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Heads up for new discovery tonight

Tel

By Tel
in The Astro Lounge

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JamesF

JamesF

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Whilst in some respects I appreciate why it works this way in the modern world, I always find myself thinking there's something of the school playground in the kind of "we've got a secret and we're not going to tell you yet" situations such as this.  I don't blame the research organisation at all.  It's just somewhat ridiculous that they are forced to "stage manage" their announcements in such a daft way.

I'm intrigued to know what it is they're going to be talking about though.

James

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lukebl

lukebl

Posted
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I read this too and was intrigued.

However, I bet it'll probably be something to do with obscure physics and relativity and waaaay over my head, and nothing as mundane as the discovery of Planet X or something!

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JB80

JB80

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Oops, didn't see this thread and I just posted another, please feel free to delete my thread. :embarrassed:

I'm pretty certain I know what it is but there is an embargo after all. Think Chariklo as they have been studying that.

They'll never find my beer stash. :D Goes to quick to stash it.

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Sp@ce_d

Sp@ce_d

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It's a Klingon bird of prey starship  :grin:

And there was me trying to hold back all morning on the MH370, Elvis & Aliens jokes.. :grin:

So I'm guessing.. another dead planet or better still remains of our Stars twin perhaps?

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Sp@ce_d

Sp@ce_d

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I think the advance warning of an announcement is only to allow any media services to be prepared for it. I hear rumours that it is to do with asteroids having rings.

Hmm I thought we sort of knew that already? Well, some have Moons anyway.

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JB80

JB80

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But Chariklo is the smallest body yet found to have rings and possibly a Moon as well.

Observations at many sites in South America, including ESO’s La Silla Observatory, have made the surprise discovery that the remote asteroid Chariklo is surrounded by two dense and narrow rings. This is the smallest object by far found to have rings and only the fifth body in the Solar System — after the much larger planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — to have this feature. The origin of these rings remains a mystery, but they may be the result of a collision that created a disc of debris. The new results are published online in the journal Nature on 26 March 2014.

http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1410/

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Knight of Clear Skies

Knight of Clear Skies

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Nice discovery. Yesterday, if you'd shown me a picture of an asteroid with rings I'd have thought the artist was being over-imaginative, now I know better.

Discovery of another dwarf planet in the same region of space as Sedna quite exciting, it could be a step in solving the puzzle of their orbits which have a perihelion far from any planet. With enough data it may be possible to work out whether they have been perturbed by a larger body lurking in the Oort cloud, whether they were pulled there by another star (probably when our Solar System was part of a star cluster) or whether they formed around another star and are captured bodies.

"Our survey covered just a very small area of the sky - about 220 full Moons of sky. So, there's a lot more sky out there, and we predict, based on this one object, that across the whole sky we could expect to find 900 objects of 1,000km or bigger in size."

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JamesF

JamesF

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Well, news of rings around a minor planet is quite interesting I suppose, but was it really worth the press build-up to the announcement?

It does rather strike me as perhaps being of significant interest to hardcore astronomers and cosmologists, of passing interest to others with an interest in space and the rest will wonder if it's going to take their job or cause the value of their house to fall if they pay any attention to it at all.

I think it's quite an interesting discovery and has the potential to become more interesting once there's sufficient data to have some idea of what its presence can actually tell us in broader terms.  The build-up does seem rather OTT to me, but as I said in my first post, that's the way things seem to have to work these days.  I certainly have the impression that availability of funding in some areas of research is at least partly related to how big a splash one can make in the media which is a sorry state of affairs in the first place.

James

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