The Art Neuro Weblog

Planets X, Y & Z
Here's an interesting one. There might be even more planets belonging to our solar system out there.

Last November, Mike Brown's team found a world at least half as large as Pluto. They named it Sedna, after the Inuit sea goddess. Sedna's elongated orbit is outside the Kuiper Belt, ranging from 76 to 1,000 AU. Sedna was found only because it is currently near the innermost stretch of its travels.

Well past Sedna is another reservoir of material left over from the formation of the solar system, theorists believe. The Oort Cloud is a hypothesized sphere of frozen objects thought to start at about 10,000 AU and extend to 100,000 AU, or 1.5 light years from the Sun.

Nobody expected to find an object like Sedna in the largely empty space between the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud. Theorists are now scrambling to explain Sedna's presence and what it means to the composition of the outer solar system.

"Sedna could be a member of a substantial population of bodies trapped between the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud," says the University of Hawaii's David Jewitt, who made the first accurate estimate of a KBO albedo in 2001.

Brown, who now bets against finding Planet X in the Kuiper Belt, thinks his group's discovery of Sedna portends an even more compelling scenario. "I'd also be willing to bet that there are many objects larger than Pluto out in the region of space where Sedna lives," Brown said last week. Out to about 1,000 AU, he speculates that there could be 10 or 20 Pluto-sized objects, "and a handful of larger things, too."

Some of these suspected worlds could be as big as Mercury or even Mars, he said. I asked Brown if there might be worlds larger than Pluto clear out at the edge of the Oort Cloud, 1.5 light-years away and nearly half the distance to the Alpha Centauri star system.

"Absolutely," he said. "Probably even likely."

More worlds to discover! More worlds to mine!

Tragedy And Disaster
There's an old Latin American joke cursing their military junta el Presdientes of their world. A child is asked in class, "What is he difference between a tragedy and a disaster?"
The child replies, "A Tragedy is if the plane carrying El Presidente and his whole cabinet and their families crashes into the side of the mountain. A Disaster is when El Presidente survives the crash."

In that spirit, I bring to you this article:

A private jet that was en route to Houston to pick up former President Bush (news
- web sites) clipped a light pole and crashed Monday as it approached Hobby
Airport in thick fog, killing all three people aboard.

The Gulfstream G-1159A jet, coming into Houston, went down about 6:15 a.m. in an undeveloped area 1 1/2 miles south of the airport, officials said. The former president had been scheduled to travel to Ecuador for a conference.

"I was deeply saddened to learn of the plane crash this morning," Bush said through spokesman Tom Frechette. "I'd flown with this group before and know them well. I join in sending heartfelt condolences to each and every member of their families."

The names of the three crew members were not immediately released. Bush, who lives in Houston, was going to give a lecture for the Guayaquil, Ecuador, Chamber of Commerce, Frechette said, adding, "It's very sad." He said he was to have accompanied Bush, as was a Secret Service agent.

It's no big deal in the scheme of the world (or space policy for that matter), but I thought I'd share that disaster with you.

More Inuit References, or How Many Words Do We Really Need (In A Time Of Global Warming)?
Not enough by far.
The Arctic is shrinking as global warming continues. Folks, the Inuit who are famed to have so many different words to describe snow, have no words to describe this because they are seeing has simply not been seen in their part of the world before. Check it out.

We can't even describe what we're seeing," said Sheila Watt-Cloutier, chair of
the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (news - web sites) which says it represents 155,000 people in Canada, Alaska, Greenland and Russia.

In the Inuit language Inuktitut, robins are known just as the "bird with the red breast," she said. Inuit hunters in north Canada recently saw some ducks but have not figured out what species they were, in Inuktitut or any other language.

An eight-nation report this month says the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet and that the North Pole could be ice-free in northern hemisphere summer by 2100, threatening indigenous cultures and perhaps wiping out creatures like polar bears.

Then they go on to report this little factoid:

In Arctic Europe, birch trees are gaining ground and Saami reindeer herders are
seeing roe deer or even elk, a forest-dwelling cousin of moose, on former lichen pastures.

"I know about 1,200 words for reindeer -- we classify them by age, sex, color, antlers," said Nils Isak Eira, who manages a herd of 2,000 reindeer in north Norway.
"I know just one word for elk -- 'sarvva'," said 50-year-old Eira. "But the animals are so unusual that many Saami use the Norwegian word 'elg.' When I was a child it was like a mythical creature."

Thrushes have been spotted in Saami areas of the Arctic in winter, apparently too lazy to bother migrating south. Foreign ministers from the eight Arctic countries are due to meet in Reykjavik on Wednesday but are sharply divided about what to do. The United States is most opposed to any drastic new action.

1200 words for Reindeer! One native word for Elk, but they borrow the Norwegian word instead. Times are changing. We are seeing disturbing signs everywhere. A Darkness may as well be rising in the East. I have but one question.
What would Gandalf do? :)

- Art Neuro