Something I just noticed: Clyde Tombaugh's 100th birthday would have been next February. Couldn't say for sure, but I'm guessing the discoverers of the new big TNO were probably hoping to announce their discovery then (it would've been nice timing). Pity about those damned hackers spoiling it.

Rob:

I'm sure the Deep Old Ones could cope with Tombaugh, whose name sounds entirely in tune with the aims and objectives of MIT. That's the Miskatonic Institute of Theomancy.

I am, indeed a fully paid up Friend of Yog-Sothoth. I kid not, ask me about The Voyage to The Bottom.

The basic principle of us acolytes of the Elder Gods is not so much to be not eaten at all (as that is what humans are for), as to simply be eaten LAST! Ai! Cthulhu!

(gulp)

Bob Shaw

Im sorry to say, but that fairy tale about hackers have been debunked.
Dont believe me but see this quote by mr Brian G. Marsden in one email exchange that was made public in regard to this matter.

Marsden: 'As I say, I know nothing about any decision to describe the above
situation as "hacking", which it clearly isn't, since everything was public
information in the internet.'

I'd personally vote for Gitney and Cloyd, the two moonmen from "Rocky and Bullwinkle".

Of course, we could always call it Nosmo, who was King of the Moon Men. I believe they came up with that name from looking at a No Smoking sign and re-arranging the space -- NOSMO KING.

Then again, we could use Chauncey and Edgar as the names for new TNOs... as in:

"There's something you don't see every day, Chauncey."

"What's that, Edgar?"

"A six-foot-tall metal-munching mouse."

-the other Doug

You may be right:



http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/Stories/0,...3009692,00.html

Haha! I figured someone would pick up that Cthulhu Mythos reference a few posts back! Ia!

As for the name Persephone being taken, no big deal. If I remember right, one of the asteroids is named Europa, and that doesn't cause much confusion. When referring to the asteroid Europa you just have to remember to use the number. (There's a Ganymed, too, without the last "e".)

Cthulhu fhtagn,
Rob
Innsmouth, Alberta (glub, glub, glub...)

Rob:

Is this the Unnamed Lovecraft Forum then?

Ai!

Bob Shaw

In that case, how about calling it The Planet That Must Not Be Named? (Although I notice that, in Lovecraft's stories, He Who Must Not Be Named usually ends up getting named anyway.)

Or, to take this a step further, given the current fervor over catagory naming...

The (Must Not Be Named) That Must Not Be Named

I want to name something out there after Igor!
Mad scientist's lab assistants need more respect!

Beautiful.

Y'know, I just was looking at the list of named asteroids (which now that I think of it didn't seem to include TNOs -- but anyways), and the designated names "Lovecraft", "Cthulhu", "Yog-Sothoth", and "Nyarlathotep" weren't taken. (Admittedly I forgot to check for "Yuggoth"). Given the number of unnamed TNOs out there, surely a few could be named after Lovecraft's inventions. But of course that's up to the discoverers.

Even though it would never happen, I'd _love_ to see a "R'lyeh Planitia" on Pluto...

Cheers
Rob

(Edit: Forgot to mention that "Unnamed Lovecraft Forum" was great too.)

Rob:

'Inventions'? Ha! You wish!

Just wait...

Ai!

Bob Shaw

Is there really going to be a problem with people confusing a virtually unknown planetoid with the now famous 10th Planet/Big KBO if they have the same name?

Not until we are established in the Sol system as a species, at least.

And I say it is not a major planet, nor is Pluto. They are KBOs.

No. But it's the IAU's business to make things neat and tidy (which of course they aren't). Frankly, if you don't use names that are "already taken" by asteroids, that pretty much rules out using feminine names from Greco-Roman mythology altogether.



Ah, but the "KB" just tells you where the object is ("real estate"), and the "O" just tells you that it is... an "Object". Still leaving the question: what kind of Object is it? What are Mercury, Mars, or the Earth? CJOs? (Cis-Jovian Objects?).

