Emily's KBO diagram, under development and open for discussion Options

[ngunn]

In this post Emily demonstrates an interesting way to depict the movements of Kuiper Belt objects: http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00003381/

I like this diagram. It reminds me of lissajous figures on an oscilloscope screen in the case where the x and y signals have the same frequency but differing phase relationships. I agree with the idea of reducing the size of the objects' position and direction markers. Perhaps tiny triangles could serve in both capacities by being oriented to point along the 'orbits'. I would like to see Sedna included since the (so far) unique nature of its motion would stand out well. I think its trajectory during at least the second half of the 600 year timespan in question would fit on the diagram.

[elakdawalla]

Today I fiddled around with the most common request, which was to see what the rest of the solar system would look like on this diagram. I tried it out with a logarithmic scale, but didn't like it. I think that the logarithmic one fails to provide an intuitive sense of the actual distances involved; it's very hard to read numbers off a logarithmic graph without making large mistakes. But the linear scale does crush the inner solar system practically into oblivion. Interestingly, though, the inner solar system makes sense at one linear scale, and the outer at a different one. I think the answer is to present the graph in two segments with different range scales, with Jupiter appearing on both. For right now I'm not interested in the asteroid belt -- figuring out the families of orbits etc. in that part of the solar system is a project for another day. So it's beneficial for now that it's crushed into oblivion!

The bodies that are on here are: the planets (black); the four largest asteroids (dark red); eight centaurs (green -- the ones listed on the Wikipedia centaur page -- I don't know if they're a representative sample or not); three Neptune Trojans (pink); and the eight biggest KBOs (blue).

Attached thumbnail(s)