Pluto is struggling to keep its status as a proper planet amongst its siblings. Being so far away and undernourished by the sun can possibly do that you. Anyway, Pluto's got good news. It's got Kuiper belt Objects.
"People were finding all these KBOs that were huge - literally half the size of Pluto or larger," University of Arizona astronomer John Stansberry said. "But those supposed sizes were based on assumptions that KBOs have very low albedos, similar to comets."
Albedo is a measure of how much light an object reflects. The more light an object reflects, the higher its albedo. Actual data on Kuiper Belt Object albedos have been hard to come by because the objects are so distant, dim and cold. Many astronomers have assumed that KBO albedos - like comet albedos - are around four percent and have used that number to calculate KBO diameters.
However, in early results from their Spitzer Space Telescope survey of 30 Kuiper Belt Objects, Stansberry and colleagues found that a distant KBO designated 2002 AW197 reflects 18 percent of its incident light and is about 700 kilometers (435 miles) in diameter. That's considerably smaller and more reflective than expected, Stansberry said.
"2002 AW197 is believed to be one of the largest KBOs thus far discovered," he said. "These results indicate that this object is larger than all but one main-belt asteroid(Ceres), about half the size of Pluto's moon, Charon, and about 30 percent as large and a tenth as massive as Pluto."
I'm sure the plaent is pleased as punch.
More Jokes About... Uranus
There are rings around your... Uranus.
Here's the article.
"It's really intriguing, the planet seems to be getting more active as the equinox approaches," said de Pater, who, with colleague Heidi B. Hammel of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., has been observing Uranus since 2000 with adaptive optics on the Keck II telescope.
"When the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by Uranus in 1986, it saw almost no discrete cloud activity -- you could literally count the number of discrete clouds on your fingers: 10! Most astronomers decided that Uranus was a boring, static planet," Hammel added. "What we are seeing now is the opposite, that actually there are changes, and they are visible to Keck and the Hubble Space Telescope."
There you go. Rings around your...
Quantum Astronomy
I'm not an astronomy buff. I'm really not all that interested in gazing at stars through telescopes. I kind of left that behind as a kid and haven't missed it. But there are always interesting developments out there.
Here's one.
A Warm Dark Glow
Again, the straight astronomy aspect of this article leaves me a little bored, but here it is anyway.
- Art Neuro
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