On the name question, it ought to be realized that there is a (sketchy) mythological rationale to the naming of planets from Jupiter on; it is not entirely "reach into the encyclopedia and grab random mythological name".
According to tradition, the fifth and sixth planets were Jupiter and Saturn, Jupiter being the king of the gods, and Saturn, his father, being king of the Titans. Uranus, the next out, was logically Saturn's father, as Saturn was Jupiter's father:
Uranus
.|
Saturn
.|
Jupiter

Obviously, the next planet out should have been Uranus' father, but mythology unfortunately does not provide Uranus with a father. The astronomers therefore went back to Jupiter, and started naming planets after his brothers, as follows:

Uranus
.|
Saturn
.|_______________
.|............. |..............|
Jupiter.....Neptune...Pluto

Jupiter also has three sisters, but as they (Juno, Ceres, and Vesta) are all names of well-known sizeable main-belt asteroids, they are not really available.
The other male names in this family are:

Uranus
.|_____________________________________
.|..............|..............|.............|...........|................|
Saturn.....Oceanus..Coeus....Crius....Hyperion....Iapetus
.|_______________
.|............. |..............|
Jupiter.....Neptune...Pluto

Hyperion and Iapetus are of course two well-known moons of Saturn (VII and VIII, respectively). The names Oceanus, Coeus, and Crius have never to my knowledge been applied to any astronomical body. In addition to the above brothers of Saturn, there were six "Titanesses", his sisters, all of whose names have been used:
Rhea: Saturn's moon V and Asteroid 577 Rhea
Tethys: Saturn's moon III
Themis: Asteroid 24 Themis
Mnemosyne: Asteroid 57 Mnemosyne
Theia (also Thia, Thea): Asteroid 405 Thia
Phoebe: Saturn's moon IX

If one were to keep these names within the same "family tree" by using, say, "Oceanus" for 2003 UB313, there would still be two unused names left over for the next two Pluto-plus KBOs that come down the pike. After that, I suppose you'd have to start using the names of the Cyclopes (Brontes, Steropes, and Arges) and the Hekatoncheires (Cottus, Briareus, and Gyes), and further non-Titanic children of Uranus.

--As an added note, the Titans, the Cyclopes, and the Hekatoncheires lived (or were imprisoned) in Tartarus, a very distant, dark and sunless realm, where the gods disposed of trouble-makers. Oceanus was an exception; he lived in the "river Ocean", imagined as a great circular body of water flowing around the (flat) earth.

I consider them to be really big comets.

Or at the very most minor planets, like the big rocks between Mars and Jupiter.

Had Clyde Tombaugh not discovered Pluto in 1930, I predict there would be no major debate on what these KBOs are, at least in terms of being major planets or not.

If the IAU can't keep things tidy in the Sol system, then I guess it is up to me.

Heck, I'd be happy if they just named a small, run-down-looking Martian crater "The Thoat Barns"...

-the other Doug

That's from Niven, isn't it? (Alternatively, they could find a particularly steep-walled crater and name it "Deep Thoat"...)

Um, no, not Niven... Think of Deja Thoris riding one, you'll figure it out.



-the other Doug (aka John Carter of Mars)

Well ultimately we're bound to run out of classical myths so someday we may have the Artolian Hills and the Seroni highlands up there...

tty

I remembered this from the deep recesses of my memory, but it took Wikipedia to pin down the exact reference. Quoting:

Interview with Mike Brown (Planetary Society):

http://www.planetary.org/audio/pr20050815.html

Also features Emily Lakdawalla talking about Cassini data.

New Scientist (20 August 2005, P7) reports that the diameter of 2003 UB313 may have been underestimated, as the Spitzer Space Telescope's attempt to detect it's IR signature failed as it was incorrectly aimed due to human error. This spurious result led Mike Brown to estimate a Moon-sized maximum diameter of around 3,000 Km.

See his comments at:

http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/planetlila/#spitzer

Spitzer observations should be complete now.

