Ultima Thule

In ancient times the northernmost region of the habitable world - hence, any distant, unknown or mysterious land.

Friday, July 29, 2005

Shall we call it Bluto? -- New world may be double Pluto's size

By Aussiegirl

A lot of exciting discoveries in the heavens are made by amateur astronomers. There's nothing like gazing into the night sky to give you a sense of awe. I remember reading recently that the Pioneer spacecraft's path was a bit unpredictable and was probably caused by some unknown source of gravity. I thought at the time that perhaps there were still undiscovered planets beyond Pluto. Now we just have to name the thing. I suggest Bluto since it's bigger than Pluto.

New Scientist SPACE - Breaking News - New world may be double Pluto's size: "

An object possibly twice the size of Pluto has been found - hiding in plain sight. The discovery could be the biggest world in the Kuiper belt of rocky objects that orbit the outer reaches of the solar system.
The find suggests more such objects are waiting to be discovered and is likely to reignite the fierce debate about what constitutes a planet.
On Thursday, an email with the subject, 'Big TNO discovery, urgent' was sent to a popular astronomy mailing list. The message described the discovery of a 'very bright' object that was creeping along slowly beyond the orbit of Neptune - making it a Trans-Neptunian Object, or TNO.
Its exact size cannot be determined because the reflectivity of its surface is not known. But if the reflectivity is as dim as most other distant, rocky objects that have been studied, it could be twice as wide as Pluto, which is about 2300 kilometres across."


3 Comments:

At 4:10 PM, Blogger Aussiegirl said...

That antiquated old bucket of bolts is so over -- and they can't even keep pieces of foam from flying off -- it's a damn disgrace. We should have had bases on the moon by now, with forays to Mars on a regular basis if we hadn't wasted all this time with the fool space station and the shuttle. And the reason the foam flies off is that they are having to use "environmentally friendly" foam instead of the old foam which stayed on much better.

 
At 7:30 PM, Blogger Timothy Birdnow said...

I hadn`t seen that-thanks!!

Yep, the shuttle is ready to be parked next to the edzel. It was never done right in the first place-thanks to Jimmy Carter and the ``golden fleece`` awards by Democrats in Congress back then.

It`s time we move forward!

 
At 5:34 PM, Blogger Timothy Birdnow said...

P.S.

I love your name; we can name the satellite Popeye (or Olive Oyl)!

 

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