Re: Get ready for Tyche! The hell, you say! Damn, that would redraw the solar system, and what a perfect name for such a planet!
Re: Get ready for Tyche! That would be freaking awesome if they found it. So awesome that I'd say that we'd have to immediately put a probe together and send it to that planet to get photographs and live shots. And none of that bullshit taking 15 years to make a probe either. Just slap one together and launch it.
Re: Get ready for Tyche! Let's see, New Horizons is taking 15 years to get to Pluto... this is 375 times farther...
Re: Get ready for Tyche! We'll probably achieve FTL capability before the probe would reach its target...
Re: Get ready for Tyche! I'll have a hard time accepting any new planetary body found out there as "part of the solar system" in the traditional sense. The existing planets (including dwarf planets and the asteroid belt) fall into a fairly neat progression in terms of distance from the Sun. All are somewhere between 1.3 and 2.0x the distance of the prior object. Even taking into account Pluto's highly eccentric orbit, for the next object to be 375x the distance of it's nearest neighbor is quite a stretch in terms of considering it to be "in the neighborhood".
Re: Get ready for Tyche! This is how we do it....... We build a big nuclear powered rocket in space. We use the Ares V rocket to get the parts up there. We extend the shuttle missions to build the rocket or we go back to using space capsules. Once it's built we aim it and fire it. It would fire up the space program and public imagination like no other recent event.
Possible 9th Planet Discovered! http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/02/1...e-hunt-massive-hidden-object-in-space/?hpt=C2 If this is true, it would be awesome! A planet four times the size of Jupiter, or a companion dark star to our own sun. Either way, it's as ginormous as my ex-wife's ass!
Re: Possible 9th Planet Discovered! Is an object that far out from the sun really part of the Solar System and even more so a planet?
Re: Possible 9th Planet Discovered! Well its part of the solar system by definition, it orbits the sun. As for being a planet, it seems so by the latest definition.
The evidence is pretty barebones at the moment, basically being that we can't say for sure it isn't there. Would be a cool discovery but I'm not holding my breath.
Re: Possible 9th Planet Discovered! According to the OP, it's a Brown Dwarf star. How can that be a planet?
Re: Possible 9th Planet Discovered! Its possible Jupiter was/is a brown dwarf class of object at one point.
Re: Possible 9th Planet Discovered! If it's in orbit around the sun, it is clearly a part of the solar system. That has nothing to do with distance. As to whether or not it's a planet, that is a question of definition. Pluto was a planet for a long time, then it wasn't a planet, simply because the definition changed. If this thing turns out to be there, whether or not it is classified as a planet and whether or not the initial classification continues to be accepted in the centuries to come, is more a question of the evolution of the language than of discoveries in space.
Re: Possible 9th Planet Discovered! I'm still waiting for them to restore Pluto to planet status. Especially since they discovered that Eris, which was thought to be larger than Pluto is in fact smaller. Eris's supposed size was what prompted the demotion of Pluto to "dwarf planet".
Re: Possible 9th Planet Discovered! If Pluto is a planet then we have hundreds of planets in the solar system.
Re: Possible 9th Planet Discovered! The quantity of similar objects is what prompted the rethink, as I undertstand it.If it has just been Eris, they'd simply have classified that as the 10th planet.
Re: Possible 9th Planet Discovered! Not necessarily. There are not asteroids anywhere remotely near the size of Pluto. Pluto is not gravitationally bound to another body besides the sun. And (this is where I disagree with the definition) Pluto in my opinion has "cleared its orbital path of other large bodies)- paraphrased of the final definition that got Pluto demoted. Because there is not another large body (known) that orbits the sun remotely near the orbital path of Pluto.
Re: Possible 9th Planet Discovered! Interestingly, unlike all of the other planets, we don't have any close-up photos of Pluto. That will change in 2015 with the New Horizons mission. Something to look forward to.
Re: Possible 9th Planet Discovered! Hey now, no reason we can't have a thread in the Red Room and Techforge.