The abstract makes for interesting reading:

http://ssc.spitzer.caltech.edu/geninfo/go/abs-go1/3283.txt

A page on Kuiper planetoids:

http://spider.ipac.caltech.edu/staff/reach/planetoid.html

It looks like the famous 200" Hale telescope at Palomar will be pointed at it in a few days:

http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:7crNRgl...s%22+1583&hl=en

The last couple of sections of this article, which detail the circumstances of what went on behind the scenes just prior to the announcement of 2003 UB313's discovery, ought to be required reading for _anyone_ involved in scientific research as a career -- even if not all of it is entirely accurate, as is suggested at the top of one section.

I've been scooped before. Even when it's something that would only be of interest to a few dozen people worldwide, it is damned unpleasant. This is much more than that. I suspect that Brown's description of "letting out a gasp" is the understatement of the year. Ouch.

Fluff article with one new piece of information:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/fashion/...ewanted=2&8hpib




http://news.ft.com/cms/s/0b5d85ec-1697-11d...000e2511c8.html

NO, NO!!!!! That [extremely bad word] proposal -- to call Pluto a planet but 2003 UB313 not a planet, despite the fact that it's BIGGER than Pluto -- has also been pushed by (I believe) Penelope Boston. NOTHING could confuse schoolkids and the general public more than this about the real nature of the Solar System. This proposal isn't just scientifically doubtful; it's flat-out INSANE!

Bruce:

Perhaps we're mixing up 'cultural' and 'scientific'. The Classical Planets (including the rather dim and difficult to see outer planets, and even Pluto) are at least within the bounds of normal human perception. Strange wee worldlets in the outer reaches are (literally) beyond our ken. Letting the world at large know that there are all sorts of planetoids out there in the dark reaches of the Solar System is a threat to nobody other than stamp collectors. We need to back off, and simply enjoy the new discoveries.

Bob Shaw

There was a time when there were only 8 classical planets -- or 7, or 6. Times change, including the public's view of the scientific world. Misleading people as to whether Pluto is the biggest KBO is NOT the way to change them.

That would be about like calling Europe a continent. Europe is not only attached to Asia, the delineation is also broad and arbitrary, unlike the narrow isthmus borders of the Americas and Africa-Asia. And it's hardly larger than other possible candidate realms that are no more detached from larger landmasses (such as India+Pakistan+Bangladesh -- about the same size as Europe, but at best a "sub"continent).

Europe certainly has a lot more history than Pluto, but the same principles are at work there. It illustrates that "continent" is not a geographical term nearly so much as a cultural one, in which case, we needn't appeal to mathematical formulas.

There are people suggesting, I think, that "planet" should be divested of any scientific purpose, written off as a historical term, and then Pluto could get the same kind of breaks that Europe does. What I like about the proposal is it takes the fig leaf off the idea that "planet" is a term that drives any real scientific thought. But Pluto's planet status surely doesn't approach Europe's continent status if you weigh the paperwork.

I don't actually hear this much any more, though maybe it's in some textbooks. Mostly I hear Eurasia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica. And (maybe) Australia.
Australia is actually a good comparison to Pluto: too small to be a good continent, too big to be an ordinary island. That battle still (quietly) rages on. Pluto may remain stuck in limbo for centuries to come.
I take the practical approach: count 2003 UB313 and Pluto as planets, and any other sun-orbiters as big or bigger than Pluto, until the number of the latter gets too big to deal with, if it ever does. I hear talk of a thousand KBOs bigger than Pluto, but from where I'm sitting that just seems fanciful. Find 'em and then we can talk. If and when we get half a dozen or more Pluto-plus KBOs, then we can put them in a new category -- just as we did with the main belt asteroids. That business sorted itself out over half a century -- why try to force things to go faster? And if it turns out that there are no other KBOs bigger than Pluto, or only two or three, then we'll still have a decent number of planets (anything under thirteen is certainly manageable) and we won't be embarrassed by having jumped the gun on a bogus prediction.

I'm going to agree with Bruce; of all the proposals I've heard so far, I like this one the least. Why is an icy body discovered in 1930 'historical' while an icy body discovered in 2005 is not? Did history stop last year? How can this possibly be applied to extra-solar planets?

