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[ilan]

Astronomers Find a Moon Hiding Around Makemake in Hubble Data
Once a lonely ice block, now it seems the dwarf planet may have a close-in companion.
By John Wenz | Published: Tuesday, April 26, 2016


Dwarf planet Makemake and its newly discovered moon.
The newly discovered moon, MK 2, found in Hubble data orbiting Makemake.
NASA, ESA, A. Parker

In 2005, Caltech astronomers Mike Brown and Chad Trujillo discovered dwarf planet Makemake, currently believed to be the third largest object in the Kuiper Belt after Pluto and Eris. But at the time, astronomers believed it was alone out there on its long path around the Sun. But new data from the Hubble Space Telescope reveal a moon around the tiny world, and offer a little explanation as to where it was hiding.

“The satellite that we found was not that faint and not that close to Makemake,” says Alex Parker, principal investigator of the research and a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute. “It popped right out of the data when we looked.”

It turns out it was always there. But the newly found object, provisionally called MK 2, orbits Makemake nearly edge-on from our point of view, meaning most of the time it’s obscured by the comparatively bright dwarf planet. Makemake is 886 miles (1,434 km) in diameter, while the new object appears to be only 100 miles (161 Km). Current scenarios also paint it as a dark companion compared to bright Makemake.

The dark surface of MK 2, which in one scenario may reflect as little as 4 percent of light, could explain why astronomers previously showed Makemake to have two highly contrasting albedos (reflectivities) that indicated different materials at work. Those dark spots didn’t seem to line up with the 7.7-hour day on Makemake, though.

“You would expect Makemake’s brightness would go up and down as it rotated, but it’s brightness hardly goes up or down,” Parker says.

There are two possibilities for why a bright dwarf planet has such a dark moon. In one scenario, it’s a captured Kuiper Belt Object that through various circumstances ended up in orbit around Makemake. In the other, a collision formed it, much like the one that formed Pluto’s moon system.

Kuiper Belt image added to artilce for clarity: ILAN

In the latter scenario, Makemake may have a sort of seasonal atmosphere, and as the ices and other chemicals on its surface sublimate, it covers MK 2 in a hydrocarbon film known as tholin. This same process likely creates the red patches on Pluto’s moon Charon’s north pole.

“You might imagine you could paint this moon dark with a transitory Makemake-ian atmosphere,” Parker says.

Follow-up observations will help determine an orbit for MK 2, something that may be hard given its edge-on nature. This would give the researchers a chance to study the size of the moon and help determine a mass for Makemake, especially if they can predict the intervals at which it is visible. In the meantime, Makemake joins a short list of Kuiper Belt Objects known to have moons, including Pluto, Eris, Quaoar, and Haumea.

[ilan]

Planet Nine: A world that shouldn't exist
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics | May 3, 2016


An artist's conception of Planet Nine. Credit: Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)

Earlier this year scientists presented evidence for Planet Nine, a Neptune-mass planet in an elliptical orbit 10 times farther from our Sun than Pluto. Since then theorists have puzzled over how this planet could end up in such a distant orbit.

New research by astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) examines a number of scenarios and finds that most of them have low probabilities. Therefore, the presence of Planet Nine remains a bit of a mystery.

"The evidence points to Planet Nine existing, but we can't explain for certain how it was produced," says CfA astronomer Gongjie Li, lead author on a paper accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Planet Nine circles our Sun at a distance of about 40 billion to 140 billion miles, or 400 - 1500 astronomical units. (An astronomical unit or A.U. is the average distance of the Earth from the Sun, or 93 million miles.) This places it far beyond all the other planets in our solar system. The question becomes: did it form there, or did it form elsewhere and land in its unusual orbit later?

Li and her co-author Fred Adams (University of Michigan) conducted millions of computer simulations in order to consider three possibilities. The first and most likely involves a passing star that tugs Planet Nine outward. Such an interaction would not only nudge the planet into a wider orbit but also make that orbit more elliptical. And since the Sun formed in a star cluster with several thousand neighbors, such stellar encounters were more common in the early history of our solar system.

