Twenty Odd - Deuce Texas Thunder

[mikeemmert]

I was reading the Yahoo News story about the reclassification of the Solar system when I came upon an illustration that is all over the web; the new Pluton candidates. One of these was 2002 TX300. I've run into the object before. I got a hold of a list of KBO's, there were about 900 of them, and looked for the brightest ones. This one is now being considered for planethood.<br /><br />It's smaller than Ceres, being less than 900 km in diameter. It is a classical Kuiper belt object whose brightness lies between 50000 Quaoar and 20000 Varuna, but it has the most eccentric ( 0.1230 and inclined (25.9 degrees) orbit of the three. It hasn't been seen in thermal infrared radiation (they looked) and together with it's absolute magnitude, this places an upper limit on diameter of 907 kilometers and a lower limit on albedo of 0.08.<br /><br />It's year is slightly less than 283 Earth years. This thing orbits way out there, where it's really cold, as I said they didn't find it with infrared equipment. It's aphelion is 48.374 AU. It's perihelion is 37.802 AU, far enough so that Neptune's gravity has little effect on it (it's not a Lagrangian). So why is it called a "hot" Classical KBO?<br /><br />From the Wikipedia link (above): "<font color="yellow">The spectrum in visible and infrared is very similar to that of Charon characterised by neutral to blue slope (1%/1000Å) with deep (60%) water absorption bands at 1.5 and 2.0 &#956;m). Mineralogical analysis indicates a substantial fraction of large water (ice) particles. The signal/noise ratio of the observations was insufficient to differentiate between amorphous or crystalline ice (crystalline ice was reported on Charon, (50000) Quaoar and 2003 EL61). The proportion of highly processed organic materials (tholins), typically present on numerous trans-Neptunian objects, is very low. This lack of irradiated mantle suggest either a recent collision or come</font>

 

[3488]

Dear Mikeemmert. Thank you very much for posting this.<br /><br />What would be useful would be to determine the shape of 2002 TX300. With the sizes quoted in the article you posted, I would expect it to be spherical, or at least very nearly so.<br /><br />A lot of these objects with Quaoar & Charon in particular appear to have large quantities of Crystalline Ice (ice that froze slowly, allowing time for large ice crystals to form, cryovolcanic activity).<br /><br />I suspect Pluto also has large quantities along with 2003 UB313 & the large Neptune moon Triton (Voyager 2 showed very clearly that Triton is very highly evolved), but their surfaces are coated with Methane Ice, which hides the water ice signature. <br /><br />The high inclination of 2002 TX300 suggests to me that the orbit has been tilted in the past perhaps by a close encounter with Neptune. The wrenching caused during the encounter caused the interior of 2002 TX300 to warm up, triggering cryovolcanic activity. Since then it has cooled down to about IMO (due to the great distance from the sun & having a fairly icy surface, & the lack of a significant IR emission) -245 Celsius (28 Kelvin).<br /><br />Please keep us informed of any more of your findings on KBOs. This is a most fascinating part of our solar system. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><font color="#000080">"I suddenly noticed an anomaly to the left of Io, just off the rim of that world. It was extremely large with respect to the overall size of Io and crescent shaped. It seemed unbelievable that something that big had not been visible before".</font> <em><strong><font color="#000000">Linda Morabito </font></strong><font color="#800000">on discovering that the Jupiter moon Io was volcanically active. Friday 9th March 1979.</font></em></p><p><font size="1" color="#000080">http://www.launchphotography.com/</font><br /><br /><font size="1" color="#000080">http://anthmartian.googlepages.com/thisislandearth</font></p><p><font size="1" color="#000080">http://web.me.com/meridianijournal</font></p> </div>

 

[mikeemmert]