Moreover, the analogy to Europe doesn't hold. Just about everybody on Earth (I hope) knows that Europe is really just Asia's biggest peninsula -- but if the IAU goes with this harebrained scheme, most people are going to think that Pluto is the biggest KBO. Pfui.

http://aa.usno.navy.mil/hilton/AsteroidHis...norplanets.html

Gives a useful overview of the gradual (pre-IAU) re-classification of Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Vesta and so on that occurred during the 19th century.

For the record, I'm on the side of disowning the word 'planet' and coming up with something better. But I'm prepared to accept 8, 10 or 20+ planets in the interim. Just not 9.

I think the trick here is going to be in the sub-classifications. These sub-classes already exist in the "taxonomy" of a solar system -- we just need to tighten up the definitions.

Maybe a nice, tidy system such as this:

Planets -- bodies made spherical by self-gravitation and that orbit the Sun primarily (i.e., do not have another body as its orbital primary)

Rocky planets -- includes Earth, Venus, Mercury & Mars

Dwarf rocky planets -- includes Ceres, Vesta, any others to be discovered

Gas giant planets -- includes Jupiter and Saturn

Icy planets -- includes Uranus and Neptune

Dwarf icy planets -- includes Pluto and any other KBO / TNO that meets the initial requirement of being a planet in the first place

I guess you could call the "dwarf" varieties something else, like "minor planets" or "planetoids," but I like dwarf better. Not only is the term more in keeping with established astronomical nomenclature, but with the amount of gravitational adjustment their orbits have probably undergone, you could say that the Solar System is engaged in "dwarf tossing"...

-the other Doug

http://www.boulder.swri.edu/ekonews/issues...html/index.html

http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/planetl...ndex.html#paper

Interesting way of putting it, but I really dont think so. Lets see. Asia would be Jupiter then, bigger than the rest. Yet we would end up with Australia being a terrestrial planet lets say Mercury since both are hot and reserve Antarctica for Mars. So we will have Greenland or Madagascar for Pluto then.

Thats true dvandorn, we have dwarf stars and dwarf galaxies. But those are bona fide object with internal fusion in the first case and true system of stars where stellar nurseries create new stars etc, perhaps at a very low pace but they still do.

The term 'dwarf planet' would suggest the object are a true member of the planetary albeit small. Yet I still cant say that it feels right putting label of 'dwarf planet' on everything from Chiron, Pluto, Vesta and Ceres.

Mr Kupiers theory that planetary formation would leave a belt of objects outside the set of regular planets have turned out to be correct. We have found plenty of those now.

If current theorys are to be trusted, these could be the let over building blocks that actually made the regular planets. And anyone in the right mind wouldnt declare a brick to be a house.
With the exception of something really huge size doesnt matter.
Yet if we would find lets say an object like Neptune out in the Kupier belt, I would have no problem naming that a planet, since it would be mostly gaseous with a small solid and liquid core and not be of the same kind as the other KBO's.

There's a paper at http://harbor.scitec.kobe-u.ac.jp/~patryk/patryk-bigTNOs.pdf

that looks at the relationship between size and albedo for the big TNOs (the larger ones seem to have more extensive frosts than the smaller ones). Plugging in the the details of the new objects to the equations on page 5:

Designation, H, est diameter (km) + / - est albedo + / -


2003 UB313 -1.2 2680 60 80 0.74 0.05 0.03

2005 FY9 -0.3 2180 90 140 0.49 0.07 0.04

2003 EL61 0.1 1990 100 150 0.41 0.07 0.04

(90377) Sedna 1.6 1420 110 180 0.20 0.06 0.03

Paper: astro-ph/0508633
Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2005 01:01:01 GMT (25kb)

