Man Very Early Made Jars Stand Up Nearly Perfectly Ummm...

July 30, 2005 6:31 PM

A new planet has been found. The new planet, named 2003 UB₃₁₃ is the farthest known object in the solar system, larger than pluto and a lousy tourist destination. Slacker Astronomy has an interview with co-discoverer Dr. Chad Trujillo.
posted by mosch (39 comments total)

Hmm... There was another planet discovered just a few days ago, actualy yesterday.

Turns out to be smaller (but brighter) then pluto. The one you linked to was discovered in january of this year.
posted by delmoi at 6:34 PM on July 30, 2005

Hmm... it appears to have a different name, but this feels a lot like I may have double-posted.
posted by mosch at 6:44 PM on July 30, 2005

It's two different object. Actually, a third large Kupier Belt Object has been found -- 2005 FY₉. Initial estimates put it around 50% to 75% of the diameter of Pluto -- so, the ranking in KBOs now appear to be

2003 UB₃₁₃
Pluto
2005 FY₉
2003 EL₆₁

The last also has a moon, currently nicknamed "Little Helper." Why? The object is currently nicknamed "Santa."

It's making an interesting point -- if Pluto is a planet, it's hard not to grant the same status to 2003 UB₃₁₃. If you don't, maybe Pluto shouldn't be a planet. Brian Marsden tried to make a common ground by also granting Pluto a minor planet number (10000), but was shouted down for daring to implicity demote a planet. With a larger object out there, though, things get more interesting.

My personal definition of a planet is "an object large enough that gravity pulls it into a spherical shape." Pluto clearly meets this criteria, I expect that the other objects listed above do as well, but we don't have proof, yet.

Finally, I expect all of them to get real names very quickly. Alas, we won't have planet Santa.
posted by eriko at 6:56 PM on July 30, 2005

Nope... not a double-post. Just another planet!
posted by mosch at 6:57 PM on July 30, 2005

BTW, information on the provisional naming system used for comets and planetoids is here.

Now, work out the math. How many objects were cataloged in the second half of October, 2003?
posted by eriko at 7:01 PM on July 30, 2005

Do it
For the
Children,
If not for yourself.
Pluto
Is a
posted by wakko at 7:41 PM on July 30, 2005

Lots of links in the very, very, very recent discussion of almost exactly the same thing.
posted by gimonca at 7:42 PM on July 30, 2005

Hmm... sending humans to this new and wonderful planetesimal will be at least as rewarding as sending people back to the moon or to mars... I wonder how long before Bush uses his bully pulpit to propose a manned mission to this mysterious world?

Meanwhile - where's my healthcare?
posted by wfrgms at 8:20 PM on July 30, 2005

My personal definition of a planet is "an object large enough that gravity pulls it into a spherical shape."

Excellent! I think we should reconsider Ceres too! I'm dead serious. Ceres sits at the position predicted by Bode's law.
posted by vacapinta at 8:23 PM on July 30, 2005

Sorry, but how did we just find this planet?
posted by webranding at 8:33 PM on July 30, 2005

I know it may not be as exotic as some of the other proposed names, but if 2003 UB213 is accepted as the tenth planet (rather than relegated to mere Kuiper Belt object), I hope it's called Persephone. Even though that name has been used frequently as a name for Planet X in science fiction, it just seems right, you know? Our solar system should have a Persephone.
posted by Chanther at 8:38 PM on July 30, 2005

Sorry, but how did we just find this planet?

Space is dark. And vast. Very vast. And dark.
posted by dopamine at 8:39 PM on July 30, 2005

Intresting that the guy who tried to "demote" pluto descovered something larger and suddenly he's all about pluto and his thing being planets :P
posted by delmoi at 8:41 PM on July 30, 2005

Personally, I don't mind if we discover a new planet every day, or that there is a metafilter post to call attention to it.

Let's see if we can swamp this place!

