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I think “15 times further from the Sun than Pluto” is more meaningful for most readers than “700 times further from the Sun than Earth.” If it exists, it’s way
by AIPedant 1y ago
I think “15 times further from the Sun than Pluto” is more meaningful for most readers than “700 times further from the Sun than Earth.” If it exists, it’s way way way out there.
- ck2 1y agoThere's an episode on "Space & Beyond" where they show all the planets in scale to the realworld on an actual football field. Then to show Planet 9 distance they have to get in a car and drive a few miles. That worked for me.
- 7373737373 1y agoMy favorite: Cody'sLab's "How far away are the nearest stars": https://youtube.com/watch?v=dCSIXLIzhzk https://youtube.com/watch?v=dCSIXLIzhzk Also gives an intuition for how incredibly bright stars shine
- oxidant 1y agoI think Bill Nye has something similar, too.
- WillAdams 1y agoYeah, when the solar system was introduced to my class in grade school, we had an outdoor excursion where the teacher brought out a golfball and place it at one end, then brought out various tiny things (noting scale was very approximate) and paced off each to show the relative distances.
- Nevermark 1y agoI have a set of twelve books by an artist, titled "Astronomical" (one book for each letter). The first page shows the sun, then the rest of the books are almost all simply black pages, but with the planets and asteroid belt entities shown with accurate distance and size scale. It communicates the scales really well, while only taking up a little over a foot of bookshelf space when not being "navigated". I have two heavy metallic retro looking rocket bookends for it.
- dmurray 1y agoIf this discovery is real, you'll need to buy another 168 books and they'll span a large bookcase or a small room.
- airstrike 1y agoWhat is "Space & Beyond"?
- 1970-01-01 1y agoYes, also being 10x the mass of Earth that far out hints that it may be an interstellar object captured by the Sun.
- nonethewiser 1y agoForgive my ignorance but how is that different than the rest of the planets?
- tliltocatl 1y agoThe rest of the planets are theorized to have condensed from the protoplanetary disk that formed the same molecular cloud the Sun did. I. e. they have formed at approximately same time as the sun and from same material, sans gravitational separation.
- swayvil 1y agoAh, so a captured body would be quite different and alien. Really old too. Like, first generation of stars.
- s1artibartfast 1y agoNot at all implied. It could be boring and younger too. 10x earth masses usually implies a gas giant.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- geuis 1y agoWould likely be older than the solar system itself. Probably not first gen star old, but likely would have formed before the sun did. Don't know how different it would be though. Would have formed out of maybe different ratios of elements than what was in the molecular cloud we formed from, but otherwise a large body like this would have undergone similar geological processes as our own planets.
- NikkiA 1y agoI dunno, '700 AU' gelled for me instantly, '15 times the distance to pluto' doesn't even make sense given pluto's orbit isn't anywhere near circular.
- doubletwoyou 1y agoI don’t think the vast majority of people will have a good sense of how far away the standard gas giants and pluto are from the sun in terms of AU.
- AIPedant 1y agoIt makes even less sense for Earth because Earth's orbit is near-circular, whereas Planet 9's hypothesized orbit is highly eccentric, more so than Pluto. Most people don't know off-hand that Pluto is ~40-50AU from the sun, so 700AU is hard to conceptualize.
- LeifCarrotson 1y agoAnd Neptune orbits at 30 AU with very low eccentricity, "of course." https://xkcd.com/2501/ https://xkcd.com/2501/
- ben_w 1y agoI was just thinking of this XKCD comic specifically. Most people won't even have the slightest idea what 1 AU is. Most people know less about most topics (including space) than the original ChatGPT (3.5) did — probably only people who at least started a degree with a space sciences module are likely to know more than 3.5, and I expect plenty of space.com readers to be enthusiastic amateurs rather than professionals. That said, I do I expect the average reader of space.com to know what an astronomical unit is, but even so I don't expect them to know the average orbital distance of Pluto. But is even that assumption my quartz?
- dragonwriter 1y ago> Most people don't know off-hand that Pluto is ~40-50AU ~30-50AU if you are referring to the range of orbital distance.
- rainsford 1y agoIt's sort of amazing to me that the Sun can capture objects that far away. Like obviously even at that distance the Sun would be by far the closest massive thing, but it's hard to comprehend the effects of gravity being strong enough at that distance. From "Planet 9" the Sun probably wouldn't significantly stand out from all the other stars in the sky, yet you'd be orbiting it.
- fallingknife 1y agoFrom 700 AU you would still be only 0.01 ly from the sun, or 400x closer to the sun than the second closest star.
- 8bitsrule 1y agoThat IS better, but I like ~0.011Ly too ... the nearest star is about 4Ly away. Another perspective on the size of the solar system, like the Pale Blue Dot.
- bsdetector 1y agoWould this be far enough out to use the sun's gravitational lensing to image distant planets? It seems like the idea was to send a bunch of instruments way out and then take pictures in the brief time they were at a useful distance, but if there's a planet out there we can orbit and so stop the instruments at that distance it seems like we could make a permanent super telescope.
- fallingknife 1y agoProbably easier to just put it in solar orbit at that distance. Orbital velocity is only about 1km/s at 700 AU.
- codesnik 1y agoorbiting a planet in that case is no different than orbiting a sun on the same orbit as planet. Probably even more cumbersome, all that jiggling around. Or are you talking about making a gravity assist to turn the orbit of the probe into less eccentric?
- carbocation 1y agoAll 3 points (two from you and one from '8bitsrule) helped me contextualize this: * 700 times further from the Sun than the Earth * 15 times further from the Sun than Pluto * 0.01 lightyear, or 1/400th the distance to the nearest star
- washadjeffmad 1y agoIf the Earth is 8 lightminutes from the Sun, Planet X is 3.8 lightdays. Or, it's the difference between going for a 15 minutes walk and walking from Boston to Orlando (or San Diego to Seattle, for the West Coasters).
