OK, one more post about this…
I just got off the phone with Mike Brown, whose team of astronomers discovered, among others, the dwarf planet recently named Eris. I called him last night and he called back. That was a fun phone call!
I asked him about the lingering questions I had (and mentioned in the post linked above). First off, he told me that while they didn’t actively pursue the name Dysnomia for Eris’s moon because it meant "lawlessness" (due to the Lucy Lawless/Xena angle), they didn’t avoid it either once they found the name. It was pretty clear that was the name to use, both because it was appropriate and because of the Xena connection. I think that’s totally excellent.
Interestingly, he mentioned that the IAU rammed the names through very quickly– they only submitted it 9 days ago!
I asked him about the two objects mentioned in the IAU circular as "two other new potential dwarf-planet candidates". He confirmed they were 2003 EL61 and 2005 FY9. I’m surprised by the inclusion of EL61, since it is highly elongated, but Mike told me it is in hydrostatic equilibrium– the gravity is balanced by the centrifugal force. It spins really quickly, rotating once every four hours or so. I figured it just didn’t have enough gravity to shape it into a ball. It does; it just spins so quickly the sphericity is distorted. It has the density of something made of rock, but is very reflective, so it must have a coating of ice. I’m surprised something that dense could be so elongated. Amazing.
But anyway, there you go; we may have names for those two guys soon too. Neat.
P.S. Mike Brown did say that the guy I linked to in my previous post was not terribly accurate with his suppositions (and has since updated his post with increasingly desperate attempts to make sense out of his original nonsense). Certainly, the words "strife" and "discord" have obvious resonance with current events, but the names themselves were appropriate for the planets. He also mentioned that new objects are not trending to be named after gods of the underworld or evil gods; that’s just how some have worked out. So I was wrong there before when I mentioned this trend.
September 14th, 2006 at 9:31 pm
Would I be correct in assuming that the reason 2003 EL61 and 2005 FY9 haven’t been named yet is the fact that their final status hasn’t been determined? I hope you’re right that they may be named soon. A name will be much less cumbersome than those long temporary designations.
September 14th, 2006 at 9:39 pm
I’m surprised something that dense could be so elongated.
Tee-hee.
September 14th, 2006 at 10:09 pm
“…the gravity is balanced by the centrifugal force.”
in the frame of reference of somebody standing on the surface, naturally.
[runs and hides]
September 14th, 2006 at 10:12 pm
I’ve never been clear about EL61. How can spinning fast make it elongated like a pickle? Shouldn’t it be shaped more like an M&M?
September 14th, 2006 at 10:14 pm
The description of 2003 EL61 reminds me of the classic scifi book “Heavy Planet” by Hal Clement. Mr. Clement worked out the gravity variences and spin rate for an entire planet shaped like EL61. He then populated it with some interesting inhabitants and came up with a reason for humans to visit.
September 14th, 2006 at 10:18 pm
Mtyler8– I mentioned “Mission of Gravity” to Mike Brown! He hadn’t read it. I told him that EL61 should be named “Mesklin”.
September 14th, 2006 at 10:37 pm
I’m a big admirer of Mike Brown for his selfless approach to planetary classification, seeing that he could be known as “the guy who discovered all those new planets” but goes along with the position that leaves him as “the guy who discovered all those new *dwarf* planets.” If I ever make a Crack Team of Action Astronomers out of supporters of DemotePluto.com, I’m going to call them the Brown Dwarfs.
September 14th, 2006 at 11:41 pm
Phil, I had a question.
Please, don’t anyone jump me. I’m not a scientist. I just read Discover.
You know and I know Pluto isn’t really a planet, it doesn’t act like a planet, it doesn’t follow the rules of a planet, etc., etc.
But, having said that, I just kept wondering if the astronomers in Prague could have done this….
… Said, “OK, technically, we *know* Pluto isn’t really a planet. But, since there seems to be so much public sentiment for keeping it a planet, and since it has been a planet for 75-plus years, and thus has become a deeply entrenched part of public culture, maybe we can continue calling it a planet …”
… and say that any *new* planets would have to minimum as big as Pluto or bigger. Pluto would get to remain a planet, the smallest planet of all time, and — so far — the only new planet would be Eris.”
You wouldn’t end up with a ridiculous 53 planets (Ceres and Charon as planets…?) or whatever. We’d have one new member to the family, Eris, and you wouldn’t have hordes of people upset over Pluto.