Hi, Andrew;<blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr /><p>The high inclination of 2002 TX300 suggests to me that the orbit has been tilted in the past perhaps by a close encounter with Neptune.<p><hr /></p></p></blockquote>Well, it couldn't have been Neptune. Perihelion of this object is 37.802 AU, which is about 7 AU farther from the Sun than Neptune.<br /><br />Trouble is, your other points are valid. Where is that methane ice, anyway. 28K will freeze nitrogen, but from what is seen at this distance, apparently even the tholins have boiled off.<br /><br />So, <i>something</i> has heated the surface of this object.<br /><br />Although there may well have been cryovolcanism, remember that volcanos are point sources of both heat and material. What is detectable at that distance is an integration of the entire surface. In other words, all the light from the surface is concentrated into a point on the focal plane of whatever telescope or camera you're using. (The need for better telescopes belongs in Missions and Launches, I say yes to that.)<br /><br />In doing GravitySimulations, I have noticed that in most cases, an encounter with Neptune tends to crank the inclination of the object closer to the plane of the ecliptic, rather than farther. But that's chaotic.<br /><br />I was doing the GravSims to try to prove that Xena is the lost moon of Triton. But I discovered that encounters with Neptune cannot crank the inclination of an object more than about 30 degrees.<br /><br />Texas Thunder's inclination falls within that possible from the Neptune encounter, but it's perihelion falls well outside of that range. There are other objects for which this can be said, 2004 XR190 "Buffy", Sedna, and Xena. I'll have to devote posts to each of these.<br /><br />I have to go to the bank right now because I found an unauthorized purchase in my junk mail and had to stop payment, this put my whole account on hold. I hope somebody cooks up some food for thought while I'm gone.

 

[Boris_Badenov]

Didn’t Mike Brown & his team suggest the possibility of even much larger bodies out that far? If so what size would be necessary to change the inclination of 2002 TX300, & how close would the encounter have to be? <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <font color="#993300"><span class="body"><font size="2" color="#3366ff"><div align="center">. </div><div align="center">Never roll in the mud with a pig. You'll both get dirty & the pig likes it.</div></font></span></font> </div>

 

[mikeemmert]

Hi, Boris;<br /><br />Couple of quick simulations here. I created an object, "Tex" with a circular orbit at 43.088 AU, which is 2002 TX300's semimajor axis (~average orbital distance) today. Then I created an "Ogre" at 50 AU and gave it the mass of Neptune. As expected, Tex wasn't perturbed too much. "Ogre" was edited to have the mass of Jupiter and it promptly threw Tex out of the Solar system.<br /><br />A new simulation was done with Ogre at 56 AU and an inclination of 45 degrees. Tex's orbit changed chaotically, and it assumed an average inclination of about 15 degrees or so, an aphelion of 46 AU and a perihelion of 39 AU (a random sample orbit).<br /><br />Obviously I'd have to do a lot of simulations to give a good answer to your question. This was a "quick and dirty" answer so that you wouldn't get too bored.

 

[mikeemmert]

90482 Orcus, formerly 2004 DW, is another of the Kuiper Belt objects which is being considered for planethood under the new scheme:<br /><br />"<font color="yellow">Orcus is a typical plutino (an object in 2:3 orbital resonance with Neptune). Although at one point its orbit approaches that of Neptune, the resonance between the two bodies means that Orcus itself is always a great distance away from Neptune (there is always an angular separation of over 60 degress between them)<font color="white">". Orcus' perihelion is 30.53 AU and it's aphelion is 48.31 AU. This brings it as close to the Sun as Neptune, so ices should boil off from the surface. It's year is 247.92 Earth years, longer than Pluto's.<br /><br />"<font color="yellow">Observations in infrared by the European Southern Observatory give results consistent with mixtures of water ice and carbonaceous compounds. Further, the infrared spectra taken with the Gemini telescope confirmed a modest water ice signature, compatible with a cover of 15–30%, but no more than 50% of the surface. This means there is less ice than on Charon, but a similar amount to that on Triton. Limitations were also placed on the amount of methane ice (less than 30%) leaving open the possibility for discovery of other components in the future.<br /><br />KBOs display a diversity of colours and spectra even among objects with similar orbits. Orcus presents a neutral colour in comparison with the redness of an object like Ixion<font color="white">".<br /><br />That's an interesting statement, that these similar objects should have diverse colors.<br /><br />Orcus' diameter was estimated at about 1600 km, or about a thousand miles, but this estimate was derived from an assumed albedo of 0.09. Similar Charon has an albedo of about 0.35.<br /><br />The albedos of these objects are estimated by comparing thermal infrared radiation to reflected visible light. There's an awful lot that can go</font></font></font></font>

 

[mikeemmert]