It's money and attention well spent.
posted by Balisong at 8:44 PM on July 30, 2005

Touche. I just find it strange that so little about space was taught in school. I had to memorize all the planets, make little models of them rotating around the sun, and now we are adding to them. I think this is cool BTW. The fact the Hubble is going to lose funding is a crime. I would have just thought in 2005 we already knew the planets in our solar system. That is all.
posted by webranding at 8:45 PM on July 30, 2005

At last, a ninth planet!
posted by interrobang at 8:51 PM on July 30, 2005

Now we just have to get to Mars and see what that water is all about.
posted by webranding at 8:55 PM on July 30, 2005

Space is dark and vast
Dark and very vast and dark
Planets can hide there
posted by bwg at 9:22 PM on July 30, 2005

Planets can hide there

For anyone better informed than I on the topic - what's the thinking then, it's likely there are more overlooked planets?

Say on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being we're totally confident that was the last one and 10 being oops, there must be more since we missed this one?
posted by scheptech at 9:54 PM on July 30, 2005

My personal definition of a planet is "an object large enough that gravity pulls it into a spherical shape." Pluto clearly meets this criteria, I expect that the other objects listed above do as well, but we don't have proof, yet.

That sounds like a reasonable definition at first but that would make many of the moons in the Solar System, including our own, planets. The cutoff is between 400 and 700km depending on the strength and density of the material making up the object. Objects smaller than this will be irregularly shaped. Larger objects have spheroidal shapes. Your personal definition would also include stars as well.
posted by euphorb at 10:13 PM on July 30, 2005

scheptech, the Kuiper Belt, and further out the Oort cloud, is (compared to the inner environs of the solar system) fairly teeming with decent-sized chunks of matter, statistically. It's just hard to find and see them because they are very far from the sun (making them dim as there's not much light to reflect) and relatively small - requiring high-powered optics to spot them.

In closer to the sun, space has been mostly "swept" clean of flying debris by Jupiter's gravity, and that of the other gas giants, which is one reason we've had a fairly impact-event-free last 2.5 billion years here on sunny planet Earth.

There may literally be hundreds of objects Pluto-sized and larger out past Neptune. We just now have bigger and better telescopes, and we're starting to pick them up. So I'd say it's closer to 1 than 10.
posted by zoogleplex at 10:55 PM on July 30, 2005

I should add that it's actually possible that our sun has a very dim red dwarf companion star on a very long orbit - 240 million years or so - that we haven't been able to detect so far. Some folks call it "Nemesis" and theorize that it comes around and wreaks havoc with our environment as it slides through the inner solar system - a possible cause of the periodic extinction events that biologists have discovered about every 240 million years.

Space is indeed vast and very dark.
posted by zoogleplex at 10:58 PM on July 30, 2005

Sorry, but how did we just find this planet?

Let me quote Bill Bryson to give you some idea of just how very large the solar system is, and just how small pluto is.

"On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away, and PLuto would be a mile and a half distant, (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway). ... if you shrank down everything so that Jupter was as small as the period at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over thirty-five feet away."
posted by mosch at 11:01 PM on July 30, 2005

Ok, definition suggestion - the planets are what we already know about - the rest, call 'em Kuiper-chunks or Oort-objects, something else anyway. Probably time to review Pluto's status as well. Is he the last planet or the first Kuiper-chunk?
posted by scheptech at 11:33 PM on July 30, 2005

By today's standards of planetship, Pluto wouldn't make the cut.
Really, there are lots of Pluto-like planteoid Kuiper belt objects that are so similar to the eccentricities of Pluto, that it's just dumb luck that it was discovered first.
posted by Balisong at 11:39 PM on July 30, 2005

Sorry, but how did we just find this planet?

Um, it's tiny. And very, very, very far away. On the scale mosch just used -- where Pluto is 35 feet away from a pea-sized Earth -- 2003 UB313 would be a just slightly bigger bacterium-sized speck very close to 70 feet away. 2003 UB313 -- at 97 AU out -- is currently the most distant object from the sun known to orbit it.

Intresting that the guy who tried to "demote" pluto descovered something larger and suddenly he's all about pluto and his thing being planets

Brian Marsden is not on the 2003 UB313 team. Nor was he really trying to "demote" Pluto -- I think it was an elegant solution, and they missed an opportunity. Indeed, he remains consistent, saying "I would not call it a planet" of the new object.