However, an interloping star is more likely to pull Planet Nine away completely and eject it from the solar system. Li and Adams find only a 10 percent probability, at best, of Planet Nine landing in its current orbit. Moreover, the planet would have had to start at an improbably large distance to begin with.

CfA astronomer Scott Kenyon believes he may have the solution to that difficulty. In two papers submitted to the Astrophysical Journal, Kenyon and his co-author Benjamin Bromley (University of Utah) use computer simulations to construct plausible scenarios for the formation of Planet Nine in a wide orbit.

"The simplest solution is for the solar system to make an extra gas giant," says Kenyon.

They propose that Planet Nine formed much closer to the Sun and then interacted with the other gas giants, particularly Jupiter and Saturn. A series of gravitational kicks then could have boosted the planet into a larger and more elliptical orbit over time.

"Think of it like pushing a kid on a swing. If you give them a shove at the right time, over and over, they'll go higher and higher," explains Kenyon. "Then the challenge becomes not shoving the planet so much that you eject it from the solar system."

That could be avoided by interactions with the solar system's gaseous disk, he suggests.

Kenyon and Bromley also examine the possibility that Planet Nine actually formed at a great distance to begin with. They find that the right combination of initial disk mass and disk lifetime could potentially create Planet Nine in time for it to be nudged by Li's passing star.

"The nice thing about these scenarios is that they're observationally testable," Kenyon points out. "A scattered gas giant will look like a cold Neptune, while a planet that formed in place will resemble a giant Pluto with no gas."

Li's work also helps constrain the timing for Planet Nine's formation or migration. The Sun was born in a cluster where encounters with other stars were more frequent. Planet Nine's wide orbit would leave it vulnerable to ejection during such encounters. Therefore, Planet Nine is likely to be a latecomer that arrived in its current orbit after the Sun left its birth cluster.

Finally, Li and Adams looked at two wilder possibilities: that Planet Nine is an exoplanet that was captured from a passing star system, or a free-floating planet that was captured when it drifted close by our solar system. However, they conclude that the chances of either scenario are less than 2 percent.

[Marley]

yup thanks for info

[Kimbo]

Thank you Ilan!!

[anon2599]

Fascinating all this info concerning Planet X Nibiru .

Thanks for this Sir.................and lets hope we never see it close quarters .

[ilan]

Welcome... Never know, though, The Man from Planet X might just show up again. (Fun, sci-fi romp from '51. Spanish subtitles, but still worth a watch.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epGlcbXdgOc

Technically, though, Planet Nine and Planet X are different beasts.

[ilan]

NASA: Planet 9 is not the ‘mythical, non-existent’ Planet X / Nibiru

The Many Lives of “Planet X”

An intriguing idea has long tugged at the collective imagination: what unknown planets might be hiding in the distant, dark reaches of the solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune?

The concept of an undiscovered “Planet X” has inspired science fiction stories, alien monster movies and Internet rumors of wandering planets that periodically wreak havoc when they pass near the Earth.

Astronomers have systematically searched for a Planet X for many decades. Their various hunts have often turned up nothing more than phantoms…with some major exceptions.

Finding a New World

In the early 20th century, legendary astronomer Percival Lowell concluded that peculiarities in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune resulted from an unseen planet. Lowell proposed that the gravity of this previously unknown “Planet X” pulled the gas giants slightly away from their expected orbital positions. He organized an intensive search with telescopes, but it came up empty.

However, after Lowell’s death a young astronomer named Clyde Tombaugh was working at the Lowell Observatory in Tucson, AZ. He searched the sky near the predicted location of Lowell’s mystery planet, comparing telescopic photos of star fields to look for moving objects. In 1930, he discovered Pluto. Even though we now know that an incorrect estimate of Neptune’s mass, not Pluto, explains the orbital discrepancies, Lowell was right that other bodies lurked in the outer solar system.

But Wait … There are More — Many More

In 2005, a team led by astronomer Mike Brown discovered a previously unknown object at a vast distance-about three times as far away from the sun as Pluto. It was round like a planet, and even had its own moon. At first it was believed that this object, which was officially named Eris, was even larger than Pluto. What’s more, astronomers knew that many other similar objects could exist as well.

