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A 1980s space telescope may have seen planet nine

gizmodo.com

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Re: A 1980s space telescope may have seen planet nine

#131

Post by spacemark »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #47
spacemark wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true at all, totally depends on the type of observation campaign. Plenty of big observatory projects are negatively impacted by the eternal march of "progress."

> "progress." Do you really think Starlink is not a step forward? It is realistically the only path to get the whole world access to the internet.

>get the whole world access to the internet

Starlink is yet another printing press, a tool to control information. It can be wielded for good and bad, just like any other technology, and it will be for both. Has the internet made the world happier? Better? By whose definition? It's certainly made many wealthier, but it's also destabilized countries, facilitated genocide, spread misinformation like nothing before. Just like any other communications technology.

The worship of tech as savior in silicon valley and its followers never ceases to amaze me. Tech is inert; has no intrinsic moral value at all.

Re: A 1980s space telescope may have seen planet nine

#132

Post by Majromax »

nashashmi wrote: post #26

Honest question: Can’t the oddity of planet orbits also be explained by a sun in motion causing the orbits to be a little dragged shape? The direction of drag is probably the ghost planet 9?

Dragged through what? It's not like the interstellar medium has friction.

In addition, our entire solar system condensed out of the same primordial soup, with the same sort of motion about the galaxy. Just as our sun is in motion about the galaxy, the planets are in essentially the same motion.

Re: A 1980s space telescope may have seen planet nine

#133

Post by jjk166 »

irjustin wrote: post #106
zionic wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m just mad we’re losing out on “Planet X”. When I was a kid Pluto was a planet so the new one was X (10) and it was cool. Now this new planet is just going to be planet 9 again… totally lame.

Oh man this was me! I 100% agreed until I saw relative size of Pluto[0]. Definitely seems unfair to call it a planet when there's a number of Kuiper belt objects that are larger[1](?) or pretty much the same size. [0] https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Pluto-so-different-from-the-oth... [1] https://www.universetoday.com/118118/it-looks-like-these-are...

Pluto is closer in size to Earth than Earth is to Jupiter, but we lump them both into the same category.

There was a real concern that we were going to find thousands of Pluto sized objects in the kuiper belt, and that when we observed them up close they were just going to look like big comets. Instead it turns out there are only a handful and they are fascinating worlds with many similarities to other planets.

Re: A 1980s space telescope may have seen planet nine

#134

Post by fsckboy »

nashashmi wrote: post #26

Honest question: Can’t the oddity of planet orbits also be explained by a sun in motion causing the orbits to be a little dragged shape? The direction of drag is probably the ghost planet 9?

you're asking a good question, that I'm not really qualified to answer, but in short I think no, that's not the explanation. what you're talking about is a general relativistic phenomenon: just as it takes a few minutes for the sun's light to reach earth, it takes an equal amount of time for the sun's gravity to get here, and by then the sun has moved on. However, I don't think that is responsible for these orbits.

Re: A 1980s space telescope may have seen planet nine

#135

Post by lutorm »

excalibur wrote: post #95
lutorm wrote: post #33

Lol, Hubble is a "1980s space telescope". It was launched in April 1990....

The article is referring to the Infrared Astronomical Satellite. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRAS

I know, my point is that "80s space telescope" doesn't mean it's something super old that's not in use today...

Re: A 1980s space telescope may have seen planet nine

#137

Post by odyssey7 »

SkittyDog wrote: post #68
odyssey7 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At risk of maybe going too far on a tangent, I understand this idea and the species example is a good one. The planets are different because they were first defined as mystical and cultural concepts, before they could be understood as scientific ones. There are plenty of people who still think about the planets as cultural concepts rather than scientific ones. (What is a Jupiter? It’s a thing in space that our cultur…

I'm pretty sure animal and plant species also existed as cultural and mystical concepts, long before science was a thing. All of your analysis can be applied equally well to species, as well as planets... Or the four seasons (winter, spring, summer, autumn) or the five Oceans, or the seven Continents. They're all simply human attempts to impose neat category boundaries across a continuum of natural phenomena that are…

You have good points here for scientific understanding vs cultural in general. I wasn’t specific enough.

The planets formed as cultural concepts in the sense that they were absolutely divorced from tangible experience other than in their role as mere “wandering stars,” allowing them to exist as pure symbolic archetypes. The idea of Mars bringing war has little to do with the fact that it and related objects have cleared their neighborhoods.

There’s a distinction here between the planets, which are the symbols that can be enumerated, and a planet, which is what the categorization problem for scientists involves.

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