"Xena" now Eris

[ittiz]

Yeah the general news agencies are going to feed into the "dwarf planets are planets" idea. The title of the story on Fox News was "New planet gets a name".

 

[kheider]

<font color="yellow">>Yeah the general news agencies are going to feed into the "dwarf planets are planets" idea. The title of the story on Fox News was "New planet gets a name". </font><br /><br />The media will probably do that until the number of 'Dwarf Planets' exceeds the number of (Major) Planets.<br /><br />In 1850 we had 18 Planets. (Source: 1850 Annual of Scientific Discovery)<br /><br />Hopefully at some point 'Dwarf Planets' will be called Planetoids so that we have asteroids, planetoids, and Planets.<br /><br />-- Kevin Heider

 

[MeteorWayne]

I much prefer the name "planetoids" to dwarf planets.<br />It's much more accurately descriptive.<br /> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><font color="#000080"><em><font color="#000000">But the Krell forgot one thing John. Monsters. Monsters from the Id.</font></em> </font></p><p><font color="#000080">I really, really, really, really miss the "first unread post" function</font><font color="#000080"> </font></p> </div>

 

[mikeemmert]

It appears now that you were correct, Mike Brown's name was not accepted. The name he submitted was apparently a creation/underworld god from a tradition ohter than Greco-Roman. (Wikipedia)<br /><br />I still like "Xena". After all, I have my own name associated with the object now and they have named it after the Apple of Discord lady and the incidents surrounding the Trojan war.<br /><br />Here's from the Wiki article on "clearing the neighbourhood" (sic: British spelling) that defines where the controversy lies:<br /><br />"<font color="yellow">Controversy<br /> <br />(Alan) Stern, currently leading the NASA New Horizons mission to Pluto, objects to the reclassification of Pluto on the basis that—like Pluto—Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Neptune have not cleared their orbital neighbourhoods either. Earth co-orbits with 10,000 near-Earth asteroids, and Jupiter has 100,000 Trojan asteroids in its orbital path. "If Neptune had cleared its zone, Pluto wouldn't be there," he now says.[4].<br /><br />In fact "clearing the neighborhood" refers to an object being the dominant mass in its vicinity, for instance Earth being many times more massive than all of the NEA's combined, and Neptune "dwarfing" Pluto and the rest of the KBO's.[3] In 2000 Stern himself wrote, "we define an überplanet as a planetary body in orbit about a star that is dynamically important enough to have cleared its neighboring planetesimals ..." and a few paragraphs later, "From a dynamical standpoint, our solar system clearly contains 8 überplanets"—including Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Neptune. Stern and Levison's paper shows that it's possible to estimate whether an object is likely to dominate its neighborhood given only the object's mass and orbital period, known values even for extrasolar planets.[1]<font color="white">".<br /><br />Stern's actually arguing against</font></font>

 

[MeteorWayne]

<i>MSNBC is hardly any kind of authoritative scientific source of much of anything.</i><br /><br />And NewScientist is? <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><font color="#000080"><em><font color="#000000">But the Krell forgot one thing John. Monsters. Monsters from the Id.</font></em> </font></p><p><font color="#000080">I really, really, really, really miss the "first unread post" function</font><font color="#000080"> </font></p> </div>

 

[mikeemmert]

Hmmm...I looked at my last post and mistakenly included a picture caption in the body of the message. I had to edit it. Sorry about that.<br /><br />So -<br /><br />I'm going to post the picture! It's in svg. format, I hope it's approved. The artist has graciously granted general permission (it's a wikipicture).<br /><br />I cropped it to fit, cutting out some black space. The scale on the right is inclination in degrees, on the top in red is semimajor axis in Astronomical Units, and the size depicted is a guess at the relative sizes, making (often questionable, IMHO) assumptions about the albedos of the objects.<br /><br />Notice the distinct population classes depicted here. There are a lot of objects in the same 2:3 resonance as Pluto, these are shown in red. Resonant objects are in red, there are other resonances, like 1:2.<br /><br />For those of you who don't know what a resonance is, that is a situation where (for example, Pluto) one object makes an integer number of orbits while another makes a certain ratio of an integer number of orbits. Pluto is in a 2:3 resonance with Neptune, in other words, when Pluto makes two orbits around the Sun, Pluto makes three. The other red objects clustered around Pluto have the same resonant orbit. The resonances are marked at the top of the image, superimposed on semimajor axis.<br /><br />There's something kind of strange about the nonresonant objects, which are depicted in blue. Most of them are clustered at low inclinations, orbiting near the plane of the ecliptic (or, the invariant plane, which is nearly the same only is based on all the planets, rather than just Earth). But there is another group of objects clustered around 25 or 30 degrees. Reality is probably more striking than that, because of the observational bias produced by the fact that the invariant plane is much more thoroughly explored than the high-inclination regions. Many of the high inclination objects were discovered as they crossed the invariant plan

