I found the preamble at the beginning of the announcement charmingly dated:
> The Minor Planet Electronic Circulars contain information on unusual minor planets, routine data on comets and natural satellites, and occasional editorial announcements. They are published on behalf of Division F of the International Astronomical Union by the Minor Planet Center, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
>
> Prepared using the Tamkin Foundation Computer Network
> The OpenVMS cluster consists of nine single-CPU workstations and one four-CPU server. All the machines are running the extremely robust and secure OpenVMS operating system. The twelve Alpha-based machines are arranged as an OpenVMS Cluster, allowing all machines to share disk storage, execution and batch queues and other resources, as well as simplifying system management.
Maybe not as old. I deployed a few racks of HP Alpha DS25s in 2007-2008 before they were replaced with Itanium based Blades (running OpenVMS 8.4). I do not miss working with OpenVMS one bit. It was rock stable (basically an on/off appliance) but the user experience left me wanting (coming from Linux).
I can see how they may be still stuck on Alphas because unless they can somehow simply recompile for x86-64 OpenVMS, it’s a complete rewrite from scratch.
Could they not get more juice out of a single, modern server? I get porting over to a new system and migrating is a huge time suck and a good enough reason not to do it if everything is working, just seems excessive for 14 cores.
> Could they not get more juice out of a single, modern server
They could probably get more performance out of one core on a modern phone, never mind a single modern server. But you see some really old systems in a lot of equipment, not because the porting costs are expensive, but the certification of proving the new system works the same is more than the operational cost of the legacy equipment.
Sure, but the capital and one-time cost of acquiring and shifting to the modern server would be non-zero, and it would entail some risk. (While OpenVMS is maintained and runs on newer systems, that doesn't mean the software that matters on the existing cluster would run without modification.)
It probably would save operating costs, and probably over a reasonably short window, if it was done successfully, though.
The minor planet center is the clearing house of observations of objects in our solar system. They have announced a new dwarf planet today.
This object appears to be in a very eccentric orbit (0.948), and with an H magnitude of 3.55, so it is likely hundreds of km in diameter.
Ceres for reference has a H magnitude of 3.33 (smaller H is bigger diameter).
Thanks, it helps quite a bit to be able to visualize what they're talking about.
Out at 90 AU, and by the year 3000 is out at 500 AU, and that's still not anywhere near maximum distance. Looked like it was going to be 10,000+ years orbits or longer, and probably out at several 1000 AU at maximum.
Little skeptical it would even orbit normally with how heavily eccentric it is, and the extreme distance at maximum. Way... out beyond the heliopause / heliosheath / termination shock.
Does anyone know if this has its PE in alignment with the other Sedna type objects found?
I think there is a tendency for them to have their PE out to one side and the AP out to the other giving a fairly obvious pattern indicating another larger object is shepherding the others into their orbits.
> This object appears to be in a very eccentric orbit (0.948)
from [0]:
> Before its demotion from planet status in 2006, Pluto was considered to be the planet with the most eccentric orbit (e = 0.248). Other Trans-Neptunian objects have significant eccentricity, notably the dwarf planet Eris (0.44). Even further out, Sedna has an extremely-high eccentricity of 0.855 due to its estimated aphelion of 937 AU and perihelion of about 76 AU
> ...
> Comets have very different values of eccentricities. Periodic comets have eccentricities mostly between 0.2 and 0.7, but some of them have highly eccentric elliptical orbits with eccentricities just below 1; for example, Halley's Comet has a value of 0.967
so possibly an ignorant question, as someone who's interested in astronomy but doesn't follow it very closely - when this is categorized as a dwarf planet, does that include "it might be a comet" as a possibility? or have they already ruled it out as a possible comet through other observations?
Dwarf planet versus comet/asteroid hinges on mass, basically its "enough mass to be roughly round" (technically it's called "hydrostatic equilibrium").
