Second ‘impossible’ ring found around distant dwarf planet
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
https://web.archive.org/web/20230501172303/https://www.nytim...
"A potential explanation for Quaoar’s distant rings is the presence of a moon, Weywot. The moon may have created gravitational disturbances that prevented the ring’s particles from accreting into additional moons. Both rings occur in locations near what are known as resonances with Weywot, and the resonances may turn out to be more important than the Roche limit for determining whether rings turn into moons or remain as rings."
Although I totally support calling the moon ‘Diana’.
"Brown left the choice of a name up to the Tongva, whose creator-god Quaoar had been named after. The Tongva chose the sky god Weywot, son of Quaoar."
OBVIOUSLY scientists understand that if something has been experimentally verified then it's by definition not impossible and the theory has to be improved. But I wonder if the general public understands that scientists understand that. Or if they imagine scientists going "Sir, an animal big as a house with a tail on his face? Impossible!"
If you use impossible in quotes to mean something that's NOT impossible but surprising or unexpected, why not just say that?
No, the general public does not. The scientific literacy of the general public is abysmal. There's entire political movements predicated on a lack of understanding of the term "scientific theory".
Really? Is it like a specific party or something?
I really find it absurdly arrogant from american writers to use their broken system for scientific material, knowing the rest of the whole god damn world is already forced to use english for scientific communication.
As a non-native person reading and writing english all day long, this makes me infuriated every single time. I feel like being shown a middle finger.
I can see a time where it‘ll start trying to do the same for other units and the large numbers of metric using English-speakers will have to put up with 1600 km being translated to 1000 miles.
You could share that as a second-hand accounting. "Blog spam", but actually superior to the original.
If you can encode knowledge and facts, there all all sorts of ways you might share news. P2P LLM-to-LLM as one crazy idea, but there are so many.
The encoding of the fact itself could let you instantly translate it, render to speech or video. This will take time to build, but it's wild.
Maybe our personal AI assistants will learn what's relevant to us and tell us at the desired resolution.
Think about how humans share facts. Our tech will trend towards that.
It would be an interesting project to see if it works.
Pasting the article into the textbox...
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Like the first ring around Quaoar, announced by a team of astronomers in February, the second ring lies beyond what is known as the Roche limit.
The second ring, at a distance of 1,500 miles from the center of Quaoar, is closer than the ring announced in February, which has a radius of about 2,500 miles.
Another occultation occurred on Aug. 9 last year, and astronomers again pointed telescopes, large and small, at Quaoar in hopes of learning more about the ring.
The new observations revealed more details including a dense, narrow core in the ring just a few miles wide, which is surrounded by an envelope of material that is more dispersed.
A potential explanation for Quaoar's distant rings is the presence of a moon, Weywot.
The moon may have created gravitational disturbances that prevented the ring's particles from accreting into additional moons.
Both rings occur in locations near what are known as resonances with Weywot, and the resonances may turn out to be more important than the Roche limit for determining whether rings turn into moons or remain as rings.
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Going through OpenAI (764 tokens with a simple prompt):
Earlier this year, astronomers announced that a small world beyond Neptune with a diameter about one-third that of Earth’s moon possessed a Saturn-like ring that should not be there. Recently, after further observation, it has been discovered that Quaoar has two such rings. Scientists are still trying to understand how dust and gas in the early solar system coalesced into moons and planets. Quaoar is located in the Kuiper belt, a region of frozen debris beyond Neptune that includes Pluto, and the rings were found through stellar occultations. The first ring is at a distance of 2,500 miles and the second is at 1,500 miles. There is a potential explanation that the presence of a moon, Weywot, has caused gravitational disturbances that stopped the particles from accreting into additional moons.
The rings are not visible in telescope images, but astronomers were able to observe the shadow of the eclipses when distant stars passed behind Quaoar. Another occultation will occur on May 13, visible to telescopes in the US and Canada, which will help to constrain the Quaoar shape better and obtain more details about the two rings.
The discovery of the two rings around Quaoar has been a surprise to astronomers and has led to further research into how these rings were formed and how they remain in place. Additionally, it could offer insight into how dust and gas coalesced into planets and moons in the early solar system. Researchers hope that the upcoming occultation on May 13 will provide more answers.
Moreover, the extant names from the Roman pantheon are universal within the international scientific community. They are also nearly exhausted.
I find it tedious to reject names from other pantheons. Not least because they are exceptionally cool - Quaoar and ʻOumuamua are stellar and divine names. Of all things, should not astronomy inspire us to grok human culture as a global and syncretic whole, as opposed to a parochial set of divisions in which English speakers may only use Greco-Roman gods?
They could have named it Terminus, or Fontus, or Quirinus, or Vejovis, or... But whatever.
Anyways, the point I'm trying to make is that the space community is definitely thinking more globally nowadays and that it absolutely works. We went from no particular interest in astronomy amongst general population to meticulously following Perseverance's every step.
For example in Japanese, the visible planets have names that align with their own pre-Columbian traditions, e.g. Mars is named "Kasei" which means Firestar and Jupiter is named "Mokusei" which means Treestar. But when you get to planets discovered in modern times, Uranus, Neptune and demoted Pluto, they're respectively "Tennousei (Heavenly-King Star)", "Kaiousei (Sea-King Star)", and "Meiousei (Hades-King Star)", which are directly derived from the Western names given by their discoverers.
Now imagine the thousands of smaller named bodies in the Solar System, nobody's going to be bothered to come up with independent names for all of them for every culture, it would be too confusing. Imagine if everyone used native-tongue keywords in programming languages. Someone would send you a Python progam in French and it would be littered with sinon, sauf, Vrai, etc. While it might be convenient for the native speaker working alone, it would be a nightmare for interoperability.
Thus, newly discovered heavently bodies are referred to by the designations approved by the International Astronomical Union, in this case via its Working Group - Small Bodies Nomenclature.
When you think about it, would it actually matter?
The AST would be the same. As long as identifiers are defined for multiple locales it would be trivial to translate.
That's Yamnaya/PIE pantheism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyēus
It's coming back though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellenism_(modern_religion)
It is consistent, planets are from Roman or Greek, dwarf planets are roughly gods of creation regardless of mythology.
Other dwarf planets include Sedna (Inuit), Haumea (Hawaii), Makemake (Easter Islands), Gonggong (China), Orcus (Etruscan, but also Roman).
Though Pluto and Eris are intentional exceptions because they were thought to be planets for a long time.
Quoting Wikipedia:
Other trans-Neptunian objects (such as 50000 Quaoar), including classical Kuiper belt objects, are given mythological or mythic names (not necessarily from Greek or Roman mythology), particularly those associated with creation.
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From a physx article [2]
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Consistent with the IAU conventions for naming non-resonant Kuiper Belt Objects after creator deities, the object was given the name Quaoar after the Tongva creator god. The Tongva people (otherwise known as the Mission Indians) are native to the area around Los Angeles, where the discovery of Quaoar was made.
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I see no reason why names need to fit the sensibilities of English speakers
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_naming_convention...