Hubble Discovers Moon Orbiting the Dwarf Planet Makemake | Hacker News Reader

Hubble Discovers Moon Orbiting the Dwarf Planet Makemake

nasa.gov

122 pointsjapaget33 comments

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Here's the discovery paper:

http://hubblesite.org/pubinfo/pdf/2016/18/pdf.pdf

Thanks for the link to the paper. :)

The two names we're floating are Makemakemake and Minimake.

How about Moony McMoonface? :D

It would be nice if there was some voting to give it a name. But... original name of Makemake was Easterbunny, so you see how names go for these things.

There's still a relation, since Makemake was a god in Easter Island.

Like somebody else mentioned, moonmoon.

Uhhh, that's a dumb name, McDumberson.

I think the obvious answer is Make McMakemake

Princess Monomake

Makemashita.

CMakemake

Gradlegradle

MoonyMoony?

I don't see how they can justify that "artists impression" of a moon they know nothing about. It has no use other than to mislead.

Because the public likes pretty pictures, and NASA needs the public to be excited about space exploration.

If I didn't know the New Horizons photos of Pluto were real, I would have thought they were just "artists impressions" too, because the real thing was stunning.

Sure, the drawing is probably inaccurate, but the real thing is probably at least as interesting.

I agree. And, sometimes the "artist's impression" is fairly decent when it's done by someone with a technical background drawing (no pun intended) from actual scientific data to make educated guesses. I realize that isn't the norm, but I've seen a case of it.

Dunno why you're being downvoted, we're still undoing years of misleading from artists impressions of dinosaurs.

I dunno - I have a hard time getting mad about that. I mean, the "cost" of those misleading artist's impressions as found in Jurassic Park and others (which were largely in line by the best scientific estimates at the time) is a few largely harmless misconceptions that many adults carry around. Conversely, the benefit is getting millions of children and adults excited about natural history, geology, biology and science in general. Sounds like a pretty good tradeoff to me.

What did Jurassic Park get wrong?

Off the top of my head, brachiosaurs likely couldn't lift themselves onto their rear legs to feed, DNA from mosquitos in resin is probably a pipe dream, raptors had feathers and were probably quite stupid, and the t-rex probably had really good eyesight but wouldn't be fast enough to chase down a jeep - however, those are more recent conclusions.

There was also a lot of creative license taken with the size of a lot of the dinosaurs in the film - generally, they were scaled up to make them more impressive. Dilophosaurus spitting to attack is pure fabrication as well.

On the other hand, movies generally must take creative license to build up a satisfying plot within a 2-hour running time limit.

Casablanca is not a realistic portrayal of a Nazi regime and Citizen Kane doesn't tell the truth about Hearst.

Yes, but Rick Blaine doesn't shoot laser beams from his eyes and Jedediah Leland wasn't 12 feet tall.

Nobody has seen a live dinosaur, and most people haven't met a real 1930s Nazi. So the image of both is pretty much determined by popular culture.

The German Nazi party had 6 million members, most of whom were nothing like the bad guy in Indiana Jones. Similarly Jurassic Park isn't a true-to-life portrayal of actual dinosaurs.

Well, the T-Rex had feathers for one. Actually, most of the dinosaurs in that movie had feathers. And raptors were tiny little creatures. Still, you have bones to try to reconstruct a dinosaur. It's just a painting of what any old moon or planet could look like. It's like trying to draw a police sketch based on the description of "it was a person." It's actually worse than that because we do kind of know generally what people look like having billions of examples of them to draw from.

True but it was a... movie... made for entertainment value --and as a nice side effect captured the imagination of millions of children (as well as adults'). So, yeah ,they got known details wrong and in retrospect, as we currently understand, got further things wrong... But again, it was a "blockbuster" movie, not a high brow film or a scientific study. Thus, I don't have anything against how they portrayed the beasts. I think it's understood they took visual license and incorporated sci-fi.

I once watched those movies in a group of paleontologists. Apparently a bunch of stuff!

From the abstract: http://hubblesite.org/pubinfo/pdf/2016/18/pdf.pdf

>We find that the properties of Makemake’s moon suggest that the majority of the dark material detected in the system by thermal observations may not reside on the surface of Makemake, but may instead be attributable to S/2015 (136472) 1 having a uniform dark surface. This “dark moon hypothesis” can be directly tested with future JWST observations.

Less excusable is showing a top-down view of the solar system and failing to include Makemake's orbit on it.

> "artists impression" of a moon they know nothing about.

And there's a big probability that they never will.

Still I like to look at an imaginary drawing of something rather than at nothing.

It makes absolutely no difference since nobody on this Earth will get to see the real thing anyway.

At least not in this lifetime.

I remember when Pluto looked like that as well.

Getting an SSL error on a NASA page.. Weird..

HTTP Link: http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/hubble-discovers-mo...

Let's name it Moon McMoonface

How about Moonmoon? :)

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/moon-moon

MooMoo feels like the name for Makemake's moon.

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