The cracked 10th “planet” and sub-orbital space tourism
You’ve probably been living under a rock if you haven’t heard the recent news regarding the new “planet” orbiting the sun. The new planet is larger than Pluto and likely has two moons orbiting it. The planet extremely far away from the sun, in the Kuiper belt.
But what you probably don’t know about the new planet is that its existence has actually been known since 2003. A cracker recently broke into the not-so-secure secure server run by Michael Brown, the researcher behind the recent findings. The cracker threatened to release the finding himself if the information was not made public. Why premature? Well, Dr. Brown has been fact-checking to be sure of the accuracy of his information, and was not ready to publish his findings.
In any case, the new planet can be seen by amateur astronomers.
Backyard astronomers with large telescopes can see the new planet. But don’t expect to be impressed: It looks like a dim speck of light, visual magnitude 19, moving very slowly against the starry background. “It is currently almost directly overhead in the early-morning eastern sky in the constellation Cetus,” notes Brown.
A new name hasn’t been released, but there is one in the process of being approved by the International Astronomical Union. And it’s really quite awful. Planet Xena? Ugh.
In other space news, Richard Branson and Burt Rutan have teamed up to form The Spaceship Company, and they are working on SpaceShipTwo (SS2), a nine-person suborbital craft that is expected to be twice the size of SS1, and completed in two and a half to three years. The expected price tag is expected to be about $200,000.
Yeah. I’d buy that for $200,000.
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Given its eccentricity and affinity with Pluto, I propose “Goofy.”
BTW, I expect Sedna, Quaoar, Ceres and Goofy all to become official planets when the IAU finally gets around to adopting the first actual scientific definition of the term ever.
Comment by Bob Waters — August 4, 2005 @ 3:04 am
Actually, to be a real nitpicker, it doesn’t lie in the Kuiper belt proper, but in the scattered disc. But the terminology may be somewhat confused and depending on which astronomer you ask :-)
Concerning it’s planetary status, it might be difficult to avoid calling this a planet, even though it would be desirable from many perspectives. It would really have been best if they hadn’t discovered Pluto until now. Then they could have avoided calling IT a planet.
I’m pretty sure neither Ceres, Sedna, Quaoar (or Orcus, Ixion, Varuna or any of the other sub-Pluto bodies) is ever going to be called planets officially. We’re going to find tens of Plutos and hundreds of Quaoar’s in the future, and we can’t really have hundreds of planets the vast majority of which are really tiny. It would subvert the meaning of the word “planet”.
My guess is that Pluto will remain a planet for historical reasons. It is called a planet in so many books, posters and what have you that it’s completely impractical to take away it’s planetary status, even if that would be the most reasonable thing to do. What they will do about this new one, and other “super-Plutos”, is a tricky one though …
Comment by Kim — August 19, 2005 @ 1:33 pm