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Second ‘impossible’ ring found around distant dwarf planet
- mgamache 3y agoNon-paywall https://phys.org/news/2023-04-dwarf-planet-quaoar.html#:~:text=A%20large%20international%20team%20of,studying%20the%20first%20known%20ring https://phys.org/news/2023-04-dwarf-planet-quaoar.html#:~:te....
- mellosouls 3y agoLacks the exciting, untruthful, "impossible" key clickbait word, something is amiss...
- shagie 3y agoGift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/27/science/quaoar-rings-kuiper-belt.html?unlocked_article_code=MX4PHUSRcx9aKOVPwfNYbpXzrEGNeB8WgCXUHb7KwMHPyyfHqQDJOaVDeez-XG3NzmO6a2oZgodZxeWzy8pTFCpOX6P8fLGbdwfWt29vfdZg9O_Qc3FxELSqWLu8JomGgYdsbuvA4g0KjotKDMz_wVO4YLnskDTM1mKqhso7bUcm0Wj-qeQqp5LmGHBSR3jwJBnau1WqHLHliIn_aWkS6EAkLGSlXchH4GiCzly2spoOg42_KfF7NXsgXLgZnv3q20zim6r3czni0Mwy_Pvu5QRjqXQ3xQpflu2Hg3nSyXxExa_1cYHdeNFzM14ywUnQeWlUUpWhyU55t-hMgMQkNjee&giftCopy=1_CurrentCopy&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/27/science/quaoar-rings-kuip...
- miah_ 3y agoFWIW gift links don't work if you turn off all tracking stuff in Firefox. It still always asks me to buy a sub to nytimes. archive.today/archive.org links are so much more useful.
- jmclnx 3y agoFar from a expert, I wonder if it has a small unseen satellite a bit away that keeps them together ?
- ksherlock 3y agoOR a small seen satellite: "A potential explanation for Quaoar’s distant rings is the presence of a moon, Weywot. The moon may have created gravitational disturbances that prevented the ring’s particles from accreting into additional moons. Both rings occur in locations near what are known as resonances with Weywot, and the resonances may turn out to be more important than the Roche limit for determining whether rings turn into moons or remain as rings."
- actionfromafar 3y agoWaitwhat? Nice name.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoI’m just worried we will give a super silly name to the planet of our future overlords
- actionfromafar 3y agoYeah, if the rings is actually solar panel satellites kept in orbit by design
- hinkley 3y agoOrbital death ray platform.
- jonathankoren 3y agoYou live on a planet named after dirt.
- fvrghl 3y agoSeems like they should rename it at this point.
- George83728 3y agoI'd have preferred a name from classical roman/greek religion to keep the theme going, but Quaoar is still a mythical name so at least it partially fits the theme. But why should rings matter?
- cwkoss 3y agoI'm glad they are getting away from roman/greek gods. Space should not be limited by eurocentrism.
- George83728 3y agoOther cultures already have other names for the planets, no? Roman pantheism is a long dead religion anyway.
- cwkoss 3y agoNASA is not part of the roman/greek culture, but uses those names.
- George83728 3y agoI was referring to the implied "euro" culture which you brought up by saying these names are "eurocentric". Obviously NASA aren't Romans. What does NASA have to do with it anyway? Isn't it the National Observatory in Brazil that is primarily responsible for the observations of this planet? NASA doesn't own space.
- w0de0 3y agoNo, other cultures do not have a name for an extrasolar planet just discovered. Moreover, the extant names from the Roman pantheon are universal within the international scientific community. They are also nearly exhausted. I find it tedious to reject names from other pantheons. Not least because they are exceptionally cool - Quaoar and ʻOumuamua are stellar and divine names. Of all things, should not astronomy inspire us to grok human culture as a global and syncretic whole, as opposed to a parochial set of divisions in which English speakers may only use Greco-Roman gods?
- metadat 3y agoLong-term archive links: https://archive.today/ysh6g https://archive.today/ysh6g https://web.archive.org/web/20230501172303/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/27/science/quaoar-rings-kuiper-belt.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230501172303/https://www.nytim...
- tagami 3y agoPerhaps these rings exist because an event happened recently on the cosmic scale and had yet to devolve/evolve.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- p1esk 3y agoI'm not saying it was aliens. But it was aliens.
- TheMagicHorsey 3y agoNot sure if you wanted a laugh. But you got a laugh out of me.
- golem14 3y agoQuagaars, for sure!
- sdfghswe 3y agoI hate it when publications label scientific discoveries "impossible". It makes scientists look like idiots. OBVIOUSLY scientists understand that if something has been experimentally verified then it's by definition not impossible and the theory has to be improved. But I wonder if the general public understands that scientists understand that. Or if they imagine scientists going "Sir, an animal big as a house with a tail on his face? Impossible!"
- taejavu 3y ago…that’s why it’s in quotes.
- sdfghswe 3y agoWhy use quotes with ambiguous words when you can just use unambiguous words? Small vocabulary or what? If you use impossible in quotes to mean something that's NOT impossible but surprising or unexpected, why not just say that?
- hluska 3y agoThe writer you’re insulting likely made around $0.20 a word. What’s the point? Does this make you feel better about your superior vocabulary?
