2003 Ub 313: The Incredible Shrinking Planet?, No bigger than Pluto? |
2003 Ub 313: The Incredible Shrinking Planet?, No bigger than Pluto? |
Guest_BruceMoomaw_* |
Jan 31 2006, 09:20 PM
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Jan 31 2006, 09:36 PM
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Administrator Group: Admin Posts: 5172 Joined: 4-August 05 From: Pasadena, CA, USA, Earth Member No.: 454 |
QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Jan 31 2006, 01:20 PM) Actually SigurRosFan deserves the credit! I must get half of my blog entry material from the sharp-eyed people on this site... http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...indpost&p=39115 Since I posted that, I've gotten an email from someone saying that there will be a publication in Nature tomorrow that flip-flops again on the size of UB313 -- hopefully another sharp-eyed watcher will post that link here as soon as it appears! --Emily -------------------- My website - My Patreon - @elakdawalla on Twitter - Please support unmannedspaceflight.com by donating here.
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Guest_AlexBlackwell_* |
Feb 1 2006, 05:48 PM
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QUOTE (elakdawalla @ Jan 31 2006, 09:36 PM) Since I posted that, I've gotten an email from someone saying that there will be a publication in Nature tomorrow that flip-flops again on the size of UB313 -- hopefully another sharp-eyed watcher will post that link here as soon as it appears! From the February 2, 2006, issue of Nature: One over the nine. |
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Feb 1 2006, 07:17 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2530 Joined: 20-April 05 Member No.: 321 |
Incidentally, don't forget that Pluto "shrank" throughout its lifetime, too, in at least two steps. I can remember when it was bigger than Mercury, and maybe bigger than Mars.
It would be interesting if size estimates consistently shrank for newly-discovered objects, as though there were a regression to the mean effect, or a pro-big bias on the part of the early researchers... Who wants to think that they discovered something tiny? PS: Titan has shrunk a bit, too... |
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Feb 2 2006, 12:27 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 288 Joined: 28-September 05 From: Orion arm Member No.: 516 |
QUOTE (JRehling @ Feb 1 2006, 09:17 PM) Incidentally, don't forget that Pluto "shrank" throughout its lifetime, too, in at least two steps. I can remember when it was bigger than Mercury, and maybe bigger than Mars. It would be interesting if size estimates consistently shrank for newly-discovered objects, as though there were a regression to the mean effect, or a pro-big bias on the part of the early researchers... Who wants to think that they discovered something tiny? PS: Titan has shrunk a bit, too... ...as Triton did. As child I read in an old astronomy library book from the '50s - I think it was from Otto Struve - Triton's diameter should be ~6000 km: 'Wow, a moon nearly as large as Mars...' I'm not quite sure what it was before Voyager II - maybe about 3500 km, but at the the end it came down to poorly 2720 km, probably the same size as UB313 now. If we get more cases like Pluto, Triton, UB313, we'll find a 'shrinking law' from 'detection-diameter' to real diameter at the end... Bye. |
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Feb 3 2006, 07:18 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 509 Joined: 2-July 05 From: Calgary, Alberta Member No.: 426 |
QUOTE (TritonAntares @ Feb 2 2006, 06:27 AM) As child I read in an old astronomy library book from the '50s - I think it was from Otto Struve - Triton's diameter should be ~6000 km. If I recall right, that was because of Triton's unexpectedly high reflectivity. The 6000-km figure was still around in the 1970s; I'm pretty sure it was included as an upper limit in Ludek Pesek's book "Solar System" which was from about 1979. |
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Feb 10 2006, 04:52 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2454 Joined: 8-July 05 From: NGC 5907 Member No.: 430 |
For what this is worth, Sky & Telescope is now including 2003 UB313
in its online section "This Week's Planet Roundup" right after Pluto: 2003 UB313 (magnitude 19, in Cetus) is getting low in the southwest after dark. This is the "tenth planet" discovered last year; see our articles on its discovery and on the finding of its moon. Advanced amateurs with good CCD setups have been imaging 2003 UB313 and tracking its motion. The discovery team is informally calling the object and its moon Xena and Gabrielle, for the TV warrior princess and her longtime companion. The official names they will get are still tied up in committees of the International Astronomical Union. According to the February 1st Nature, "Xena" is unquestionably larger than Pluto: 3,000 kilometers in diameter compared to Pluto's 2,300. http://skyandtelescope.com/observing/atagl...ticle_110_1.asp -------------------- "After having some business dealings with men, I am occasionally chagrined,
and feel as if I had done some wrong, and it is hard to forget the ugly circumstance. I see that such intercourse long continued would make one thoroughly prosaic, hard, and coarse. But the longest intercourse with Nature, though in her rudest moods, does not thus harden and make coarse. A hard, sensible man whom we liken to a rock is indeed much harder than a rock. From hard, coarse, insensible men with whom I have no sympathy, I go to commune with the rocks, whose hearts are comparatively soft." - Henry David Thoreau, November 15, 1853 |
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