This set off a debate about just what a “planet” is, and ultimately led to the International Astronomical Union designating Pluto and Eris as “dwarf planets.” Outer solar system explorers, using a variety of instruments on the ground aboard Earth-orbiting spacecraft, have now found a host of similar tiny worlds. They carry the names of creator gods and other deities from many traditions, including Varuna, Quaoar, Makemake and Haumea. Some of these orbit in the region known as the Kuiper Belt, while others trace huge, tilted, elongated orbits that carry them even farther out.

A Planet of Possibilities

Mike Brown piqued the world’s interest again in January 2016 when he and his colleague at Caltech, Konstantin Batygin, announced they had evidence for another previously unknown planet. But this time, the proposed discovery is no dwarf. The potential object, which the researchers have nicknamed “Planet Nine,” could have a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbit about 20 times farther from the sun on average than Neptune. It may take between 10,000 and 20,000 Earth years to make one full orbit around the sun.

No one has actually seen this possible new planet. As with previous “Planets X,” the proposed evidence again revolves around the idea that although this new planet has not yet been seen, its gravitational effects have been. Mathematical modeling and computer simulations suggest that the orbits of many smaller objects in the Kuiper Belt region have been clustered together by “Planet Nine’s” gravity.

More Than Meets the Eye

One thing that recent exploration has made clear: the realm beyond Neptune is vast, complex and populated by a menagerie of varied objects. Thanks to the New Horizons mission, we have seen that at least one of them tells a much more involved story of planetary evolution than might have been expected. The simple solar system map that we saw in grade school-showing the neat, nearly circular orbits of Mercury through Neptune-is just the innermost core of what may be out there.

“Planet X” comes in many forms, and we’re only beginning the quest to understand the solar system it inhabits.

No, It’s Not Nibiru

There is no evidence whatsoever for the existence of “Nibiru,” the mysterious object from online conspiracy theories that supposedly swings near the Earth on occasion. The recently predicted “Planet 9” comes nowhere near Earth or even the inner solar system. According to the Caltech astronomers’ calculations, the planet would never approach closer than about 200 times the distance between the Earth and the sun.

[anon2599]

Absolutely loving the information and post Sir.

[ilan]

Thanks... It is fun stuff!

[wickedjoker]

We haven't seen Mars like this in more than a decade.

The red planet will soon be closer to Earth that it has been in 11 years: On May 30, Mars will be about 46.8 million miles (75.3 million kilometers) from Earth. Yes, that's still a long way off, but sometimes Mars is 249 million miles (400 million kilometers) from Earth.

Skywatch: Your guide to space
What does this close approach mean for sky watchers? It means Mars will appear bigger and brighter from May 18 until June 3, according to NASA. But you don't have to wait. Mars already is putting on a spectacular show in the early morning sky. And you don't need a telescope or binoculars to see it. In fact, you'll probably be able to find it without a star chart or an astronomy app. In the United States, the best time to look for Mars during its close approach will be around midnight Eastern time, according to NASA. It will be the brightest "star" that you'll see in the southeastern sky and it will appear a bit reddish. 'Way Up There': Above the Earth and onward to Mars NASA's Mars mission: Spaceship under construction To find out when Mars is visible in your neighborhood, you can go to timeanddate.com/astronomy and pop in your location. It will give a list of times that the sun, moon and planets rise and set. Also, both CNN partners Astronomy and Sky & Telescope.com offer online tools to help you track what's going on in the night sky. After you have seen Mars shining bright in the morning sky, you may want to get an even better view. You can hook up with your local astronomy club to see Mars through a telescope. If you miss this year's close approach, Earth and Mars will be even closer on July, 31 2018. They'll come about 35.8 million miles from each other. Back in August 2003 they were closer still: The two planets were only 34,646,418 miles (55,758,006 kilometers) from center to center. That was the nearest Earth and Mars have been in almost 60,000 years, according to NASA. Scientists calculate they won't get that close again until August 28, 2287.

Source -- CNN

http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/05/us/mars-close-approach-to-earth/index.html