Ixion was detected by the Deep Ecliptic Survey as it crossed the plane of the ecliptic, midway between aphelion 49.0773 AU and perihelion at 30.0009 AU. There's that pesky observational bias again. Notice how similar it's orbit is to Orcus, though less inclined (19.6314 degrees). I'ts also oriented opposite to Pluto, perihelion is below the ecliptic whereas Ixion's is above.<br /><br />"<font color="yellow"> Little is known about Ixion. Its coloring is moderately red (slightly redder than 50000 Quaoar) and it has a higher albedo (0.15) than the mid-sized red cubewanos: 0.10 and 0.04 for Quaoar and 20000 Varuna respectively (see TNO colour comparisons).<br /><br />The latest spectroscopic results indicate that Ixion's surface is a mixture of dark carbon and tholin, which is a heteropolymer formed by irradiation of clathrates of water and organic compounds (see TNO spectra). Water ice absobtion lines (1.5 and 2ìm) were absent (Licandro et al. 2002). Unlike Varuna, Ixion does not show greater reflectivity for longer waves (the so-called red slope) in infrared<font color="white">".<br /><br />It's kind of strange that Ixion, with dark carbon and tholins and with no signature of ice, would have a higher albedo than Orcus. Cognitive disconnect, here...<br /><br />"<font color="yellow">In Greek mythology, Ixion was one of the Lapiths, a king of Thessaly, and a son of Antion or Phlegyas. Pirithous was his son (or stepson, with Zeus being his father). Ixion married Dia, a daughter of Deioneus (or Eioneus) and promised his father-in-law a valuable present. However, he did not pay the bride price, so Deioneus stole some of Ixion's horses in retaliation. Ixion concealed his resentment and invited his father-in-law to a feast at Larissa. When Deioneus arrived, Ixion pushed him into a bed of burning coals and wood. The neighboring princes were so offended by this act of treachery (and violation of Xenia) that they refuse</font></font></font>

 

[3488]

Hi Mikeemmert.<br /><br />Thank you for your posts. I used Neptune for 2002 TX300 simply because I know of no other large planetary massed object in that region. <br /><br />Both Orcus & 2003 UB313 & the others mentioned are all so different to one another. <br /><br />I think the case for a New Horizons 2 & even a New Horizons 3 have strengthened somewhat.<br /><br />I will post again later when I have more time.<br /><br />Andrew Brown. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><font color="#000080">"I suddenly noticed an anomaly to the left of Io, just off the rim of that world. It was extremely large with respect to the overall size of Io and crescent shaped. It seemed unbelievable that something that big had not been visible before".</font> <em><strong><font color="#000000">Linda Morabito </font></strong><font color="#800000">on discovering that the Jupiter moon Io was volcanically active. Friday 9th March 1979.</font></em></p><p><font size="1" color="#000080">http://www.launchphotography.com/</font><br /><br /><font size="1" color="#000080">http://anthmartian.googlepages.com/thisislandearth</font></p><p><font size="1" color="#000080">http://web.me.com/meridianijournal</font></p> </div>

 

[mikeemmert]

Hi, Andrew;<br /><br />Both Orcus and Ixion are plutinos. I think that is a fairly good name for them, those two definitely fall into that category. These are associated with Neptune.<br /><br />I guess that they are going to lump them all together as "Plutons". But the classifications they have come up with since (starting at) 1992 are much more clarifying. Classical belt, plutino, twotino, scattered disc object, these tell you something about them. More subdivisions coming, stay tuned!<br /><br />I have been doing selected objects that have been candidates for "plutonhood". I'm not going to get to them all, Mike Brown said that if they included everything in the definition, there would be 53 "planets"! But at least I will be trying to get to the more spectacular ones, or the ones that reached the newspapers.<br /><br />Poor old Tex never even got a proper name. The only name I know of that has been proposed for it is too long; Twenty Odd - Deuce Texas Thunder <img src="/images/icons/rolleyes.gif" /> .

 

[mikeemmert]

2002 AW197was discovered by Mike Brown et.al. It has no name, so far. It's a cubewano. Anybody got a mnemonic for this one? This poor guy gets <i>no</i> respect at all!<br /><br />It has a typical cubewano orbit, 41.2764 AU X 47.4873 AU, with a period of 327.2468 years. This one has been seen by the Spitzer Infrared Observatory and they were able to come up with a size estimate:<br /><br />"<font color="yellow">Observations of thermal emissions by Spitzer give a diameter of 700±50km and a higher than expected of albedo 0.17±0.03.<br /><br />ESO analysis of spectra reveals a strong red slope and no presence of water ice (in contrast to Quaoar, also red) suggesting organic material (see comparison of colours and typical composition inferred from spectra of the TNOs)<font color="white">".<br /><br />No water ice here, either? Notice that the measured albedo is higher than the estimate for Orcus. They need to measure Orcus. With the expectation of more discoveries, maybe the next generation of IR telescopes needs to be launched by the SDHLLV. Gonna need a lot of ice for this party.</font></font>