 

[alokmohan]

Sorry Xena is not that bright we thogt.It barely gets pass marks.http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20060415/fob8.asp

 

[mikeemmert]

Hi, alokmohan <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" /><br /><br />I made your link clickable: Brilliant! Tenth planet turns out to be a shiner. <br /><br />While I was at it, I visited Mike Brown's website on the moon of Eris. What I was trying to find out is if the measurements on the mass of Eris, found by tracking Dysmonia, were ready yet. Here's what I found on the website:<br /><br />"<font color="yellow"><b>When will we know more?</b><br /><br />Soon.<font color="white">"<br /><br />Oh, well. I have been waiting for this announcement for some time. For those of you for whom English is not their first language, Eris is the same brightness that it has been since it's discovery, about magnitude 19. It is the <i>diameter</i> whose estimate has changed, to 2384 km (from the link you posted, I see no margin of error at that site).<br /><br />What could have happened to the mass measurement? I can only guess. But it would be considerably complicated if Dysmonia turned out to have an eccentric orbit.<br /><br />And <i>that</i> can only happen if Eris turns out to have more than one moon. That's entirely possible. Pluto has three. 2003 EL61 has at least two. Those objects are considerably closer than Eris; Pluto's moons escaped detection for decades as technology slowly improved to the point they could be found.<br /><br />So, what makes Eris have such a highly reflective surface? It's almost as reflective as Enceladus' surface. Could it be that Eris is coated with ice from an Enceladus-style geyser continously repainting the surface? With the present state of knowlege of Eris, this would be, as stevehw33 might put it, "(mutters <img src="/images/icons/crazy.gif" /> under his breath)This is the wildest speculation, with <b>no</b> evidence <b>whatsoever</b> to back it up!"<br /><br />Hmm...I guess I'll just have</font></font>

 

[vandivx]

<blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr /><p>Eris is 1000 times better than Xena. Whenever I hear the name Xena, I can't stop thinking of a bunch of nerds drooling. Xena is just as bad a name as Buffy the Vampire Slayer.<p><hr /></p></p></blockquote><br /><br />sorry but in my eyes that 'bunch of nerds' (fans of the serial) you talk about tower over you and the naming comitee - presumably composed of dry stuffy and pretentious schoolars who have no sense of humour anymore and who wouldn't know what heroism is all about if they stumbled on the little of it that remains in the world today - sadly last bits of it surviving in movies only thanks to people like you among other who ridicule this movie serial, I feel genuinely sorry for you offsprings should you have any<br /><br />I have started watching this serial just recently and seen only the first season of it so far but it has in it everyting one might want from such movie for its target audience (probably teenagers) and because today's movies for adult audience are mostly ladden with anti heroism with the humour of the smirking or at best of the empty headed variety, even adults end up watching this movie serial or at least those of them who managed to keep some healthy outlook on life, the rest are ridiculing them and or making lewd sexual remarks, whatever floats their boats<br /><br />there might have been some good reason why the name Xena wasn't suitable in this particular case (I think naming convention follows some theme for a given neighbourhood or type of objects) but the damning thing is that it seems to have been rejected as such, not reserved for possible future use for some other more suitable objects<br /><br />also I always thought that the convention used to be to give new objects some technical name, some arbitrary combination of numerals and letters untill the suitable name could be decided upon, if this poor sod of an astronomer chose Xena's name to insure its later rejection and his motivation was t <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[mikeemmert]

<blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr /><p>Whenever I hear the name Xena, I can't stop thinking of a bunch of nerds drooling.<p><hr /></p></p></blockquote>Riiight!!!<br /><br /><img src="/images/icons/cool.gif" />

 

[mikeemmert]