In the 19th century, the four largest (and only known) asteroids were temporarily counted among the "planets" -- giving us eleven. It was only later that they were taken "off" the list.

It's clear to me that there are thousands of objects roughly Pluto-sized, spherical, in very eccentric orbits. Many of them have satellites. I don't think it makes sense to call all of them planets, and I don't think it makes sense to call Pluto a planet if we don't. Unless we do, in which case the number of "planets" is going to change pretty frequently in coming years.

I posted here before (can't find) that I thought Pluto was -- pridefully -- the King of the Kuiper Belt. Well, now maybe it's the Queen ...

A lot of the opposition to "demoting" Pluto has less to do with its actual characteristics, and more to do with the legacy of Clyde Tombaugh. As such it's irrational.

I wonder how long before Bush uses his bully pulpit to propose a manned mission to this mysterious world?

We haven't even sent an unmanned mission to Pluto. Why the hell are you polluting the thread?

I would have just thought in 2005 we already knew the planets in our solar system.

When a "planet" is roughly the size of a good-sized state, and it's out there in the big black murky, we're not going to find it until our instruments are good enough, and we're looking very carefully for them. The Trans-Neptunian Objects (save for Pluto) were only discovered beginning in 1992, and now that we're looking, we're discovering them by the boatload.

For anyone better informed than I on the topic - what's the thinking then, it's likely there are more overlooked planets?

100% likely. In the last 13 years we've discovered half-a-dozen objects almost the size of Pluto. There's also a theory that the Kuiper Belt, which drops off suddenly past 55 AU or so, is swept clean by a very large object on the order of another gas giant. Although the Planet X hypothesis introduced by Percival Lowell a century ago has now been disproven -- the perturbations he saw there were based on wrong knowledge of the gas giants' mass -- there's a real possibility that there's "a" Planet X out there anyway.
posted by dhartung at 11:43 PM on July 30, 2005

H4!! Plu70!! D37hr0n3d!
posted by Balisong at 11:58 PM on July 30, 2005

yeah, what gimonca said... isn't this a double post kinda?
posted by dabitch at 12:44 AM on July 31, 2005

space is big
space is dark
it's hard to find
a place to park
Burma Shave
posted by nightchrome at 1:05 AM on July 31, 2005

ROFLMAO

nightchrome, let's laser-etch that into the 5 largest KBO's as soon as we get out there. Of course you'll have to be going very, very fast to pass them quick enough to make that read properly... :D
posted by zoogleplex at 1:14 AM on July 31, 2005

Sorry, but how did we just find this planet? From the article it seems to be one of those "Ah, I found my keys" moments
"Nobody looks that high up in the sky for these sorts of objects," Brown explained. "The only reason we've been looking that high is because we've looked everywhere else so far."
posted by mss at 7:21 AM on July 31, 2005

I say that we don't classify an object as a planet until a human looks at it with his own eyes and we hear what they think. So far, we've only got one.
posted by Captaintripps at 9:05 AM on July 31, 2005

Welcome to the solar system, 2003 UB313!

No, wait, I guess you've been around longer than I have...
posted by sour cream at 9:29 AM on July 31, 2005

So, Captaintripps, is Venus just a mass hallucination? I guess you have to see a planet as a plane in order to believe it. And telescopes don't count because they have little demons in them tricking us.
posted by Citizen Premier at 12:19 PM on July 31, 2005

Isn't there some major science museum that's already taken Pluto out of their display of the planets?
posted by Citizen Premier at 12:22 PM on July 31, 2005

The Rose Center in New York did that. I like the idea of arbitrarily calling the big eight "the (major) planets", everything else being a satellite or minor planet or comet or what-have-you.
posted by gubo at 2:21 PM on July 31, 2005

Mother Very Easily Made a Jam Sandwich Using No Peanuts, Mayonaise, or Glue.
posted by soyjoy at 9:16 PM on July 31, 2005

Why don't "they" just start calling the newly discovered orb Pluto, and stop calling the old one Pluto?!
posted by ParisParamus at 10:43 PM on July 31, 2005

I once met the discoverer of Pluto ... I guess he is not longer the most far our person I know!
posted by Christrust at 2:03 AM on August 1, 2005