower limit. Most astronomers would say that a reasonable idea would be large enough for gravity to make it spherical (or close to, like Earth). However, then other KBOs and asteroids qualify as planets. You simply can't come up with a rigorous definition that includes Pluto and excludes the others unless you work customize your definition in a manner that is not scientific.

 

This will not be the last big KBO. There will be several more. These are exciting times as we discover more and more about our own backyard.

[SuperJerk 0]

We should blow it up. Right after we get rid of that pesky MOON!

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

We need to teach that moon not to mess with...God's America.

[Art Sandusky 0]

Why couldn't our astronomers find this planet sooner? As long as space exploration and research isn't privatized, this sort of slack thing will just have to continue I guess...

[AndrewTS 0]

I saw this pop up recently, but I'm fairly certain the story is about 7 years old because the mainsteam didn't care one bit.

 

Maybe NASA forgot.

 

EDIT: Apparently I'm not crazy...

 

http://www.captaincomics.us/forums/lofiver...php/t20464.html

 

Somebody beat me to pointing this out, but my first thought was also "haven't they discovered this planet before?" (And I am definitely thinking of a planet past Pluto- in fact, I think I had a (then) brand-new science text in Jr. High that implied there WAS a 10th planet past Pluto)

 

Maybe it's like comics in the golden age, they figure people don't pay much attention to science news, so they can "recycle" it every decade or so...

They've suspected the existance of the tenth planet ever since Pluto was confirmed/discovered. Pluto is just too small to do the weird things that happen to Uranus' orbit. It just takes years to confirm where the darn thing actually is!

 

I know I'm not thinking of Charon either, cuz that's really old news.