Thank you, vanDivX <img src="/images/icons/cool.gif" /> . As you can easily see from my last post, I am definitely a fan of <i>Xena: Warrior Princess</i>. I started watching it because, frankly, I found Renee O'Connor extremely attractive, moreso than TV news prettyfaces and in fact the most beautiful woman on television (that's a very bad picture of her {and it doesn't hurt that she's a local girl, from here in Austin}) and very soon found the show to be an excellent television series. It could be watched on several levels; humor, adventure, morality shows, theme exploration, it could be as shallow as you wanted it to be and, a mark of the true genius of it's creators, as deep and profound as any show you could find. One episode managed to combine the political and romantic questions of Shakespere's <i>Romeo and Juliet</i> with the political complexity of the Iraq situation - and even explored the philosophical question of Einstein's Grandfather Paradox! And they threw in a feat of ballistic precision that far exceeds William Tell and even rivals the Voyager missions!<br /><br />Xena's world was a lawless place in a lawless time, a timeless theme for sure, but no horse opera I have ever seen does such a good job of exploring it. The key was the contrast between the two main protagonists. Xena was large, strong, somewhat ignorant at times, displaying a savage street savvy at other times, and occasionally brutal and extremely violent. Gabrielle was sweet, soft, highly intelligent, with a streak of starry-eyed optimism that was sometimes naive. Sometimes Gabrielle could make her way work; sometimes Xena had to break things up. We have such conflicts in our personal, local, and international dealings and it is educational and instructive to examine these tales.<br /><br />I think the Xena myths were better than the Greek myths. Over 2000 years have elapsed and we know more as a species

 

[vandivx]

"Planet X" rings very weak bell in my memory, I don't follow astronomy from the astronomers angle but rather from theoretical physics angle (Cosmology mostly) and stuff like naming bodies etc I may notice or not as it is not in the center of my interest<br /><br />as to the movie, it has many sides to it as you mention, like that 'friendship of complementary nature' which I think is the ultimate basis of any healthy kind of relationship where each side brings in what the other lacks and needs and can admire in the other<br /><br />Gabrielle is Slavic type in appearance (Eastern Europe, Western Russia) although she has Scottish background (I've just looked it up), personally my favourite is Xena - not really for her looks although she does have that) but for her independence, for example as it was so strikingly shown in that episode where she tells Gabrielle of the difference in one's soul after one has killed people - IMO it is not about some stain of the soul or lets say sin (as per conventional views) but about independence when one stands alone and has to decide or takes on himself to decide on his own the weighty issue of the lives of others - even if they are plain crooks, decissions of that kind do place one appart from human heard, from that comfortable abode which extremely few individuals ever dare to leave, step outside of it and dare to judge (in deed, not just in voice) on their own and basicaly dare to contradict the majority (remainds me of the Eve and the original sin - eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge which separated the human race from animals and brought it the eternal inquietude of soul at the same time...)<br /><br />it would seem that there is no place for anything like that in our modern society but that is no so at all, for example those that advanced science by some fundamental discoveries typically stood alone in that way and it is no different today, often after such discoveries become widely known and accepted it turns up that many ot <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[mikeemmert]

Hi, vanDivX;<br /><br />I wound up spending a lot of time on this post! I've read the thread over to see if any rumors needed clearing up. Here's word on all that from Mike Brown's Eris website:<br /><br />"<font color="yellow">In Greek mythology, Eris is the goddess of warfare and strife. She stirs up jealousy and envy to cause fighting and anger among men. At the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, the parents of the Greek hero Achilles, all the gods with the exception of Eris were invited, and, enraged at her exclusion, she spitefully caused a quarrel among the goddesses that led to the Trojan war. In the astronomical world, Eris stirred up a great deal of trouble among the international astronomical community when the question of its proper designation led to a raucous meeting of the IAU in Prague. At the end of the conference, IAU members voted to demote Pluto and Eris to dwarf-planet status, leaving the solar system with only eight planets.<br /><br />The satellite of Eris has received the offical name Dysnomia, who in Greek mythology is Eris' daughter and the demon spirit of lawlessness. As Dysnomia is a bit of a mouthful, we tend to simply call the satellite Dy, for short.<br /><br />As promised for the past year, the name Xena (and satellite Gabrielle) were simply placeholders while awaiting the IAU's decision on how an official name was to be proposed. As that process dragged on, however, many people got to know Xena and Gabrielle as the real names of these objects and are sad to see them change. We admit to some sadness ourselves.We used the names for almost two years now and are having a hard time swtiching. But for those who miss Xena, look for the obvious nod in the new name of the moon of Eris<font color="white">".<br /><br />I didn't like the artistic depiction of Eris the godess on the Wikipedia site, it was from the period and I guess I just didn't like the artist. So there'</font></font>

 

[mikeemmert]

I found out that Discord is Latin for Eris, which is in Greek. So, the Xena character actually <i>is</i> Eris! All we have to do is translate from Greek instead of Latin into English! After all, the show translates into English...<br /><br />Eris and Aphrodite causing trouble...

