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Something Deep Inside Pluto Is Replenishing Its Atmosphere
- jessaustin 11y agoWired editors should investigate a valuable technique for clarity of expression: scientific notation.
- blowski 11y agoIt's journalism. It's not about accuracy or clarity, but the impression it makes on the reader. All those zeroes make a bigger impression.
- scarmig 11y agoAnd I thought analogies in scientific journalism were annoying. I certainly prefer them to this. What's biggest: 7000000000000000000000 grams 700000000000 gigagrams 70000000000000000000000000 milligrams The mass of Ceres The mass of the water currently in the Pacific Ocean The mass of the Earth's atmosphere The mass of Mt Everest
- thfuran 11y agoThe one about the ocean takes up the most bytes. It's biggest.
- cabirum 11y ago57900000000000 refrigerators http://recoveringphysicist.com/23/journalistic-units-of-measure http://recoveringphysicist.com/23/journalistic-units-of-meas...
- schoen 11y agoYikes, the two of these that are largest seem to be well within the same order of magnitude, and I'm not sure how to be sure which is bigger!
- S4M 11y agoIt's true, but the article almost sounds like "Lol Pluto shouldn't have nitrogen anymore but it has. Santa Claus?"
- sp332 11y agoThat's not journalism, that's poetry.
- rubidium 11y agoUg. Article is terrible. I quote: "Considering that Pluto has been around for more than four billion years, the odds are pretty friggin’ slim that humans would meet the dwarf planet during its brief phase of atmosphere-having. No, something is replenishing the supply. Scientists, you got some ‘splaining to do." What is this, third grade. Here's the actual science: http://iopscience.iop.org/2041-8205/808/2/L50/pdf/2041-8205_808_2_L50.pdf http://iopscience.iop.org/2041-8205/808/2/L50/pdf/2041-8205_...
- gizmo686 11y agoNot directly relevant, but we did come close to meeting Pluto after it lost its atmosphere, due to seasonal variation (which was one of the motivations for launching New Horizons when we did). Of course, in that context, we are not talking about atmospheric escape, but condensation, and the atmosphere will come back in a few hundred years when Pluto's orbit takes it close to the sun again.
- jonursenbach 11y agoIt's Wired. Calm down.
- sigmar 11y agoThe abstract of that states: >We conclude that either the escape of N2 from Pluto’s atmosphere was on average much lower than the predictions for the current epoch, or that internal activity could be necessary to bring N2 to the surface and resupply escape losses. Isn't the second part of that sentence pretty much what Wired is trying to get at?
- aaron695 11y ago> What is this, third grade. What are we, in a retirement village? As long as the science is good, I don't care how it was written. Could we at least get the reporting to be factual before we worry about proper style. And I thought it was kinda novel unlike the research paper which is a pretty hard read for someone not researching this topic.
- coldtea 11y ago
- datalus 11y agoAliens.
- remarkEon 11y ago-> Pluto has been around for about four billion years, and according to the best math, it should have lost about 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 grams of nitrogen (give or take a zero) since then. What is "the best math"? Is it better than "the good math"? I get the whole writing for pop-sci thing that's in vogue right now, but being cavalier with significant figures or being imprecise with language leads to a shallow understanding of the topic presented. Especially when writing about space, where it's already difficult to convey the scale of what's described.
- rev_bird 11y agoI'm not debating the whole "cavalier with significant figures or being imprecise with language" bit, but "the best math" seems to mean "the most likely guess given current information."
- jschwartzi 11y agoWhat is clear to me is that we don't have the best math. We only have the good math, and the journalists aren't sharing. Want better math? Contact Kelsi N. Singer and S. Alan Stern.
- linkydinkandyou 11y agoMaybe a monolith!?
- timharding 11y agoUnreadable.