Back from the 1810's to the 1870's or so, most people considered Ceres, Vesta, and things like that to be planets- they were bodies that wandered around the solar system, that meant they were planets. When the numbers started to get into the 20's, everyone decided to create a new category, "asteroid" (Greek for 'star-like') and put all of the smaller things in that. So when Pluto was discovered in 1930 it was slotted right into the planet category. Pluto was discovered mostly by accident, because Clyde Tombaugh was amazing at working the blink comparator, and finding the one dot that moved in between the two pictures of the night sky a few days apart.
However, by the 1990's and 2000's you had computers and digital cameras, which are even better than Clyde at finding things that move, and quickly the number of planets started to go up- and it was clear that once we had thoroughly mapped the ~~Oort Cloud~~ (meant Kuiper Belt, see below) etc. we would have dozens of planets. And so once again astronomers decided to create a new category, just like they had with asteroids a century earlier. This time they drew the line in such a way that Ceres got moved from asteroid to dwarf planet- it has enough mass to be roughly round, so after over a century of being an asteroid it became a dwarf planet.
This is how things always work in science: we discover something, then we discover more of them, and re-categorize everything based on the new discoveries. It's just more noticeable with Pluto because reciting the planets is done by every schoolkid in a way that they don't for subatomic particles or for species of voles or whatever.
That wiki page needs some work. The section you linked to describes the eccentricity as a ratio, however the top of the page describes 0 as perfectly circular and 1 as an escape trajectory.
If it were a ratio then 0 would be escape and 1 would be circular.
Depends on the albedo, if the H magnitude is a good measurement, then it is probably between 300-700km. These are rough bounds, its highly dependent on how reflective it's surface is (albedo).
With an orbit somewhere around 28k years, it reached perihelion in about 1931, at 45 au from the Sun.
Going off the SMA and eccentricity, part of its orbit is "relatively" close to the sun, ~ 45 AU, about 1.5x the distance to Neptune (~ 30 AU), and the other half of its orbit is very, very far away, ~ 1700 AU, over 50 times the distance to Neptune, but still less than 1% of the distance to the next star.
When it's in the faraway part of its orbit, it is moving very slowly, probably only tens of meters per second, but it's still close enough to the sun to eventually fall back in for another loop.
However, if something else dense enough got close enough out there, it would be easily perturbed and have its whole orbit altered, or even be ejected.
But interstellar space is pretty void of wandering solid bodies, so it keeps falling back towards the sun.
"That's no moon" :-). But more seriously, just another giant lump of stuff swinging around the solar system. I am not an astronomer, so I'm not sure about some of the things I'm reading in that report but to me, it seems to be in the solar ecliptic. But its far enough away even at perigee that the only thing of note it might interact with would be Pluto.
I suppose that flying through the Oort cloud it might periodically launch ice balls into the inner solar system.
Minor astrodynamics nit: "perigee" is a term specific to Earth. The generic term for all bodies is "periapsis", and the term for the Sun is "perihelion"
(Astrodynamics terms generally take from the Greek, rather than Latin)
It boggles my mind when I look up at the Moon, that in fact it's a massive rock travelling at something like 2,000 mph, always trying to fall onto the Earth, and missing it all the time.
If my goal was to fall into the earth and kept missing I would be depressed too. Each try it misses by slightly more and it's orbital distance increases. How sad is that?
Also, I like to anthropomorphize inanimate objects because secretly they hate it.
only thing of note it might interact with would be Pluto
Is Pluto a planet again, or not? Honest question because
I don't keep up on these things because they have no practical effect other than drama...and I try to avoid drama.
No. It’s smaller than other moons in our solar system. It’s never going to be a planet again, but a planetoid, dwarf planet, or even asteroid is appropriate.
26000 year period and yet it has still been around the sun 2000+ times since the dinosaurs went extinct. Make me feel a bit insignificant and awed at the same time.
Specifically: when this object is at its closest and Pluto is at its farthest then this object can be the one closer to Earth. Pluto comes the closest of the two overall though.
I got a bit too excited with this one, this is may not be a full on dwarf planet, but it is a very large object. There are only a small number (about 10-20) objects in our solar system of this size. Its the first big one we have found in a number of years.