 

[mikeemmert]

When the discovery of 50000 Quaoar was announced with great fanfare, it was said that it was nearly as large as Pluto. I wondered about this claim; it was based on an albedo of 0.04.<br /><br />I knew it wasn't the lost moon of Triton. It's orbit (44.896 AU x 41.914 AU, 286 year period) precluded that. It was more like a planet's orbit than what would become known as a plutino's orbit. It's one of the "hot" Classical KBO's with an inclination of 7.983 degrees. I am speaking of "hot" as in the degree of it's orbital tilt with respect to the plane of the ecliptic. But that's not too "hot". If there is a serial perturber in the outer solar system, then Quaoar has happened to be on the other side of the solar system when it passed.<br /><br />I'm human and there was a natural desire on my part to see the size go down when the actual measurements came in. It did. It's diameter measured the the Point Spread Function method from HST is 1260 km. They also used the thermal technique which pretty much confirmed this. In both cases the investigators were right up against the limits of the techniques. The discoverer's page (the Brown team from Caltech, with apparently Chad Trujillo being on watch that night since his name is listed first) describes these techniques with links to the relevant papers.<br /><br />The real albedo of Quaoar turns out to be about 0.10. Crystalline ice has been detected on it's surface. From the Wiki article: "<font color="yellow">Quaoar is believed to be a mixture of rock and ice, like other Kuiper Belt Objects; however its very low albedo (estimated at 0.1 but still much higher than that of 20000 Varuna: 0.04) indicates that the ice<font color="white">(s, I think they are talking about stuff that's gas at room temperature)<font color="yellow"> has disappeared from its outer layers. The surface is moderately red (simi</font></font></font>

 

[3488]

Deare Mikeemmert,<br /><br />Keep these posts coming. Fascinating reading.<br /><br />Do you think at one time 50000 Quaoar was a satellite of a larger body? Just trying to find an explanation of the huge quanities of crystalline ice (tidal flexing much like Jupiter's Io, Saturn's Enceladus or Neptune's Triton)?<br /><br />2003 EL61 is a weird one. Large, cigar shaped, crystalline ice, two moons. What the hell happened there?<br /><br />Please keep these coming. We must push for decent observations of Orcus as well.<br /><br />Andrew Brown. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><font color="#000080">"I suddenly noticed an anomaly to the left of Io, just off the rim of that world. It was extremely large with respect to the overall size of Io and crescent shaped. It seemed unbelievable that something that big had not been visible before".</font> <em><strong><font color="#000000">Linda Morabito </font></strong><font color="#800000">on discovering that the Jupiter moon Io was volcanically active. Friday 9th March 1979.</font></em></p><p><font size="1" color="#000080">http://www.launchphotography.com/</font><br /><br /><font size="1" color="#000080">http://anthmartian.googlepages.com/thisislandearth</font></p><p><font size="1" color="#000080">http://web.me.com/meridianijournal</font></p> </div>

 

[mikeemmert]

<blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr /><p>Do you think at one time 50000 Quaoar was a satellite of a larger body? <p><hr /></p></p></blockquote>Well...no, I don't think that. BUT:<blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr /><p>Just trying to find an explanation of the huge quanities of crystalline ice (tidal flexing much like Jupiter's Io, Saturn's Enceladus or Neptune's Triton)?<p><hr /></p></p></blockquote>I can't totally discount that Quaoar has a satellite. I'm afraid you'll have to judge this for yourself. Here goes from the Brown team's website:<br /><br />"<font color="yellow">You can see the HST images <font color="blue">here<font color="white"> (there's a link; sorry, it won't copy, you'll have to go there from the other link)<font color="yellow">. Note that the vertical elongation is due to object motion during the exposure ("blurring"), and not the size of the object. Also, there is a paper about this technique <font color="blue">here<font color="white">". <font color="green">I used green for the links I couldn't copy but the words, "here", were almost as <font color="red">hard to see<font color="green"> as Quaoar.<font color="white"><br /><br />If you read the paper and look at the images carefully, you can see that there <i>might</i> be a satellite lurking in the smearing caused by Quaoar's motion. Also, the real image is not quite true to the model. Evidence in this particular case is so tenuous that if you hadn't brought it up, I wouldn't have. BUT:<blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr /><p>2003 EL61 is a weird one. Large, cigar shaped, crystalline ice, two moons. What the hell happened there?<p><hr /></p></p></blockquote>This thread is about the objects that don't get any respect. I have one more to do on Varuna, and it's due today because IAU is making an announcement today. I believe I'll have to start a new thread about the objects that get more respect and "Santa" (2003 EL61) is ce</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font>