- prox 1y agoFor us Elite Dangerous players to get a sense of scale, that’s approximately 329,472,000 light seconds. Hutton Orbital is located approximately 6,784,404 light seconds, or 0.22 light years, so this will be 50 hours of non boosted SC.
- josephcsible 1y ago> that’s approximately 329,472,000 light seconds I think you have an extra factor of 1000 somewhere.
- prox 1y agoYou’re right, a bit too fast there. It’s 328,319 ls Which means Hutton is a lot further actually.
- josephcsible 1y agoIsn't that slightly overstating it? Those pairs of cities are over 1000 miles apart, so unless you walk at 6mph, that's more than 700x as far.
- washadjeffmad 1y ago
- AzzyHN 1y agoMost readers probably know Pluto is the... well... it's not the farthest dwarf planet. But they know it's far, but don't realize just how far it is. I certainly didn't until I watched a video about it. 700 further from the Sun than Earth is tangible as "really really far" though.
- SecretDreams 1y agoI think both work. The average reader doesn't need to conceptualize these distances. They just need to know they're reallllly far away and realllllllly realllllllly (9x) far away. You can use the earth or pluto distances as relative scales.
- nine_k 1y ago700 AU is way past heliopause, firmly in the interstellar space. Same, 15 times farther than Pluto is definitely away from the Solar system "proper". It's about 100 light-hours away from Sun. I wonder how could this object be counted as a "planet" belonging to the Solar system, even if it were the size of Jupiter. But it's an object "estimated to be 2 to 4 times the radius, and about ten times the mass of the Earth". This must be another class of celestial bodies, some jumbo-sized Oort cloud object.
- manquer 1y agoAs long it is orbiting the sun, i.e bound by the solar gravitational field then it is in the solar system? Also depending how elliptical the orbit, is the perigee might be much closer than 700AU, while still being further than Pluto's orbit. For all we know 700 AU is the apogee and say the perigee is 70 AU (1.4x Pluto's apogee ).
- chgs 1y agoPerigee is lowest point in an orbit around Earth. Perihhelion for sun orbits. Periapsis for the general term.
- goku12 1y ago> As long it is orbiting the sun The body must also be large enough to clear other bodies in the same orbit, except at the Trojan positions (L4 and L5), to be considered as a planet. Otherwise it would just be a Trans-Neptunian Object (TNO) or a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) at these distances. It obviously does in this case. But this pedantic detail is rather important. It was used to demote Pluto a few years back.
- viraptor 1y ago> It obviously does in this case. Does it? Would we actually know if there was another slightly more sparse belt at 700AU? If we can't track a large planet in that area, why would we be certain about the belt? Alternatively, if it's an external object captured by the Sun, how would we even classify it as clearing or not if there's nothing to clear?
- smolder 1y agoI think both comparisons together paint a good picture: 15 times further than Pluto, which itself has an orbit ranging from 30 to 49 AU (the distance between Earth and the sun.)
- StopDisinfo910 1y agoBut then why Pluto rather than Eris which is considerably further than Pluto or Sedna which is even further? Pluto is a fairly unremarkable dwarf planet. I don’t think it really helps to compare things to it.
- halgir 1y agoBecause more people know about Pluto than Eris or Sedna. And we know that Pluto is the furthest away planet (sue me). So 15x Pluto is much easier to visualize in context of the entire solar system than 700x Earth. My cosmological knowledge is above average, but I don't know off the top of my head if 700 AU is super-duper far away or still in the range of the gas giants.
- SequoiaHope 1y agoAgree. Pluto anchors is to visualizations I can remember.
- StopDisinfo910 1y ago> And we know that Pluto is the furthest away planet (sue me) I don't need to sue you. It's just entirely incorrect by any sane definitions of a planet. It's not the further if you include similar bodies or not a planet. As I have no interest in saving American misplaced pride (because let's not kid ourself it's about anything else), I don't see the point of spreading misinformation. > Because more people know about Pluto than Eris or Sedna Only if you were born before it was retrograded which will be less and less likely as time goes on. > My cosmological knowledge is above average, but I don't know off the top of my head if 700 AU is super-duper far away or still in the range of the gas giants. I'm not convinced that giving it in multiple of the distance between Pluto and the sun is in any way more useful than distance between the Earth and the sun or that it helps conceptualise the distance relative to the gas giants. Anyway, Pluto orbit is highly excentric so you have 20AU of wiggle room here when considering distance.
- halgir 1y agoI know it's not a planet, hence my sarcastic "sue me". I suppose the self-irony didn't work too well over text. My point was that many people still know about Pluto as a body that's at the edge of many people's everyday conceptualizations of the solar system, and I argue that makes it a more useful tool for helping people intuitively understand the particular distances involved. > Only if you were born before it was retrograded which will be less and less likely as time goes on. I admit my age plays into it. Though I am curious about the role Pluto has in modern primary school, do you know? I understand that it now has the same technical status as Eris et al., but I think it's still a fantastic example of how scientific understanding develops and changes. Not on par with discarding heliocentricity, but a very practical example of ongoing changes still present in our own time. > As I have no interest in saving American misplaced pride (because let's not kid ourself it's about anything else) I don't understand how this ties into American pride (nor am I American), what did I miss?
- interludead 1y agoMost people have at least a vague sense of Pluto being the edge of the solar system, so hearing that Planet Nine could be way beyond that makes it feel almost interstellar
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mbfg 1y agohow about 4 times further than Voyager 1?
- snthpy 1y agoI agree. Idk now many AUs Pluto is but I know it's far away and hardly visible until we flew by.