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Comment by ohwellhere | Hacker News Reader

My 9 year old daughter told me last week that Uranus had rings, and I told her I really didn't think so, are you thinking of Saturn? And she said nope, they both do. What a weird bit of knowledge to get wrong, even at 9, so I looked it up. She was delighted to have taught me something.

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That’s crazy to hear. To me, after Saturn, Uranus is the most famous planet with rings because it’s vertical instead of horizontal. That’s the defining feature of Uranus.

The defining feature of Uranus is that its axis of rotation is at almost right angle to the axis of rotation of Solar system.

The rings just conform to that axis of rotation along with moons and such.

Also, rings are thought to be relatively recent feature of Uranus (on the order of hundreds of millions of years).

IIRC, Saturn's rings are also relatively recent feature. If you think about it, what a time to be alive! Saturn and Uranus have rings and Sun and Moon are in so precious position, that we can experience total eclipse (this won't last too long also, relative to age of Solar system).

"the appalachian mountains are older than saturn’s rings. the appalachian mountains are older than dinosaurs. the appalachian mountains are older than trees. the appalachian mountains are literally older than BONES. the appalachian mountains should be regarded with pure terror."

Who came up with this? All I see a bunch of twitter users reposting it. Is it from something? Other than twitter I mean.

That passage sounds like it might be from a podcast called Old Gods of Appalachia,

https://oldgodsofappalachia.com/

I know at least at one point during the Cassini mission- though I confess I have not followed this in more than a decade it so I don't know if further study has refuted this idea- a popular theory for the rings was that basically Saturn was constantly forming and destroying moons into rings and back: a moon would get torn up and turned into a ring, then slowly clump back together over time and reform as a moon, then the cycle would continue.

Makes me curious what past/future aspects of our solar system we would have considered special had we been alive then.

If it makes you feel better, outer planets with all their moons will be in habitable zone for a short time when our Sun will reach red giant stage in some billions of years.

Liquid water oceans on Mars are believed to have existed in the past.

Super glad I'm alive in the few centuries where I can see it in the night sky from the northern hemisphere. I've seen mars too, but it's always down near the horizon. Both are way brighter than any star.

For me it is precisely because I always had in mind the "featureless blue sphere" picture in mind, and never bothered to look deeper. Goes to show how important images are in the public sphere.

To me, after Saturn, Uranus is the most famous planet with rings because of toilet humor.

As an aside, either get or borrow a decent telescope and see the rings of Saturn and the Galilean Moons for yourself. It’s a really neat experience and gives you a direct personal shared experience with the birth of modern astronomy.

Seeing Jupiter, its Great Red Spot, and a line of dots representing 4 of its largest moons, as well as Saturn and its rings through a telescope at a backyard astronomy event when I was a kid was such a ridiculously cool experience. Granted, I was a huge space dork.

It's exactly why Uranus was my favorite planet growing up. It was such an outlier, which, if I dig farther into my psyche, probably aligned well with my self view as the only kid in my class who geeked out on space.

Speaking of Psyche (and mythology), the names of Uranus's moons are excellent.

Whenever my children teach me something, it makes us so happy. They, for teaching their dad. Me, for learning something from such a special little person. It’s just the best.

This is my favorite part of my day. Yesterday we were just having dinner talking about god knows what when my 9 year old drops something into convo about The Homestead Act and how many acres you could by and how they had to be developed and all these bullet points about it I haven't retained when I may have read about it so many years ago. It was delightful.

Now, there was also the part about her thinking the Mexican–American War was in 1989. Which is Taylor Swift's birthday, her favorite artist. Which is hilarious on so many levels.

> Now, there was also the part about her thinking the Mexican–American War was in 1989

there was a president that thought we had airplanes during the revolutionary war, so hopefully the date mix up wasn't judged too harshly

> there was also the part about her thinking the Mexican–American War was in 1989. Which is Taylor Swift's birthday,

So that's what The Great War is about!

I have learned that to most kids anything before 2000 is basically ancient history that all blends together.

My godson once solemnly asked his dad "Were dinosaurs before or after steam engines?" which is obviously adorable.

Neptune has rings as well, as does Jupiter.

I highly recommend checking out what we learned about Saturn's rings from Cassini. One example: https://science.nasa.gov/resource/the-tallest-peaks-2/

Woah, that's amazing.

