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Icewall? Boundry? Ice Cube? Frontier? Gateway?
Whats ancient Greek for Gateway?
Should we just call it Planet 10 and use it to deploy nukes in the outer field to push ice towards the centre of the solarsystem.
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Yansar.
Yet Another NonSpherical Average Rock.
I'm pretty sure, the next 10 years, they'll find similar objects, making Pluto less planet-like every year...
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*Tralfaz.
--Cindy
We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...
--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)
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DEC
or possibly
Brass Monkey
:?
Chan eil mi aig a bheil ùidh ann an gleidheadh an status quo; Tha mi airson cur às e.
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LATEST
It's been named after the warrior princess. But the only fighting involved with Xena is between scientists, bitterly divided as to whether she is our latest planet, or just a jumped-up asteroid
Robin McKie
Sunday July 31, 2005
The Observer
Astronomers have found a new world orbiting the Sun. The giant lump of rock and ice is larger than the planet Pluto and is now the farthest known object in the solar system.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/ … 0.html]The discovery was announced by US scientists yesterday and the object has unofficially been named Xena, after the TV series starring Lucy Lawless. 'We have always wanted to name something Xena,' said Michael Brown, a member of the team that made the discovery using telescopes at the Palomar Observatory, outside San Diego, California.
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That's rather old news, to 'headlineze' it like that
. And "Xen"a is the unofficial, working name. The discoverer has an official up his sleeve, but keeps mum about it.
When I first heard about that Xena thing, I thought great, now we get to the absolute peak of infotainment, sheesh... But maybe it's just a geek joke, or (God forbid) a desperate try to get kids interested... indeed in that case.
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in addition:
Preliminary observations suggest Xena - officially known as 2003 UB313 - is an extremely strange world. It is currently 9 billion miles away from the Sun, roughly 100 times more distant than the Earth, and is now about three times more remote than Pluto. At its present distance, the Sun will appear so small in the sky it will almost be indistinguishable from other stars.
Xena will also be incredibly cold. Its surface temperature is likely to be only a few degrees above absolute zero, while a year there - the time Xena takes to make one passage round the Sun on its highly elliptical orbit - will be the equivalent of 560 Earth years.
yikes - we should go there as soon as poss to check it out, :twisted: c'mon NASA, saddle up :twisted:
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Macte nova virtute, sic itur ad astra
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Well then again you could have the pick from the last few that have been found.
Work Continues On The Solar System's Three Recently Discovered Objects
the objects still go by the unofficial code-names "Santa," "Easterbunny," and "Xena," though they are officially known to the International Astronomical Union as 2003 EL61, 2005 FY9, and 2003 UB313.
Santa also has a tiny moon, nicknamed Rudolph, which circles it every 49 days.
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Well then again you could have the pick from the last few that have been found.
Work Continues On The Solar System's Three Recently Discovered Objectsthe objects still go by the unofficial code-names "Santa," "Easterbunny," and "Xena," though they are officially known to the International Astronomical Union as 2003 EL61, 2005 FY9, and 2003 UB313.
Santa also has a tiny moon, nicknamed Rudolph, which circles it every 49 days.
*Good grief. Can it get any sillier? Though the Santa/Rudolph thing is sort of cute.
They needn't focus on classical Greek or Roman mythology names...but what's next, Barney? Fluffy? Kookla, Fran, Ollie?
Geez...
--Cindy
::EDIT:: I know! I know! Let's name the next two Ken and Barbie!
We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...
--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)
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But with all the goofyness of the names Hubble has been doing its homework on Pluto.
Hubble reveals new map of Pluto
Astronomers have produced a new colour map of Pluto, the most distant planet in our Solar System, using images from the Hubble Space Telescope.
The detailed map shows areas likely to be methane frost and a bright spot perhaps made of frozen carbon monoxide.
And another team has obtained the most precise estimate yet for the size of its moon, Charon, with data gathered during the planet's eclipse of a star.
This figure could be used to calculate a more accurate size for Pluto itself.