 

[mikeemmert]

20000 Varuna was discovered by R. McMillan of Spacewatch. It was discovered because at this period of time, it is near the plane of the ecliptic. There are more ongoing surveys of the plane of the ecliptic than outside of it, several of them designed to intercept objects threatening Earth. I certainly don't object to National (Global) Defense goals of this nature. But the fact is, there is observational bias in the data about the Kuiper belt.<br /><br />Varuna is a moderately "hot" Classical KBO, a cubewano; perihelion 40.915 AU, aphelion 45.335 AU, inclination 17.2 degrees, with a 283 year year. If there is a serial perturber, Varuna has been more affected than Quaoar; it happened to be on the same side of the Solar System when the (hypothetical {<img src="/images/icons/crazy.gif" /> idea, so far}) object passed.<br /><br />"(Varuna)...<font color="yellow">is named after the Hindu god Varuna. It previously had the provisional designation 2000 WR106 and has been precovered in plates dating back to 1953. Under the International Astronomical Union's 2006 draft proposal for the definition of a planet, Varuna would be labelled a planet if it were proven to be spherical...<br /><br />...<br /><br />"Varuna has a rotational period of approximately 3.17 hours (or 6.34 hours, depending on whether the light curve is single or double-peaked). Given the rapid rotation, unknown at this time (2002) for objects so large, (Jewitt & Sheppard, 2002) consider possible models for the shape and density concluding that the most probable interpretation fitting the data is an elongated spheroid (ratio of axis 2:3), composed from a porous mixture of rock, with a mean density around 1g/cm3 (roughly the density of water ice). Since then, another even larger, rapidly rotating (3.9 h) object 2003 EL61 has been discovered. An elongated shape was also suggested in that case<font color="white">".<br /><br />Is Varuna big enough to des</font></font>

 

[mikeemmert]

This Wikipedia article on 2003 EL61 starts off with an unseemly passage about political infighting that's painflu for me to read. Sounds like Free Space.<br /><br />There's no official name for this object yet. If you don't mind, I'm going to call it "Santa". This was Mike Brown's codename for the object. This post is going to be pretty long, so I'm going to shorten the name a little. It has at least two moons, one has a Brown nickname, "Rudolph", and if you don't mind I'm going to call the other one by the name of another Santa reindeer, "Donner", to memorialize the sacrifice of the Donner expedition's animals in their trek across America.<br /><br />Santa's year is 285.4 x Earth's year. Has anybody noticed a pattern of the lengths of KBO years? Santa is classified as a cubewano with an orbit of 35.164 AU x 51.526 AU, giving a pretty long eccentricity of 0.18874. It's a cubewano because at the perihelion of 35.164 AU, It is not significantly perturbed by Neptune. I wonder if this has always been the case? It's inclination is 28.19°, making it a pretty "hot" cubewano.<br /><br />Santa is one of the strangest astronomical objects ever discovered, certainly in our own solar system: "<font color="yellow">Too often, the only element to estimate the size of a trans-Neptunian object is its magnitude assuming the albedo. For larger objects, thermal emissions can be measured providing an independent measure for the albedo. 2003 EL61 is exceptional as its two moons provide the means to determine directly the mass of the system from Kepler's third law. The estimated mass is 4.2×1021 kg, 28% the mass of the Plutonian system.[4] Moreover, as the object rotates extremely rapidly, faster than any known body in the solar system larger than 100 km in diameter, this rotation should distort its shape into an oblate spheroid. http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:-Is9XpqwZXEJ:www.gps.caltech.ed</safety_wrapper</font>

 

[exoscientist]

What does "Twenty Odd - Deuce Texas Thunder" mean?<br /><br /> - Bob <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[mikeemmert]

Free Space

 

[mikeemmert]

2002 TX300.