By "small number (about 10-20) objects in our solar system of this size" you are referring to the class of objects of a similar size rather than the largest objects in the solar system?
This is a good question to ask. It can't be, for the reasons you guessed.
This is not the first time this sort of thing has happened. When Pluto was found by Clyde Tombaugh he was looking for Planet Nine, which Percival Lowell had calculated must be present based on the orbits of the outer planets. But it was quickly realized that Pluto was too small and in the wrong orbit for it be Lowell's deduced planet. (And even then they worked with a too high estimate of Pluto's mass, it wasn't until the 1978 discovery of Charon that we got a good estimate of Pluto's mass. It is hard to get a good mass estimate without something else in orbit around it.)
The Pioneer and Voyager missions gave us much better estimates of the masses of the gas giants, and my understanding is that if you go back and redo Lowell's calculations with those correct masses, his planet disappears. That's my best guess as to Planet X, that our constants are wrong in some way, but we'll see.
One of the other theories for Planet X I believe has been debunked as absense of evidence. There are gaps in the documented bodies orbiting the sun that could imply an object clearing orbits, but they were dismissed instead as sampling errors - there are parts of the sky that are easier to catalog than others, and so of course we have cataloged the easy parts more thoroughly. We need observation stations in a sun orbit to see the parts we can’t see easily from an earth orbit.
It is a very odd orbit. Obviously it doesn't match the expected mass, but the orbit makes you wonder what else might be out there. As someone else posted:
Readit News
> The Minor Planet Electronic Circulars contain information on unusual minor planets, routine data on comets and natural satellites, and occasional editorial announcements. They are published on behalf of Division F of the International Astronomical Union by the Minor Planet Center, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A. > > Prepared using the Tamkin Foundation Computer Network
Looking up the Tamkin Foundation Computer Network: https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/Ack/TamkinFoundation.h...
> The OpenVMS cluster consists of nine single-CPU workstations and one four-CPU server. All the machines are running the extremely robust and secure OpenVMS operating system. The twelve Alpha-based machines are arranged as an OpenVMS Cluster, allowing all machines to share disk storage, execution and batch queues and other resources, as well as simplifying system management.
Assuming "Alpha-based machines" is referring to the DEC Alpha, these computers are ~30 years old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Alpha
I can see how they may be still stuck on Alphas because unless they can somehow simply recompile for x86-64 OpenVMS, it’s a complete rewrite from scratch.
They could probably get more performance out of one core on a modern phone, never mind a single modern server. But you see some really old systems in a lot of equipment, not because the porting costs are expensive, but the certification of proving the new system works the same is more than the operational cost of the legacy equipment.
It probably would save operating costs, and probably over a reasonably short window, if it was done successfully, though.
Maybe the software they use won’t easily run on a modern server.
You could ask them, but you might have to hook up your modem and try to call them. Maybe they have a BBS you could leave your question on.
This object appears to be in a very eccentric orbit (0.948), and with an H magnitude of 3.55, so it is likely hundreds of km in diameter. Ceres for reference has a H magnitude of 3.33 (smaller H is bigger diameter).
If you want to know what H means: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_magnitude#Solar_Syste...
https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html#/?sstr=2017%...
Out at 90 AU, and by the year 3000 is out at 500 AU, and that's still not anywhere near maximum distance. Looked like it was going to be 10,000+ years orbits or longer, and probably out at several 1000 AU at maximum.
Little skeptical it would even orbit normally with how heavily eccentric it is, and the extreme distance at maximum. Way... out beyond the heliopause / heliosheath / termination shock.
I think there is a tendency for them to have their PE out to one side and the AP out to the other giving a fairly obvious pattern indicating another larger object is shepherding the others into their orbits.
from [0]:
> Before its demotion from planet status in 2006, Pluto was considered to be the planet with the most eccentric orbit (e = 0.248). Other Trans-Neptunian objects have significant eccentricity, notably the dwarf planet Eris (0.44). Even further out, Sedna has an extremely-high eccentricity of 0.855 due to its estimated aphelion of 937 AU and perihelion of about 76 AU
> ...
