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darkreaver

New Horizons arrives at Pluto

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Captain Toenail said:

Pretty cool... so is Pluto a planet again?

No. It's still a dwarf planet. Despite an emotional attachment that means many people would like to see it named as a planet again, the current categorisation makes more sense and the old designation as a planet was never fully secure or even agreed on by all astronomers from the outset.

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NoXion said:

Is it just me, or does Pluto look a bit like Iapetus?


I don't see it. I think that, if anything, Iapetus resembles Mimas more than anything else, because both have a large circular crater. Mimas is effectively the real-life Death Star, Iapetus kind of looks a bit like it, with some DMCHOSHO on top :P

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Eris Falling said:

I don't see it. I think that, if anything, Iapetus resembles Mimas more than anything else, because both have a large circular crater. Mimas is effectively the real-life Death Star, Iapetus kind of looks a bit like it, with some DMCHOSHO on top :P


You're telling me that you don't see both bodies having highly contrasting surface patterns?

Sure, both Iapetus and Mimas have large craters, but Mimas is just light grey all over while the surfaces of both Iapetus and Pluto are divided between light and dark.

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Enjay said:

No. It's still a dwarf planet. Despite an emotional attachment that means many people would like to see it named as a planet again, the current categorisation makes more sense and the old designation as a planet was never fully secure or even agreed on by all astronomers from the outset.


Fuck you Pluto is a planet! Let's fight in the street over it!

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The arguments for Pluto's demotion is pretty standard among Planetary Scientists.

-Pluto would barely cover half of the USA.

-Russia has a greater surface area than Pluto.

-Most of Pluto's mass is in fact water-ice, if you were to put it close to our orbit or even by Mars' orbit it would quickly grow a tail like a comet.

- Earth's Moon is bigger than Pluto.

- Pluto's orbit intersects orbits of other planets.

- Pluto's characteristics matches that of objects found in the Kuiper belt by various telescopes, again, dwarf like, at one point thought to be even carbonaceous rock bodies.

In fact it's already been thought that the Mountainous landscape could be entirely made from water-ice as it behaves close to rock-like under such temperatures. The surface approximately pretty young apparently, ~100M yrs.

So it's neat to think that Pluto had a recent collision around that time and had the cool down while under heat to perhaps even form such weird terrain. It's interesting to have such geological features without any influence of energy by an outside source of the body. (e.g. Europa - Jupiter)

The hypothesis' were flowing like wine today!

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Kontra Kommando said:

Over 4.67 billion miles is quite a journey!

Then think about the fact that the largest known star has a diameter of 2 billion miles... (IIRC, and maybe ut it was kilometers, but anyway!)

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NoXion said:

Is it just me, or does Pluto look a bit like Iapetus?

Before New Horizons' flyby, I always wondered if Pluto looked like Triton, since it was theorized that Triton was a Kuiper Belt object captured by Neptune. The recent pics of Pluto seem to confirm that theory, as their compositions are similar and they are roughly the same size!

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darkreaver said:

Then think about the fact that the largest known star has a diameter of 2 billion miles... (IIRC, and maybe ut it was kilometers, but anyway!)


And also that our sun is about 25,000,000,000,000 miles from the next nearest star, with basically nothing between them.

And that our galaxy is a relatively small 600,000,000,000,000,000 miles (approx) across, has about 100-300 billion stars and it is about 15,000,000,000,000,000,000 from Andromeda, the next nearest massive galaxy.

The Milky Way and Andromeda are part of a group of galaxies known as the local group and that, in in total, there are estimated to be around 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe.

Current estimates of the total stellar population is roughly 70 billion trillion. It is estimated that the diameter of the observable universe is about 28 gigaparsecs (93 billion light-years, 8.8×10^26 metres or 5.5×10^23 miles).

Sources Wikipedia, Sky and Telescope, physics.org, National Geographic.


What I find interesting is the relative distances of the planets (and other astral bodies). We are quite used to seeing pictures showing how big, say, Jupiter is compared to the other planets and how big the sun is compared to other stars. However, we rarely see the distances between them shown correctly because it is very difficult to show them.

If the sun was the size of a medium-sized beach ball, the smallest planets could be reasonably represented by a poppy seed. Jupiter in all its glory would be about the size of a ping-pong ball. On that scale, Pluto would be a little over a mile from the beach ball and all that would be between them would be objects the size of a few seeds and marbles and nothing else. So, to show them in a book, you'd need a book with a page a mile wide with only a few small spots of ink on it.

And, of course, almost all of the time, the planets aren't arranged neatly along the same radius but spread out across the full "disc" of the solar system. On the same scale, the Sun would be a few thousand miles from the next nearest star.

I do an exercise with my classes at school where we go out and pace out some of the distances. One kid is left holding the "Sun" beach ball, a few paces later, we drop off a kid holding a poppy seed "Mercury", then we pace to "Venus" (a bigger seed) etc etc and we pace things out until we can go as far as is reasonable and practical. We usually only go as far as Jupiter (there is a big gap between Mars and Jupiter) but we sometimes get to Uranus (yeah, I know, I know). Even from "Jupiter", when you look back to the kid holding the first seed, you can't see the seed and even the "Sun" is pretty small. In fact, the ping-pong ball "Jupiter" seems a bit pathetic when you realise that there is basically nothing between you and the beach ball a few hundred metres away yet those two balls represent the two largest bodies in out solar system.

TL:DR the solar system is big, the universe is big and there is a lot of space in them.

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NoXion said:

You're telling me that you don't see both bodies having highly contrasting surface patterns?

Sure, both Iapetus and Mimas have large craters, but Mimas is just light grey all over while the surfaces of both Iapetus and Pluto are divided between light and dark.


I see the patterns, but really, I just can't see how they resemble each other based on that. If I were trying to make a point that they look similar, I'd be completely stumped at how to get past the fact that one is completely brown and the other is predominantly grey, admittedly with some brown areas.

Similarly, Neptune and Jupiter both have large circular regions that stand out well against their respective cloud bands, but you could hardly say that because of that, Neptune looks like Jupiter

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New composite image, an approximation of what Pluto and Charon look like from the spacecraft now
http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_width_feature/public/thumbnails/image/pluto-and-charon-01.jpg?itok=1QsBZEmJ

And also released today, an image of Nix from 13 July, distance 360,000 miles. I think there's supposed to be a better one soon though
http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_width_feature/public/thumbnails/image/nix-lorri.jpg?itok=q0v66xiS

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