Race to discover Planet Nine using astronomy and new computational techniques

Post by scott_s » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 1:17 PM UTC

Robotbeat wrote: post #58

svachalek wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow. Planet Nine is not expected to be another dwarf planet like Pluto. There are a handful of other dwarf planets known already, some bigger than Pluto, and it's expected that there are hundreds more yet to be discovered.

Some may be bigger than Earth, yet still classed as dwarf planets. Therefore, I think the definition is BS as it has nothing to do with the planet itself (such as its geography, size, etc) but only the bodies around it.

Post by Armisael16 » Wed, Aug 02, 2017, 4:45 PM UTC

ryanx435 wrote: post #26

everyone wrote: post #22

This is awesome. Also I found a tiny nitpick "But the early 1990s also brought a big breakthrough in an algorithm, known as symplectic integration, that reduced computational times by an order of magnitude." then "Because symplectic integrators don’t waste time rediscovering Kepler’s laws over and over, they run orbital simulations hundreds of times as fast as older methods do." 100 times as fast is two orders of mag…

Maybe,maybe not. Depends on what base you are measuring magnitude in. In base 10, 100x is 2 orders of magnitude. In base 2, the same speed up (written in binary: 1100100x) is between 6 and 7 orders of magnitude.