- giantrobot 3y ago> But I wonder if the general public understands that scientists understand that. No, the general public does not. The scientific literacy of the general public is abysmal. There's entire political movements predicated on a lack of understanding of the term "scientific theory".
- sdfghswe 3y ago> There's entire political movements predicated on a lack of understanding of the term "scientific theory". Really? Is it like a specific party or something?
- tabtab 3y agoToo bad the New Horizons probe can't make an L-turn to go visit one of these.
- shmerl 3y agoAstronomy article should use kilometers, not miles.
- bsaul 3y agoAny science-related piece of text should use international standard units, period. I really find it absurdly arrogant from american writers to use their broken system for scientific material, knowing the rest of the whole god damn world is already forced to use english for scientific communication. As a non-native person reading and writing english all day long, this makes me infuriated every single time. I feel like being shown a middle finger.
- NeoTar 3y agoAutomated website translation software will sometimes try to translate dates into ‘English’ so 04.01.2023 becomes 01/04/2023. I can see a time where it‘ll start trying to do the same for other units and the large numbers of metric using English-speakers will have to put up with 1600 km being translated to 1000 miles.
- shmerl 3y agoAnd most indeed do. It's annoying when it doesn't happen. Metrication in US takes ages for no good reason.
- dataflow 3y agoSee also: https://br.ifunny.co/picture/R68WTJxJA https://br.ifunny.co/picture/R68WTJxJA
- hammyhavoc 3y agoEarth's gonna have an 'impossible' ring if we don't figure out the space junk.
- echelon 3y agoImagine feeding content like this into an LLM summarizer that can retain factual basis. You could share that as a second-hand accounting. "Blog spam", but actually superior to the original.
- metadat 3y agoJust to clarify your point, are you saying we should stop posting archive links.., or? I honestly am intrigued by Llama and company, but don't think about them that much.
- echelon 3y agoI'm saying the website as a distribution model might change. If you can encode knowledge and facts, there all all sorts of ways you might share news. P2P LLM-to-LLM as one crazy idea, but there are so many. The encoding of the fact itself could let you instantly translate it, render to speech or video. This will take time to build, but it's wild. Maybe our personal AI assistants will learn what's relevant to us and tell us at the desired resolution. Think about how humans share facts. Our tech will trend towards that.
- orbisvicis 3y agoThat's intriguing. And you could also customize the writing "in the style of ...".
- shagie 3y agoOn reddit, there's a bot that runs on a number of subs: http://autotldr.io http://autotldr.io - https://smmry.com/ https://smmry.com/ It would be an interesting project to see if it works. Pasting the article into the textbox... --- Like the first ring around Quaoar, announced by a team of astronomers in February, the second ring lies beyond what is known as the Roche limit. The second ring, at a distance of 1,500 miles from the center of Quaoar, is closer than the ring announced in February, which has a radius of about 2,500 miles. Another occultation occurred on Aug. 9 last year, and astronomers again pointed telescopes, large and small, at Quaoar in hopes of learning more about the ring. The new observations revealed more details including a dense, narrow core in the ring just a few miles wide, which is surrounded by an envelope of material that is more dispersed. A potential explanation for Quaoar's distant rings is the presence of a moon, Weywot. The moon may have created gravitational disturbances that prevented the ring's particles from accreting into additional moons. Both rings occur in locations near what are known as resonances with Weywot, and the resonances may turn out to be more important than the Roche limit for determining whether rings turn into moons or remain as rings. --- Going through OpenAI (764 tokens with a simple prompt): Earlier this year, astronomers announced that a small world beyond Neptune with a diameter about one-third that of Earth’s moon possessed a Saturn-like ring that should not be there. Recently, after further observation, it has been discovered that Quaoar has two such rings. Scientists are still trying to understand how dust and gas in the early solar system coalesced into moons and planets. Quaoar is located in the Kuiper belt, a region of frozen debris beyond Neptune that includes Pluto, and the rings were found through stellar occultations. The first ring is at a distance of 2,500 miles and the second is at 1,500 miles. There is a potential explanation that the presence of a moon, Weywot, has caused gravitational disturbances that stopped the particles from accreting into additional moons. The rings are not visible in telescope images, but astronomers were able to observe the shadow of the eclipses when distant stars passed behind Quaoar. Another occultation will occur on May 13, visible to telescopes in the US and Canada, which will help to constrain the Quaoar shape better and obtain more details about the two rings. The discovery of the two rings around Quaoar has been a surprise to astronomers and has led to further research into how these rings were formed and how they remain in place. Additionally, it could offer insight into how dust and gas coalesced into planets and moons in the early solar system. Researchers hope that the upcoming occultation on May 13 will provide more answers.
- spiderxxxx 3y agoSeems it's less than impossible, and more of 'can happen in some rare circumstances, that we didn't account for'. It's certainly not in "type two" Kardashev scale, but rather an intriguing example of the complexities and surprises that the universe holds. These 'impossible rings' serve as a reminder that our understanding of celestial dynamics is constantly evolving, and that there is still much to discover and learn about the intricacies of our solar system and beyond.