Title: Discovery of a planetary-sized object in the scattered Kuiper belt

Authors: M.E. Brown, C.A. Trujillo, D.L. Rabinowitz

Comments: 9 pages, 1 figure
\\
We present the discovery and initial physical and dynamical characterization
of the object 2003 UB313. The object is sufficiently bright that for all
reasonable values of the albedo it is certain to be larger than Pluto.
Pre-discovery observations back to 1989 are used to obtain an orbit with
extremely small errors. The object is currently at aphelion in what appears to
be a typical orbit for a scattered Kuiper belt object except that it is
inclined by about 44 degrees from the ecliptic. The presence of such a large
object at this extreme inclination suggests that high inclination Kuiper belt
objects formed preferentially closer to the sun. Observations from Gemini
Observatory show that the infrared spectrum is, like that of Pluto, dominated
by the presence of frozen methane, though visible photometry shows that the
object is almost neutral in color compared to Pluto's extremely red color. 2003
UB313 is likely to undergo substantial seasonal change over the large range of
heliocentric distances that it travels; Pluto at its current distance is likely
to prove a useful analog for better understanding the range of seasonal changes
on this body.

\\ ( http://arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0508633 , 25kb)

I absolutely agree. To call Pluto a planet and not 2003 UB313, an object larger than Pluto, is downright moronic I agree, the term "planet" really can't be scientifically defined if we set arbitrary limits, but any proposal that includes Pluto and not 2003 UB313 is absolutely unacceptable.

Moronic? Perhaps I am.
While on the other hand, declaring 2003 UB313 a planet would necessitate the rewriting of every astronomical textbook back to the 19'th century.
We already have one systematic approach how to label various objects within the solar system. Planets, moons, comets, rings and yes belts. I see no reason why we should throw all that overboard.

Sorry, moronic is perhaps not the best word, but to me, it makes no sense to call Pluto a planet and 2003 UB313 not a planet. If one wants to downgrade Pluto, fine, while I disagree, it makes more sense than having a minor planet that is larger than a full-fledged one.

Personally, I have no problem with re-writing textbooks or over throwing centuries-old schemes if the data calls for it. And I don't think adding a planet really changes much.

Dont worry volcanopele, it provided me the opportunity for some self bashing on my part. I picked my nick already from the start knowing that I would be one ant among giants on this forum.

Its all obvious that you base your view on that of size, whereas I tend to view objects as belonging to different groups. Yes had my life taken a different path I certainly could have ended up as one beancounter.

So I cant help thinking that it does matter, since its a deviation from the established system of classification. Even though the idea of the Kupier belt have been only theory during the most part of my lifetime, we now have established its existence. And in the future we might find the objects of the Oort cloud as well, for me it would simply be one addition to the cometary family of objects - again regardless of size. Lets say one of Plutos size were found out there, to me it would just be 'the motherload of all comets'.
With my way of reasoning Pluto would indeed be at risk of loosing the planetary status, yet I mentioned one way to avoid that earlier if IAU would so decide.

Since my culture are known for our ability to make compromises, I offer you the compromise that we are all free to disagree on this matter.

I haven't read your previous statement on this, so perhaps I am mostly just agreeing with you.

This issue of whether Pluto or 2003 UB313 should be considered planets seems kind of old-fashioned. We know information about a quarter million things which orbit the Sun, including estimates of how big they are and guesses of what they are made of. We never have to say whether Pluto, or Sedna, or 2003 UB313, or Ceres is a planet. We simply identify the object as needed for whatever purpose. So far, no one will have their real estate drop in value because Pluto loses some linguistic status.

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/overview/piPerspec..._09_2005_2.html

From the September issue of Physics World [article not online]

Marsden relents on the re-classification of Pluto.



Also:

Dear God, I hope they're not going to follow through on that halfwitted idea. Of all their possible courses of action, that is the ONLY one that is unacceptable and indefensible.

Maybe if that happens the astronomical community will simply rebel against the diktat of the IAU. Then they can just do whatever they like, which of course is what they were doing for centuries before the IAU came around.

The IAU group seems to have a fear of making an arbitrary distinction. I'm not sure where this fear comes from. There are lots of arbitrary distinctions in science and they harm no-one. The dividing line between a G class star and a K class star in stellar astronomy is a temperature of 5000K. The dividing line between sand and silt in sedimentary geology is a grain size of 62.5 µm. Why is it unscientific to do something similar for planetary bodies?