Now on sabbatical, Mike Brown has recently reactivated his mainly Transneptunian blog. Here is a tasty two-parter on Sedna for starters: http://www.mikebrownsplanets.com/2010/10/theres-something-out-there-part-2.html
I like Brown's writing style.
Excellent blog and mind stimulating
And now, we interrupt your regularly scheduled program, to announce that http://www.mikebrownsplanets.com/2010/11/shadowy-hand-of-eris.html.
The consequences of which discovery could be far reaching indeed: http://www.mikebrownsplanets.com/2010/11/dwarf-planets-are-crazy.html
After some plutonic intrusions, the next instalment of the Sedna story: http://www.mikebrownsplanets.com/2010/11/theres-something-out-there-part-3.html
Mike's back. This time he's talking about Snow White.
http://www.mikebrownsplanets.com/
--Greg
After another long lull, obsessive-compulsive rechecking of Mike's blog site is rewarded:
http://www.mikebrownsplanets.com/2013/11/snow-balls-in-space.html
The essence of that article and the linked paper is that you can't make a large rocky body by assembling many small icy ones.
Here's a go at that problem. Start with a population of small particles, mostly silicate (rockdust), some ice. Suppose that rock-rock collisions are very bad at resulting in coalescence whereas ice-ice and ice-rock collisions do so more easily due to the absorption of energy by plastic deformation and partial melting. The rock particles would never find a permanent home until they ran into an already formed icy object. As the object grows it becomes better and better at trapping the ubiquitous rockdust.
Probably not, but does there have to be? Maybe there is but I don't know about it. It seems to me self-evident that the ice/water phase change would facilitate coalescence.
I suspect the solution to the problem will turn out to be surprisingly simple.
I flagged up an article by Mike Brown hoping it would kick off some interesting discussion. I have to say I'm dissapointed with the result so far. Is there really nobody here interested in engaging with his question? I had hoped to learn something, and still do.
There's loads of good theories on his website as responses to the post, I suspect that's the reason we're being less chatty than usual.
I was hoping to learn something too, something I've wondered about for a while. Since the bigger KBOs have rocky cores as Brown says, could some of the largest be metallic as well, or were all the metals accreted in the inner solar system back in the day? New Horizons doesn't carry a magnetometer, so we won't have direct evidence for a while.
Plus if the answer is a conclusive no, none of them have metal cores, we've got a ready made definition of planet that will satisfy everyone, ending the debate once and for all!
(Obviously I'm idealistic about that last bit )
ADMIN NOTE: A general reminder to all about UMSF Rule 1.9 Other subjects that are banned here include: Pluto's planethood;.... Let's be careful please.
I was quite pleased when I identified a solution to the problem, I wouldn't want to spoil it for you by giving away the answer.
Adore witchy sleepyhead whiningly pirating in rubbishes.
Fermat
To me the most plausible solution to form km-size objects from dust/sand/stones/snowflakes is via gravitational pull of a sufficiently large and sufficiently dense cloud of such bodies with very low relative velocities. Part of the cloud will collapse, part of it will be ejected.
At low temperatures near absolute zero ice/snow won't adhere much different from silicates.
In the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud (up to 1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-year resp. 63,000 au from the sun) relative velocities of objects, which remain in the solar system, should be below a range of between 100 m/s and 1 km/s, depending on the distance to the sun (otherwise particles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inelastic_collision / friction should reduce relative velocities further until the precondition for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_formation is fulfilled.
Collisions of sufficiently large and fast bodies may lead to densified fragments, besides fine debris.
The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accretion_(astrophysics) process will take quite a bit longer than http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wiles needed to show the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modularity_theorem.
The Sedna orbit may be explainable e.g. by an instable http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem of Kuiper objects, which eventually split into a binary system ejecting Sedna near Sedna's perihelion. I don't see the necessity for a big planet or star to explain the orbit.
A hypothesis I floated a long time ago on Sedna's orbit is that it may have been shaped by a planet that was once there, but isn't anymore.
The rules of celestial billiards require that if two bodies have an orbit-altering encounter, they will leave the encounter with orbits that will cross again. But there's no rule stipulating that they will remain in those orbits.
Suppose, for example, an earth-sized planet (or many) once had elliptical orbits that came close to Neptune (or another giant planet) at perihelion and ventured out towards Sedna's neighborhood at aphelion. Such planets could have tweaked Sedna's orbit, then later ceased to exist, either by being absorbed into a giant planet or being ejected from the solar system.
I think there's a rich field of study ahead on how mass swarms of bodies evolve. This can involve massive computation, and has been investigated for many years, but I'm not sure how exhaustive the investigations have been.
Or you could start off with an extra Gas Giant or two for more fun!
Or just an extra ice giant, as in the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping-Jupiter_Scenario (which I'd never heard called that before - it's got a nice ring to it).
Rather simplified simulations I've done a long time ago (unpublished) showed, that randomly started planetary systems behave highly chaotic in the beginning, including planets being ejected from the system or planets falling into the sun. That's because each close encounter leads to an exchange of kinetic energy throwing one planet further out, and the other closer to the sun, including highly elliptical orbits.
Therefore tracking back the solar system becomes more and more uncertain the further you go back to the past. This means two things: Similar initial conditions can lead to very different results, and rather different initial conditions may lead to similar results. The underlying general principle is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory, rather abundant among non-linear http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamical_system.
So, if you like extra ice giants in the early solar system, you'll find a way to define initial conditions which make them vanish later.
If you like to try your own implementation, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_model_of_the_Solar_System is an intro.
Poking around this old thread led me to Dr. Brown's blog and from there to the information that he is teaching a free Coursera online course March 30th through June 9th called "The Science of the Solar System."
Looks like the course gets rave reviews.
http://www.coursetalk.com/coursera/the-science-of-the-solar-system
First week of the course and it is excellent; just got done watching a couple of lectures where Dr. Brown goes through how reflected light spectra work and how the formulas used to measure spectra can determine atmospheric composition, measure the proportion of water, and determine surface temperatures. What's really cool about it is how he works through the increasing complexity of functional form of the modelling process: e.g., how the fairly simple formula to determine surface temperature has to be modified for the angle of incidence of the Sun by a cosine term.
Good morning Guys, you Think it can possible Italian subtitles in the course?
Object spotted at 103 AU, breaking a 10 year old record held by this thread's namesake:
http://news.sciencemag.org/space/2015/11/astronomers-spot-most-distant-object-solar-system-could-point-other-rogue-planets
As a bookkeeping note, there is a blog discussing the putative [trans-Neptunian large planet] here:
http://www.findplanetnine.com/
But that is better discussed (I think) in this ongoing thread:
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=8150&hl=
I mention this because I keep not finding the putative Outer Planet thread where I expect it, but I always see this thread.
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