 

[mikeemmert]

Let's face it, Meighan, a great actress, plays a mean old battleaxe. So on most photos she has some kind of a scowl on her face. That's why I chose a photo of the actress rather than the character. But I found one "in character" (that I can use since it's labeled "promotional photo") which I can use to associate Eris with a beautiful babe.<br /><br />Of course that's not really a smile, it's a grin <img src="/images/icons/cool.gif" />. That dangerous-looking bow? According to an article I read in <i>Scientific American</i> (print version) the most dangerous ancient bows were made like that. Note that it's curved where the bowstring is attached to the bow, so the leverage of the bowstring on the bow changes as you draw the bowstring. Most tension occurs as you first start drawing the arrow back. It gets easier, and is fairly easy to keep cocked. When the arrow is released, the bowstring effectively gets shorter, which changes it's frequency (think guitar string). The shorter frequency when the arrow is about to fly free tranlates to higher velocity. Pretty high tech.<br /><br />Of course, who's looking at the bow?

 

[vandivx]

what to say, perhaps we should have comitee sitting couple years after every baby is born and then rename it as some elite selected comitee of the community see fit (I fail to see how parents can have right to select names for their babies which they don't 'own' if discoverers can't choose names for their discovered bodies), never mind that parents got used to the two years old name they have given the baby originally, if you get born in some babyboom you might have your name changed to proper one as teenager or worse, on the other hand some lucky bozos might even live and die under the original name their parents have given them as placeholders because the comitee didn't have time to sit on it...<br /><br />to me it seems like that comitee chose different name to make it look like they actually do something and call attention to themselves and nothing else and the discoverer be damned<br /><br />vanDivX <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[vandivx]

"I found out that Discord is Latin for Eris, which is in Greek. So, the Xena character actually is Eris! All we have to do is translate from Greek instead of Latin into English! After all, the show translates into English..."<br />------------------------------<br />lets hope our names won't be translated into some language and we won't be told those are the same names really and that from now on we will be known under them<br /><br />"Eris and Aphrodite causing trouble..."<br />no idea what those two are supposed to be (what movie or show) but they look to me run of the mill empty faces, sort of official criterion of what passes for being pretty and might win you miss Kansas (insert here your favourite state) <img src="/images/icons/wink.gif" /><br /><br />that photo with the bow just above, she has face one solid mask, who knows what hag might be hiding under that, I am always leery of these painted women - how they look in morning LOL<br /><br />still the movie might not be bad, I saw on European TV some years back several installments of an Italian fairy tale series set in some fantasy world and it was actually quite good, it had certain ironic humour to it but I can't find it anymore and have no idea what it was called or anything<br /><br />hope I didn't offend anybody too directly by my comments <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" /><br /><br />vanDivX <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[alokmohan]

We have forgotten our original topic,subplanet.

 

[mikeemmert]

No, alokmohan, the thead title is ""Xena" now Eris", implying it's about the name change.<br /><br />But, it is a bit of a subtopic. I have noticed that 2003 EL61 doesn't have a permanent name yet. Brown called it "Santa" because it was discovered around Christmastime. By Brown. But the latest twist in that drama was that credit for the discovery has reverted back to José Luis Ortiz Moreno, an astronomer at the Sierra Nevada Observatory in Spain, and colleagues Francisco José Aceituno Castro and Pablo Santos-Sanz.<br /><br />"<font color="yellow">A Caltech team consisting of Michael E. Brown, Chad Trujillo, and David Rabinowitz had been observing the object for half a year with the 1.3 m SMARTS Telescope, but had not yet made the data public. Brown and his collaborators initially supported giving Ortiz and his group credit for the discovery, but withdrew support when they found reason to suspect that Ortiz may have used discovery data from Brown's team, which had inadvertently been made publicly available on the web.<br /><br />A week before Ortiz's discovery announcement, on July 20, Brown's team had published an abstract of a report they intended to use to announce the discovery, in which the object was referred to by the internal code name K40506A. Typing this code into internet search engines allowed anyone to find the observation logs of Brown's group, including the observed positions of the object. Third-party web server logs indicated that the page in question had been accessed by an IP address used by computers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía where Ortiz's group worked.[1] Brown's group accused Ortiz's group of a serious breach of scientific ethics and asked the Minor Planet Center to strip them of discovery status.[2]<br /><br />Ortiz later admitted he accessed the internet telescope logs with the relevant information a day before making his announcement, but denied any wrongdoing<fon></fon></font>