> Comets have very different values of eccentricities. Periodic comets have eccentricities mostly between 0.2 and 0.7, but some of them have highly eccentric elliptical orbits with eccentricities just below 1; for example, Halley's Comet has a value of 0.967
so possibly an ignorant question, as someone who's interested in astronomy but doesn't follow it very closely - when this is categorized as a dwarf planet, does that include "it might be a comet" as a possibility? or have they already ruled it out as a possible comet through other observations?
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_eccentricity#Examples
Back from the 1810's to the 1870's or so, most people considered Ceres, Vesta, and things like that to be planets- they were bodies that wandered around the solar system, that meant they were planets. When the numbers started to get into the 20's, everyone decided to create a new category, "asteroid" (Greek for 'star-like') and put all of the smaller things in that. So when Pluto was discovered in 1930 it was slotted right into the planet category. Pluto was discovered mostly by accident, because Clyde Tombaugh was amazing at working the blink comparator, and finding the one dot that moved in between the two pictures of the night sky a few days apart.
However, by the 1990's and 2000's you had computers and digital cameras, which are even better than Clyde at finding things that move, and quickly the number of planets started to go up- and it was clear that once we had thoroughly mapped the ~~Oort Cloud~~ (meant Kuiper Belt, see below) etc. we would have dozens of planets. And so once again astronomers decided to create a new category, just like they had with asteroids a century earlier. This time they drew the line in such a way that Ceres got moved from asteroid to dwarf planet- it has enough mass to be roughly round, so after over a century of being an asteroid it became a dwarf planet.
This is how things always work in science: we discover something, then we discover more of them, and re-categorize everything based on the new discoveries. It's just more noticeable with Pluto because reciting the planets is done by every schoolkid in a way that they don't for subatomic particles or for species of voles or whatever.
If it were a ratio then 0 would be escape and 1 would be circular.
How big is that compared with other dwarf planets/ Moons? If you sort all dwarf planets by size, which position does this take (approximately)?
Pluto -> 2300 Km
Ceres -> 950 Km
Fobos(Mars) -> 25 Km
With an orbit somewhere around 28k years, it reached perihelion in about 1931, at 45 au from the Sun.
When it's in the faraway part of its orbit, it is moving very slowly, probably only tens of meters per second, but it's still close enough to the sun to eventually fall back in for another loop.
However, if something else dense enough got close enough out there, it would be easily perturbed and have its whole orbit altered, or even be ejected.
But interstellar space is pretty void of wandering solid bodies, so it keeps falling back towards the sun.
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I suppose that flying through the Oort cloud it might periodically launch ice balls into the inner solar system.
Minor astrodynamics nit: "perigee" is a term specific to Earth. The generic term for all bodies is "periapsis", and the term for the Sun is "perihelion"
(Astrodynamics terms generally take from the Greek, rather than Latin)
Also, I like to anthropomorphize inanimate objects because secretly they hate it.
Why did we have to evolve in such a loser system??
“falling into” was never part of the equation
Is Pluto a planet again, or not? Honest question because I don't keep up on these things because they have no practical effect other than drama...and I try to avoid drama.
Periapsis, au: 45.241
Apoapsis, au: 1714.759
Period, years: 26106.07
This is not the first time this sort of thing has happened. When Pluto was found by Clyde Tombaugh he was looking for Planet Nine, which Percival Lowell had calculated must be present based on the orbits of the outer planets. But it was quickly realized that Pluto was too small and in the wrong orbit for it be Lowell's deduced planet. (And even then they worked with a too high estimate of Pluto's mass, it wasn't until the 1978 discovery of Charon that we got a good estimate of Pluto's mass. It is hard to get a good mass estimate without something else in orbit around it.)
The Pioneer and Voyager missions gave us much better estimates of the masses of the gas giants, and my understanding is that if you go back and redo Lowell's calculations with those correct masses, his planet disappears. That's my best guess as to Planet X, that our constants are wrong in some way, but we'll see.
https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html#/?sstr=2017%...
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