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*How about a long and unusual, difficult-to-pronounce (for most folks anyway) name like:
CHALCHIUHTLICUE
or
HUEHUETEOTL
or
MICTLANTECIHUATL
Those are cool Aztec names.
If you think that's a bit too "much," consider that 2 stars are named Zubenelgenubi and Zubeneschamali.
Really, whoever names these objects can borrow from a variety of mythologies and etc...provided the cultures which created the various mythological names are okay with it.
--Cindy
We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...
--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)
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I still say we take Pluto off of the "planet" list and form a more rigid definition of what a planet is. Has to be on the elliptic plane, and has to be a mass at the size of or larger than Mercury.
Some useful links while MER are active. [url=http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html]Offical site[/url] [url=http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/MM_NTV_Web.html]NASA TV[/url] [url=http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/mer2004/]JPL MER2004[/url] [url=http://www.spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/statustextonly.html]Text feed[/url]
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The amount of solar radiation reaching the surface of the earth totals some 3.9 million exajoules a year.
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Definition Debate: Planets May Soon Get Adjectives
The main sticking point: If Pluto is a planet, then so is 2003 UB313, the object discovered in July. But by that logic, there are several other round objects nearly as big as Pluto that should be considered planets, some astronomers say.
Lets just make it 8 to keep it simple, But then again to describe the new planets with the use of an adjective would lead to alot of ha????
The compromise currently being floated by the working group is to add an adjective in front of the term planet for each different type of non-stellar round object.
Pluto and 2003 UB313 could be called Trans-Neptunian objects. Earth would be called either a terrestrial planet or perhaps a "cisjovian" planet, meaning it's inside Jupiter.
Further complicating the matter are extrasolar planets much more massive then Jupiter, planet-like objects orbiting dead stars called pulsars, and possibly even free-floating worlds that don't orbit stars.
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I think we should take the heat of Uranus by calling it Urectum.
"...all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by."
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New Pluto images may reignite debate over dwarf planet status
The debate over Pluto's status in the solar system never seems to end with the question which still remains: Is Pluto a planet?
"We're close enough now that we're just starting to see Pluto's geology," New Horizons program scientist Curt Niebur said in a news release.
The purpose of the mission is to better understand where Pluto and its moons figure into the rest of the solar system, and the images could help scientists determine what Pluto's atmosphere is made of and what its surface looks like.
The International Astronomical Union's official definition states that a planet:
• Is in orbit around the sun.
• Is round or nearly round.
• Has "cleared the neighborhood" around its orbit, meaning it is not surrounded by objects of similar size and characteristics.
Supporters of Pluto's status as a full-fledged planet are hopeful the New Horizons images will bolster their case to reinstate Pluto.
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SpaceNut wrote:Supporters of Pluto's status as a full-fledged planet are hopeful the New Horizons images will bolster their case to reinstate Pluto.
I could argue that Eris is larger than Pluto, so if Pluto is a planet then so is Eris. I could also argue that the astronomer who discovered that body called it Xena. Yes, it was named after a TV character. But if you insist on ancient mythology, the name Xena is based on a minor character from Greek mythology: Xenia. All the major names are used, and this name starts with "X", the Roman numeral for 10. It's the 10th planet. And correct spelling is in the Greek alphabet, anything in English is a translation, so Xenia or Xena depends how you translate. The main reason I argue this is that the person who discovered it gets to name it. The fact the International Astronautical Union had a temper tantrum and rejected a name based on a TV character, doesn't matter. The person who discovered it gets to name it. If you don't like the name, then you go discover something. Another complaint is that "Eris" is too close to the name of the asteroid "Eros". Very confusing.
But all these are old arguments. I lost long ago. Move on.
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I had forgotten near earth Asteriod 433 Eros but had not payed much attention to the other darft planets that were discovered. The international union will need to rethink what is a planet once all the data is in for Pluto's system....Neptunion / Kuiper Belt inclusion...
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/pr … t=Dwa_Eris
I was actually surprised by the number of Neptune-crossers'
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How about Tiamat?
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