 

[alokmohan]

1000 TNO fantastic.

 

[mikeemmert]

Thanks for the TNO list, Steve. I've downloaded it. Since I'm going back to school, I won't be able to do anything with it anytime soon, but I do have some investigations of it. I wish there were more hours in a day, but if there were, they would make the course harder. <br /><br />Well, Steve, you caught me making an error posting (<img src="/images/icons/blush.gif" />). First I thought, "I didn't say that!" but when I checked back on my post, in fact I had. OK so let me straighten it out:<br /><br />"Discord" was the name of a character in the television series "<i>Xena: Warrior Princess</i>". The character "Discord" is not the same as the character "Xena". Discord was portrayed by actress Meighan Desmond, and Xena was played by Lucy Lawless. Very, very separate characters; in Discord's last appearance on the show, Xena cuts off her head (<img src="/images/icons/tongue.gif" />) . Obviously the characters didn't like each other. But the actresses got along just fine.<br /><br />That was more of an error of syntax and articulateness rather than a factual error. I've left it up there with this disclaimer. Don't let this happen to you. <br /><br />There were plans, in the 5th season, to replace Gabrielle as a sidekick with Meighan Desmond. However, Ms. Desmond was offered a lucrative role in a movie and took it, so Gabrielle remained and they killed off Ms. Desmond's character.

 

[3488]

The 1,000 mark has been reached in the TNO count. I wonder if New Horizons could be directed to one???<br /><br />Anyway, hopefully we will have some HST observations later this year, to observe Eris, the motion of Gabrielle orbiting Eris, to:<br /><br />(1), Settle the mass once & for all of Eris & putting this to the known size, determine the density & possibly get a clue concerning the internal make up. Is it like Pluto?<br /><br />(2). Obtain spectra of both Eris & Dysnomia seperately, is Dysnomia a block knocked off Eris, did Dysnomia form around Eris, or is Dysnomia a captured smaller KBO with an independant history?<br /><br />(3). Does Eris have more smaller moons, like those recently discovered around Pluto (Nix & Hydra)?<br /><br />(4). Determine the rotational period & rotational direction of Eris.<br /><br />(5). Determine the axial tilt of Eris. Does it have weird seasons like the Uranus system, 2 Pallas, 7 Iris, 433 Eros, 511 Davida, 951 Gaspra & the Pluto system?<br /><br />(6). Does Eris show markings on the surface?<br /><br />(7). Does Dysonomia orbit Eris in a prograde of retrograde direction?<br /><br />(8). Does Dysnomia orbit Eris above the equator, or is it highly inclined?<br /><br />(9). Does Dysnomia follow a circular orbit around Eris, or is it highly eccentric?<br /><br />Not asking for much am I??<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>

 

[MeteorWayne]

Just for a good year <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" /> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><font color="#000080"><em><font color="#000000">But the Krell forgot one thing John. Monsters. Monsters from the Id.</font></em> </font></p><p><font color="#000080">I really, really, really, really miss the "first unread post" function</font><font color="#000080"> </font></p> </div>

 

[3488]

Happy New Year MeteorWayne.<br /><br />Things are looking up now, my wife is back from China, etc.<br /><br />I just hope we get to see some interesting things this year.<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>

 

[MeteorWayne]

Happy New Year back at ya!<br /><br />I'm sure we'll get to see MANY interesting things this year. We have the rovers, MRO, Cassini, a NH flyby of the gas Giants, and more exploration of the outer solar system from ever improving ground and space based telescopes.<br /><br />Every year gets better now <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" /> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><font color="#000080"><em><font color="#000000">But the Krell forgot one thing John. Monsters. Monsters from the Id.</font></em> </font></p><p><font color="#000080">I really, really, really, really miss the "first unread post" function</font><font color="#000080"> </font></p> </div>