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Press Conference in Brazil to Announce Discovery in Outer Solar System
- clef 13y agoBig alien motherships on their way to acquire Facebook?
- icebraining 13y agoShame it's not broadcast, nowadays it should be a given, in my opinion. Why keep it closed to "members of the media", particularly when we all know how often they screw up these stories?
- InclinedPlane 13y agoEmbargos are designed to give every news outlet sufficient time to write up their stories and do their background reasearch without having to worry to rush to print to beat their competitors. In practice it's questionably useful.
- mariusz79 13y agoNot only there is no broadcast, but there is also strict embargo on the information, until after the conference.
- onion2k 13y agoEvent Horizon has returned.
- mkohlmyr 13y agoI guess Zecharia Sitchin was right. They be a comin' for our gold, dontcha know.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- wikiburner 13y agoPlanet X??? :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planets_beyond_Neptune http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planets_beyond_Neptune
- samwillis 13y agoEarly leak of press announcement: "Brazlian researchers discover asteroid with rings" "The European Southern Observatory announced this week the discovery of rings around an asteroid 1.4 billion miles from Earth. Chariklo is the largest of the class of asteroids orbiting the sun between Saturn and Uranus known as Centaurs." Google cache before it was thaken down: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.wral.com%2Fdiscovery-an-asteroid-with-rings%2F13510966%2F http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%... http://www.wral.com/discovery-an-asteroid-with-rings/13510966/ http://www.wral.com/discovery-an-asteroid-with-rings/1351096...
- adlpz 13y agoWell, that is pretty boring. But still, thanks for providing some actual information ;). By the way, I find it a bit excessive that, if it is in fact this what they found, they set up a media embargo and everything. It's a pretty nice finding, but nothing massive.
- soneca 13y agoNot that important tiny detail: Oiapoque and Chuí are not referenced as the rivers, but as the northest (Oiapoque) and southest (Chuí) cities of Brazil. "from Oiapoque to Chuí" is a popular expression to refer to the whole extension of brazilian territory.
- hrjet 13y agoWhoa! I guess the big news here is that rings around such a gravitationally weak body would be a rare occurrence in nature... indicating a high possibility of an artificially designed / constructed structure. Edit: Not sure if I am being downvoted for stating the obvious or the incredulous :)
- czottmann 13y agoHot on the heels of the discovery of Big Bang's gravitational waves there's now news that for the first time ever alien live has been witnessed, in the form of Silver Surfer ridin' dat wave.
- stuaxo 13y agoThe beginning of The Fifth Element ..
- andyjohnson0 13y agoSome recent papers by the team's leader, Felipe Braga-Ribas, are at [1]. I'm not any astronomer, but they mainly seem to concern studies of the atmospheres of the outer planets and mintor planets using observations of stellar occultations. Maybe the announcement is about Pluto's atmosphere, or detection of atmosphere around an asteroid or one of the Centaurs? [1] http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Felipe_Braga-Ribas/publications/ http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Felipe_Braga-Ribas/publi...
- joshvm 13y agohttp://aerospace.firetrench.com/2014/03/20-seconds-that-changed-our-understanding-of-the-solar-system-surprise-discovery-of-double-ring-system-around-asteroid-like-body/ http://aerospace.firetrench.com/2014/03/20-seconds-that-chan... This was published yesterday, hasn't been taken down yet. The DOI is 10.1038/nature13155.
- forgotAgain 13y agoI think the importance goes up a lot if the rings are made of water as conjectured in parent. Getting access to water in space without dragging it out of a gravity well would make asteroid mining much easier. There's water in comets but their availability is not nearly as reliable.
- Sharlin 13y agoNot really. At those distances, beyond the frost line [1] pretty much everything solid is bound to be mostly water. Ice is plentiful even in the main belt asteroids and in this case we're talking about the Centaurs that lie much farther away - of course, their distance also makes them ineligible for any short-term mining endeavors. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frost_line_%28astrophysics%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frost_line_%28astrophysics%29
- hello2 13y agoBreaking news: From some undisclosed confirmed sources, it appears they discovered a new planet after Pluto. Could this be planet Nibiru?
- hello2 13y agoI don't understand why this was voted down. The sources were trusted and the news was accurate.
- morituri 13y agoIt's the Klingons.
- clef 13y agoThey want their beer back :) http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/mar/25/star-trek-warnog-official-klingon-beer http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/mar/25/star-trek-warnog...
- valarauca1 13y agoHttp redirects to https, which is awesome. Except they don't support any 'new' ciphers. So I can't connect. Site only supports TLS_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_MD5 (0x4) TLS_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_SHA (0x5)
- welterde 13y ago> Http redirects to https, which is awesome. Huh..? Here it's doing the opposite (but will check again once I get home if it's just at work..).. Or weren't you talking about the eso.org website?
- Wohui 13y ago"We have found the inventor of Bitcoin. At 15 AU, harassing him will be extremely expensive, however we hope NASA will do the right thing and repurpose their 2025 europa lander"
- lifeisstillgood 13y ago> Each of the outer planets: Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune and of course Saturn have rings. What? Really? * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rings_of_Jupiter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rings_of_Jupiter OK, so there are things I don't know, and more importantly there is water in fairly easily accessible places dotted around our Solar System.
- clef 13y agoReports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know. —United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld
- mathattack 13y agoWhen you have kids, your internal Wikipedia gets an update. :-) I had no idea about the rings until I read a book about planets to my kid. Then he started telling me that there were other dwarf planets besides Pluto. I told him that he was wrong. Then I went to a new book, and had to explain that "Even Papai makes mistakes." Getting current on science is one of the great perks of having kids.
- gamerdonkey 13y agoI agree. I get an amazing thrill from learning even some small new fact about our solar system. However, I'd argue that you don't have to wait until you have kids to get current on science. Maintaining general knowledge about the world around us is beneficial to everyone, and I believe that recognizing how much of a universe there is beyond our existence can help keep things in perspective. And with all the Internet, Wikipedia, and several prominent science-oriented television shows today, keeping up is easier than ever.
- neves 13y agoMee too! It touches me to have my kids begging me to see the next episode of Cosmos as if it was Games of Thrones.
- emeidi 13y agoIt has to be Nibiru (or better known as Planet X)! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibiru_cataclysm#Planet_X http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibiru_cataclysm#Planet_X
- mathattack 13y agoI have to admit that this excites me a lot more than Oculus and Facebook, even if the latter will have a more immediate impact on my life.
- jneal 13y agoThis is very cool, I'm anxious to see the full announcement and see what is said. I want to hear what others in the field see and have to say as well because I would never think a body with a diameter of just 250 km could actually have enough gravitational power to maintain rings.
- T-hawk 13y agoRead up on the Hill sphere: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_sphere http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_sphere How much mass you need to retain rings isn't an absolute quantity. It depends on distance and size of other masses. A 250km body in Earth orbit couldn't retain its own rings because Earth's gravity would dominate the system. But a 250km body in deep space with no competition could. Neptune can actually maintain satellites at a greater distance than Jupiter can, despite Jupiter having over 10x the mass. This is because Jupiter has closer competition from the Sun and Saturn, while Neptune has enormous amounts of space to itself.
- Mchl 13y agoScience through press conferences. Exactly how you're not supposed to do it.
- DoggettCK 13y agoCome on, Reapers. Or even Reavers.
- chasing 13y agoI wonder if it's better to just wait until the discovery is announced before submitting and upvoting? The speculation's fun, but, y'know. The announcement is in just a few hours.