Could a proposition like that have worked … or is that simply too whack and too unscientific?
It’s just that I feel kind of bad about losing poor Pluto. It can’t help being so weird.
September 15th, 2006 at 1:57 am
IIRC, the problem with setting Pluto as a lower limit for planets, is the strong suspicion that there could be hundreds of Pluto-plus-sized Kuiper-belt objects as-yet undiscovered. So in time, by using that definition, we’d end up having hundreds of “planets” in our solar system. This contradicts the “intuitive” notion that planets are a “major” component of solar systems, not something that’s “common” and “plentiful”.
Note the number of vague, fuzzy, unempirical words in that last sentence.
Phil has pretty-much convinced me that his position makes the most sense - That pigeon-holing astronomical bodies into sharply-defined categories is foolish and counter-productive.
September 15th, 2006 at 1:58 am
Pluto is Pluto. It doesn’t really matter whether the public call it a planet or not. It just helps with classification (which we scientists really like to do… helps with communication). Schools should now teach the new classification, and a discussion of classification in science would be interesting for students (hopefully). Anyway, I’ve always had a thing for Pluto as well and the new classification doesn’t change how I feel about the peculiar piece of frozen real estate.
Talking with the public (I’m a microbiologist, so I’m a lay person when it comes to astronomy and public includes me in this case) about the decision is a good thing. Explaining what the new classification means and why the deicision was reached should help. Expect a lot of Discovery channel shows about it!
September 15th, 2006 at 1:59 am
[…] “Xena renamed to Eris“. Ainda a nova designação para este asteróide, no Universe Today. Também sobre este assunto, “On the naming of Eris and such“, no Bad Astronomy, “Eris and Dysnomia“, que refere também a nova denominação da lua de Eris, no Astronomy Blog, “Dwarf Planet Names: Eris and Dysnomia” no SCSU Astronomy […]
September 15th, 2006 at 5:29 am
Personally I wish they had taken the origionally proposed definition of a planet (that it had to be round, etc) and used that, but with one cavet. They should have placed the 9 planets in a seperate classification called “the 9 classical planets”. I think that would have appeased almost everyone. We would have had a definition that made sense (albiet a bit of a soft definition, but it could have been adjusted a bit), and the whole issue of “either we get rid of pluto or we have a boat load of new planets” wouldn’t have arose.
September 15th, 2006 at 6:49 am
So people are suggetsting we keep calling Pluto a planet “because the public says so” and “because we’ve always called it that“.
If we relied on public opinion and habit in scientific matters, we’d still be working on ever more complex models of geocentrism …
Besides, Pluto has only been a planet for barely half a year. It was still in its probation period
September 15th, 2006 at 7:07 am
The only problem I have with Pluto being a planet is that it does not share the same ecliptic that the rest of the planets have. I would like to have the ecliptic part of the definition. It would probably illiminate many of the Kuiper Belt objects and give us a nice small number. If we want 9, then we rename Ceres to Pluto, and rename Pluto to Ceres. Same number, same names, different order…
September 15th, 2006 at 8:15 am
FWIW, I’m more-or-less with gopher65 here. If I’d been king of the IAU, I would have kept the original proposal (orbit the sun, in hydrostatic equilibrium, etc.), but added planetary classes (as we currently do with stars, supernovae, and such).
So….
Gas giants would be class 1a planets
Terrestrial planets would be class 1b planets
Icy planets would be class 2 planets
This would have been the best of both worlds — folks that like Pluto could have kept calling it a “planet,” while folks that dislike it could revel in the fact that it (and a few dozen / hundred of its buddies) were “second class planets.”
Oh, well…
September 15th, 2006 at 8:26 am
There was an article about Mike Brown in a recent(?) issue of the New Yorker magazine. Very interesting.
An internet or library search should turn it up quite easily. Or ask a liberal friend.
Greg
September 15th, 2006 at 9:21 am
“I would like to have the ecliptic part of the definition. It would probably illiminate many of the Kuiper Belt objects and give us a nice small number.”
Quaoar is the only known large object in the Kuiper Belt that has both a circular orbit is in within a few degrees of the ecliptic. That arguably makes it the most distant object in the solar system that was not eventually ejected from its original circular orbit formed during the development of our planetary system.
If people insist on having 9 planets, there’s your best candidate
September 15th, 2006 at 9:23 am
I had thought that the idea behind Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity had been shot down on the basis that any (ahem) planet spinning so fast as to make it into a discoid would experience centrifugal forces exceeding the tensile strength of a rocky crust, and therefore tear itself apart.
In any case, how could EL61 acquire such rotational speed? It’s hard to imagine it occurring by accretion, and even harder to work out how a passing or impacting planetoid could impart such spin without hurling it out of the solar system, or at least into a cometary-type orbit.
The mere physics of all this is secondary, of course. What counts is ensuring that EL61 is officially named Mesklin, to assert the power of the International Hippie Psychedelics Conspiracy ™!
September 16th, 2006 at 3:18 pm
i just happy to see the name xena gone.
September 16th, 2006 at 6:15 pm
A quote has been attributed to Brown, saying that “we wanted her fans to know that the spirit of Lucy Lawless is still out there”, but I can’t get any google hits elsewhere for that quote. Is it likely to be for real?
September 16th, 2006 at 11:10 pm
In regards to Pierre LaBossiere’s comment the problem with setting Pluto as the lower size, “grandfathering” it in is that there will soon be a plethora of like and larger bodies found. I actually predicted that a hyperPluto would be discovered a few years ago and it would result in Pluto’s demotion. My logic: Many similar (though smaller) Pluto sized objects were being discovered. Pluto was discovered near perihelion in a 250 year orbit, only approximately 25% of its orbit has elapsed: therefore it is completely possible that a hyperPluto was out there at aphelion and would eventually pull into view. Actually I didn’t anticipate Mike Brown’s discovery of an object much further out.
Hopefully Pierre LaBossiere’s and people who want a vulgar concensus to promote Pluto will instead learn and enjoy the dwarf planets. Pluto is a very interesting system, its moon may be the only similar scenerio to our own moon’s formation. Besides Mars, Ceres is actually the best place to put set up a terrestrial colony, and this newly named Eris will likely suprise and delight when more is known.
September 18th, 2006 at 1:54 pm
Andjam, I haven’t found that precise quote. However,
http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/planetlila/index.html#eris
and
He certainly has expressed that sentiment.
September 19th, 2006 at 9:56 am
Renaming the planet was a clear case of Xenophobia.
September 20th, 2006 at 6:08 pm
Having followed the above link to CalTech’s 2003 EL61 page, I’m still confused. The image shown is described as an (American-type) football shape, though to me it more resembles an elongated gelatin capsule. It spins around one of its short axes (which does bring to mind a kicked football).
Brown et al hypothesize an oblique collision with another large Kuiper Belt object early in EL61’s history, sending its icy material into orbit and leaving the rocky material spinning rapidly: “The rapid spin elongated 2003 EL61 into the football shape we see today.”
All well & good, but why didn’t it form a disk shape if it were being re-formed by centrifugal force? Did the tensile structural components give way only in one dimension?
September 21st, 2006 at 1:52 am
test post
September 22nd, 2006 at 8:04 am
Skeptic girl :
As you should be able to see
Your test worked for me.
Its only one cryptic line of text
Makes me wonder just what’s next
So post away I plea!
If I recollect my Greek mythology right then Eris was the goddess of Strife. It was she that offered the prize of a golden apple inscribed “to the most beautiful” in a contest with the godesses Hera, Aphrodite and Athena and got Prince Paris of Troy to judge betwixt ‘em.
Hera offered Paris money..
Athena offered Paris success in war.
Aphrodite offered him the hand of the most beautiful woman in the world - Helen of Sparta who was already married to King Menelaus.
Paris chose Aphrodite - who guaranteed he could seduce Helen. He did so - Menelaus understandably enough got cheesed off and, with his brother King Agamemnnon, organised the Archean (ie. Greek) fleet to attack Troy and get Helen back “launching a thousand ships” and causing the Trojan war.
Apt name given “Xena’s” role in sparking astronomical debate over Pluto …
But I bet the name “Xena” will take a long time to disappear from popular culture references to it. If indeed it ever does … Reckon its gained enough “cultural mass” to hang on over the more academic, less memorable one.
Eris = the Greek equivalent of Loki … anyone know has thatname been taken by any minor planet yet?
January 18th, 2007 at 8:40 am
Eris also features in Robert Anton Wilson’s amazing “The Illuminatus! Trilogy”.
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