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How Venus ended up with a mini-moon named Zoozve
- asicsp 3y agoRelated discussion: "Something peculiar in my 2yo's bedroom led me to a revelation about our universe" https://twitter.com/latifnasser/status/1750952860131729544 https://twitter.com/latifnasser/status/1750952860131729544 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39151768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39151768 (181 points | 16 days ago | 49 comments)
- mcv 3y agoThat twitter link sounds like it's the start of the thread, but the thread is not visible. Probably due to Musk's changes to twitter. Is there a way to see the entire thread? Otherwise I think people should stop posting threads on twitter and linking to them.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoYou probably need to be logged in to see the full thread. That said, here's a mirror without that requirement: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1750952860131729544.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1750952860131729544.html
- yreg 3y agoTwitter was already a horrible place to read entire blog articles anyway.
- mcv 3y agoYeah, I don't know why people keep posting this stuff there. It's completely unsuitable to it. It wasn't great for it before, but it's completely terrible for it now. Post this sort of stuff either on a blog or on some Fediverse thing that doesn't try to own your content and keep people from reading it.
- picadores 3y agoBecause the platforms design is irrelevant - people go where people are, where the content is. Twitter could be irc beneath for all the world cares.
- dano 3y agoThe RadioLab episodes about Zoozve are great fun
- graposaymaname 3y agoAbsolutely. Adding the links below - https://radiolab.org/podcast/zoozve https://radiolab.org/podcast/zoozve https://radiolab.org/podcast/breaking-newsve-about-zoozve https://radiolab.org/podcast/breaking-newsve-about-zoozve
- Linda231 3y ago[dead]
- lxe 3y agoI've been listening to Radiolab for a few years now on my runs, and I generally enjoy it a ton. Occasionally they really really dumb things down to the point of making me wonder who they think their audience are. But oftentimes they produce these amazing gems like Zoozve or Alphagal for example.
- stevenwoo 3y agoI think it's really hit or miss these days. It feels like the episodes like this that Latif hosts are interesting. But towards the end of last year they had a very long less sciency run that was not very interesting, so much so that I stopped subscribing and listening, I mean not dumbed down, but actually unscientific, like the long series on immigration or broadcasting an anti-trans activist to talk about gender.
- LeapingLennie 3y agoI lost a bit of respect for them when they did an episode about the placenta and had an apology at the start because the episode contained the word "mother" rather than "pregnant person". I feel if you want to be a great science communicator you can't also insist on using postmodern language which will either confuse or put-off much of your audience.
- AlecSchueler 3y agoWhat's confusing about the term "pregnant person?" It seems very clear to me and has the benefit of being more inclusive.
- f6v 3y agoBecause the identity politics has no meaning when we talk about biological phenomenon like pregnancy. We know that only members of female sex can get pregnant. The word “mother” is defined as female parent in a dictionary. So there’s nothing wrong with the term mother in the first place.
- yieldcrv 3y agoSo Planet X could be a large quasi-moon, not only undetectable or merely undetected with our current technology, but orbiting multiple objects at once, throwing off our assumptions of what exists in the oort cloud
- wcoenen 3y agoNo, the hypothesized planet X would have a mass of on the order of 10 Earth's, and would therefore be too heavy for that. A quasi-moon is a relatively lightweight object which shares an orbit with a host planet, but doesn't (noticeably) disturb the orbit of that host planet.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- speps 3y ago"Zoozve" is its original name "2002VE" read as a word because an illustrator for a poster wrote his 2s looking like Zs.
- badcppdev 3y agoI shall call him, "Mini-moon"
- Benbobby 3y ago[dead]
- mcv 3y agoRemind me a lot of Cruithne[0] which IQ once incorrectly called the second moon of Earth. Like Zoozve it orbits the sun with the same period as a planet and in a way that's strongly influenced by that planet, but while Zoozve kind of orbits Venus as a result (but in an orbit that crosses the orbits of Mercury and Earth and clearly couldn't possibly be maintained by Venus' gravity itself), Cruithne does the opposite: it kind-of orbits a point on the other side of the sun from Earth. Whenever it gets close to the Earth, it turns around. It's playing cat and mouse with the Earth, slowly overtaking it in a lower orbit until it nearly overtakes Earth, then switches to a higher, slower orbit and falls behind until the Earth nearly overtakes it, at which points it moves to a lower, faster orbit again. From the Earth's perspective, it follows a horseshoe shape around the sun, with the Earth in the gap of the horseshoe. It's definitely not a moon, but I wonder if it could be considered a pseudo-satelite like Zoozve. They feel similar to me, though in an opposite way. Edit: according to the Wikipedia link below, it does not follow a horseshoe shape like I originally learned, but more of a kind of bean shape that's varying between just in front of the Earth to half an orbit ahead of the Earth. Not sure where I got the horseshoe description. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3753_Cruithne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3753_Cruithne
- omnibrain 3y agoReading the Wikipedia article I wondered why there was no (proposed) mission to Cruithne. The Space Exploration Stack Exchange has the answer: It's difficult to reach. https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/41500/why-not-explore-cruithne https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/41500/why-not-expl...
- araes 3y agoWe ought to go to 2003 YN107 [1], it literally arrives at Earth's doorstep every 50 years. Although it's rather tiny at 30 m. The spiral patterns really neat to look at though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_YN107 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_YN107
- pygy_ 3y agoThe orbit varies with time in a cyclic fashion and if you trace it for its whole cycle you get the horseshoe.
- picadores 3y agoCould this mini moon be nudged to first be stable, then to become a dust ring and shadow venus?
- sandworm101 3y agoI think it is too small to form a ring. At <1km, it may require an orbit so low that atmospheric drag would take over before tidal forces could pull it into a ring.
- ourmandave 3y agoTitle should have 2002 in it.