New planet found

Nasa is going to announce the detection in our solar system of a 10th 'planet' orbiting our sun. The discovery has been made using the Hubble Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope.

Sedna, as it has been named, is being described as "a mysterious object" and is being hailed as a "discovery of the most distant object ever detected orbiting the Sun".

The object measures approximately 1,250 miles across but may yet prove to be even larger than Pluto, at 1,406 miles across. Its distance from Earth is 6.2 billion miles, residing in the distant Kuiper Belt.

Interesting stuff. :smile: I think calling it a planet is debatable though, because technically pluto isn't big enough to be a planet.

Yeh I heard that there thinking of taking pluto off the list so there will be only 8 planets dont know if they will do it.

But they think that pluto is just what was leftover from when the planets were formed.

It might have a moon too, they're trying to get a look at it with hubble. :smile:

It's 3 times futher from the sun than pluto, so that should give you some idea of how far away it is.

"The Sun appears so small from that distance that you could completely block it out with the head of a pin," said Dr Brown

:smile:

isn't this like the 5th time they've found a "10th planet"?

Don't screw with "Planet-X" you bastards! You're screwing with 80s games timelines! Ohs nos!

yea, i read about this, its ment to be always -230C. bit nippy :smile:

you mean NIPPLE-Y I'm sure :biggrin:

My question is, how do they figure out diameter, distance from sun, ambient temperature etc. I mean, its not like we've been to the damn think to see for ourselves.

Wild Card said:
My question is, how do they figure out diameter, distance from sun, ambient temperature etc. I mean, its not like we've been to the damn think to see for ourselves.

There ar many diffenent ways to get that stuff, mainly through light (eg it takes 60 min for that light to get to planet earth, multiply 300000km by 60 then by 60 again). But I see what you mean, its just a dot, so far away........

They can find the mass from close planets orbits (you have Kepler to thank.).. Such as that's how they found Neptune (or was it Pluto) well anyway one of them had a funky orbit and they couldn't figure out why and then they came to the conclusion that there was another planet out there. They went looking for it and then we had 9 planets in the solar system lol.

They calculate the tempurature of the planet based on it's distance from the sun in regards to planets it's near.

There's a lot more to it then all this though. But it gives you an idea of what they go through.

They launched a probe with a thermometer using them new ion drives... all that money to find out the ambient temperature to a planet we will never visit in our lifetimes... lol I hope thats not what they did.

And to think they could have spent that money somewhere else.

I guarantee you that we wont even know the tempurature in our lifetime lol.

That's a long f**king distance away ... I mean, we barley made it Mars, sheesh lol.

so whens that lil space cruiser thing that NASA launched to mars gonna get there then, in the paper[the Sun lol] it said 2014!

I want to know when the Japanese satalite will be launched to the moon to see if the rover is still there lol.

In other words, when are they going to try to disproove Nasa's supposedly staged moon landing?

"But the set for the moon landing is at Area 51"
"Fine, cancel the shoot and lets really land on the moon"

lol.

I wanna know what NASA is going to do with its shuttles :biggrin:

probably send a shuttle out to blow it up, then send out another shuttle to blow that one up....etc

...I don't know...

Just don't look behind you ... GET HIM BOYS!

LOL....crono u crack me up

I hear they're planning on letting the Hubble telescope die though.

Yeah, I'm sure they're pissed that they have to go out every time their scientists make a better mirror system. The calibration on that thing must be a bitch.

"s**t, a rock hit it again"
"Dammit, we just got back"

so they spent all that money making it so that it can die?

Crono said:
Yeah, I'm sure they're pissed that they have to go out every time their scientists make a better mirror system. The calibration on that thing must be a bitch.

"s**t, a rock hit it again"
"Dammit, we just got back"

Maybe thats why they built the ISS. So that they could have a permanent repair staff for the thing

Yeah, I'm sure they're pissed that they have to go out every time their scientists make a better mirror system. The calibration on that thing must be a bitch.

"s**t, a rock hit it again"
"Dammit, we just got back"

Lmao :arse:

Maybe thats why they built the ISS. So that they could have a permanent repair staff for the thing

Probably ... But there's a lot of stuff they could design and build, but they wont because it doesn't seem cost effective. Like artificial gravity. Well, actually that's wrong, because if you do it through centrifical (I totally buchard that word) force it IS gravity ... anyway, they haven't developed that. They also haven't developed a flight cruiser that can EASILY enter and return into the Earths atmosphere. Why would you want this? Well because, it would take no longer then 90 minutes of flying to get anywhere on Earth. But, there's heat issues and gravity issues as well as the G-Force ... not the nVidia kind.

Well centrifuges are cool things, they should try making one properly to see how effective it would feel, plus for the astronaughts- they would be able to stay in space for longer lengths of time because bone errosion would be slower.

As for knowing how far away planets are I think (from my Physics days) they use "Red Shift" factors or something.

Myrk-

Doppler shifting (comonly know as the "red shift") is used to determain the distance of anything which emmits light, because the farther away somthing is in the universe, the faster it moves away from us due to the expansion of the universe. I do not know what method they would use for finding the distance of an object such as this new "planet".

WC-

One possibility is to measure the distance between two telescopes looking at the planet and measure the angle at which they see it. from this, the distance could by obtained through triangulation. obveously, the uncertainty in such a method would increase with the increasing distance of th object being measured.

once you know the distance, diameter is simply a matter of measureing it's it's angular size.

temperature could possibly be measured by observing the black-body radiation of the planet. if you get enough light for it, the calculation is quite simple.

Tracer, will you be my physics tutor? lol

Crono said:
I want to know when the Japanese satalite will be launched to the moon to see if the rover is still there lol.

In other words, when are they going to try to disproove Nasa's supposedly staged moon landing?

"But the set for the moon landing is at Area 51"
"Fine, cancel the shoot and lets really land on the moon"

lol.

Um, wasn't it China that was going to the moon?

And I believe Sedna is referred to as a "planetoid". (Thanks to the Daily Show! :biggrin: )

Was it? I just remember hearing about it, so.

meh who cares, as someone already said they find a new 10th planet all the time...

I thought the 10th planet was Vega, a huge "rock" orbiting the Sun. Oh, BTW, they called it Quaoar, not Sedna.

Err, I read in the paper they called it Sedna. It'd be weird if they renamed it, but meh, scientists are weird like that.

There is a small dispute wether someone who finds a planet/planetoid has the right to name it.

No no...

First there was Planet X, then Quoao or whatever, now theres Sedna. They are all "10th Planets" lol!

There was another name...urm, something beginning with N...me forgot. :sad: