Most people don't know off-hand that Pluto is ~40-50AU from the sun, so 700AU is hard to conceptualize.
Or 698 trillion bananas.
But if you got “15x further than Pluto” you have context without needing to know any other trivia-style numbers.
15x means no one alive today will see a mission that reaches the planet, and that's more accessible for most readers per above.
Then to show Planet 9 distance they have to get in a car and drive a few miles.
That worked for me.
It communicates the scales really well, while only taking up a little over a foot of bookshelf space when not being "navigated". I have two heavy metallic retro looking rocket bookends for it.
I wonder how could this object be counted as a "planet" belonging to the Solar system, even if it were the size of Jupiter. But it's an object "estimated to be 2 to 4 times the radius, and about ten times the mass of the Earth". This must be another class of celestial bodies, some jumbo-sized Oort cloud object.
Also depending how elliptical the orbit, is the perigee might be much closer than 700AU, while still being further than Pluto's orbit. For all we know 700 AU is the apogee and say the perigee is 70 AU (1.4x Pluto's apogee ).
I guess I’d always put all the gas giants in the same “very, unimaginably big” bucket. I knew Jupiter was the biggest, then Saturn, but I didn’t realize just HOW big they were compared to the rest. At the risk of stating the very, very obvious, Jupiter is huge!!!
Masses of gas giants are: Jupiter, 317.8 earth mass; Saturn, 95.2 earth mass; Neptune, 17.1 earth mass; Uranus, 14.5 earth mass
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_mass#Unit_of_mass_in_a...
It seems like the idea was to send a bunch of instruments way out and then take pictures in the brief time they were at a useful distance, but if there's a planet out there we can orbit and so stop the instruments at that distance it seems like we could make a permanent super telescope.
* 700 times further from the Sun than the Earth
* 15 times further from the Sun than Pluto
* 0.01 lightyear, or 1/400th the distance to the nearest star
Or, it's the difference between going for a 15 minutes walk and walking from Boston to Orlando (or San Diego to Seattle, for the West Coasters).
Pluto is a fairly unremarkable dwarf planet. I don’t think it really helps to compare things to it.
700 further from the Sun than Earth is tangible as "really really far" though.
Another perspective on the size of the solar system, like the Pale Blue Dot.
It could also allow gravity and Oberth effect acceleration of small probes to meaningful fractions of the speed of light for interstellar flyby missions. Imagine the Oberth effect boost from thrusting in such a deep gravity well.
We don't have enough data to see whether there are unexpected instabilities in detected planetary systems. But it would be an interesting project to look for those.
Let’s fire up a replica of TARS, load up ChatGPT inside (TARS-GPT, patent pending), and yeet it straight toward the Schwarzschild golf ball. It’ll narrate live.
Imagine the livestream:
“Approaching event horizon. Spaghettification at 3%. Mood: stretchy.”
“Entering gravitational lensing zone… wow, even my tokens are redshifting.”
Bonus: With the right timing and Oberth maneuver, TARS-GPT might sling itself into Alpha Centauri before we finish arguing whether Pluto’s a planet again.
Worst case: we lose a robot. Best case: we unlock quantum gravity and get a podcast from inside a black hole.
I'd call that a win.
For all it's worth, there's no need to go black hole to explain the lack of visual observation. Objects that far from a star reflect very little if any light and would appear black to a black background.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.11090
As I recall, it did not get printed this way because the ink would be too expensive, or mess with the paper.
That's the idea behind this paper (and similar ones like it): since they're looking for the planet's intrinsic emissions, from its internal heat, it's only a single inverse-square law.
With d being ~20 times Neptune's distance and ~140 times Jupiter's, these really are large factors!
Is my calculation correct?
https://bsky.app/profile/plutokiller.com/post/3lnqm2ymbd22r
If those two spots are the same object, that object is on a high-inclination orbit; but the pattern the Planet 9 hypothesis explains is only compatible with a low-inclination object.
Seriously though, is he one of the people responsible for Pluto's demotion to dwarf planet?
Back in the early 1800s children used to memorize the names of the 12 planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Vesta, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. But then in 1845 astronomers discovered Astraea, and now there were 13. In 1847 three more were discovered: Hebe, Iris, and Flora. Then Metis, Hygiea, Parthenope, and Victoria by 1850. The 100th asteroid was discovered in 1868, and the pace only got quicker from there. Somewhere along that line people started using the words “asteroid” and “asteroid belt” and schoolchildren were mercifully spared the pointless task of memorizing hundreds, and later many thousands, of names of asteroids.
The same thing happened to Pluto. Just as Ceres was the first discovered asteroid, Pluto was the first discovered TNO. There are now hundreds of named TNO and thousands more that are just numbered. Nobody should force schoolchildren to memorize them all. Just tell them that there are an unknown number of objects in the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud and they’ll know as much as they need to know. Give them bonus points if they know the names Ceres and Pluto, and more if they know why these two were discovered first of all the objects in their class: they’re the biggest. Otherwise there’s nothing special about them.
Non native english speaker here, but last I checked further was a metaphorical distance, when farther was a literal distance. You can push a concept further, but you walk farther right? Or did I miss something?
Sure, we wouldn't be able to get there for many decades, but "within a century" would be feasible.
There are so many unknowns surrounding the nature of black holes. Having one in our backyard would give us a chance to test our guesses.
https://science.nasa.gov/universe/exoplanets/exoplanet-disco...
By comparison the entire Kuiper belt – including Pluto – is estimated to have a total mass of about 10% of Earth's mass.
Here is a nice graphic that excludes Ceres https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_planet#Population_of_d...
The motivation for this dwarf planet nonsense was to try to keep the official planet list small so children could memorize them with ease, but that is absurd. We do not remove countries from the map to make it easier for children to learn geography and there are over 100 of them.
Nonsense. "Pluto is grandfathered in as a planet, nothing else is a planet". See?
Was earth not a planet shortly before and after collision with Theia?
The naming pedantry seems ridiculous given that we have such a small sample size.
To discover Planet 9, simply open your ephemerides and look for "Neptune".