Yes, all four gas giants in our Solar System have rings:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_system#Ring_systems_of_pl...

They are very faint and difficult to detect. They weren't even observed directly when they were discovered. They were originally discovered when astronomers noticed that they occulted light of background stats.

Occluded

In astronomy we use the term "occulted" when one body passes in front of another and blocks its light.

Medicine uses "occult" for hidden too, e.g. occult blood in Uranus may be a sign of polyps or cancer.

As distinct from non-occult blood, which is probably just from asteroids.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecal_occult_blood

TIL. Thank you

That's so strange? 'Occluded' would be a suitable word for that meaning-wise though right? When did astronomy decide to use such a close sounding but different meaning word? Did occult mean what it does now when they started? Language is so strange

The sciences are full of new-latin and neo-greek formations like Biology and Astronomy. So reaching back the the original meaning of occult "to hide (from)" isn't that big a stretch. Especially when "occlude" comes from a word meaning "to shut (away)" and an eclipse isn't shutting the sun away, just hiding it. The Mahdi isn't just standing behind something, he's hidden away in another plane. That's why he's the occluded imam.

But also occlude has a chemistry meaning when one substance gets hidden inside another, so maybe it was too overloaded to be a good word for that.

I'm not sure about the history of these words, but astronomy also uses the noun form: "occultation" [1], for which there's not an obvious equivalent for "occlude."

> Did occult mean what it does now when they started?

A word can have more than one meaning. The first definition on merriam-webster.com covers the definition used in astronomy:

occult (v.): to shut off from view or exposure: cover, eclipse [2]

The adjective form might be a source of derivation for the meaning you're alluding to:

occult (adj.): (1) not revealed: secret; (2) not easily apprehended or understood: abstruse, mysterious; (3) hidden from view: concealed [2]

And finally, the paranormal meaning that people are more familiar with today:

occult (n): matters regarded as involving the action or influence of supernatural or supernormal powers or some secret knowledge of them -> used with the [2]

Again, I don't know the history of these words. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd bet that the noun form, "the occult", is derived from the adjective form since "the occult" refers to supernatural phenomena, which is naturally hidden from view, concealed, not revealed, secret, not easily apprehended or understood, etc (because it's not real).

Edit: Another guess. If you think about the history of astronomy, it was originally intertwined with religion and astrology. Perhaps these words date back to a time when "the occult" and astronomy weren't entirely separate. Anyways, I agree. Language is strange.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occultation

[2]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/occult

My daughter said there are 5 oceans ... I said she was wrong, then we looked at a modern map. Who forgot to send out the memo about the Southern Ocean?

My kid, after watching some YouTube videos on prehistoric man, told me that the theory of the Missing Link was wrong.

I was like, “Wait, what? When did that happen?” Apparently it was disproven for decades and I never knew. I felt like the old people who held onto their old beliefs that I felt such disdain for. He also went on to tell me that the brontosaurus didn’t exist either and I had enough.

Brontosaurus is controversial! A paper in 2015 asserts that it's distinct from Apatosaurus. When I was in school it was well understood to be just another name for the apatosaurus. Some teacher claimed it was an apatosaurus with the head and tail switched. But there's been some activity in this space!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brontosaurus

What? The missing link in human evolution, the link between primate and homo sapien, has been found? Not as far as I understand.

There is no missing link. The issue is that the theory precluded that evolution was a straight line. They have different theories now about rivers and branches of evolution and no straight line.

Plus a lot of missing link evidence was apparently made up!

What do you mean that it's a branch instead of a straight line? Then there should still be intermediate species, and the species should not suddenly make an evolutionary jump. And what missing link evidence has been made up? Never heard about that. What is there to make up about it? You can make up something that is missing, but you can't make up something that isn't missing. So then you would mean that they incorrectly said that there was a evolutionary jump between 2 species while there wasn't?

In any case, if you have any sources, would be appreciated.

I just read the wiki article about it:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_link_(human_evolutio...

So it seems that the name "missing link" has gone out of favor because it implies a linear evolution instead of branches. But in a branch you can still have missing links I would say.

So I feel the scientists just didn't like that there was a term made up for something they can't explain yet. And the various solutions to the missing link story turned out to not fit or be a hoax, so I guess that is what you mean by "has been made up".

The wiki article says at the end of the introduction:

"There is no singular missing link. The scarcity of transitional fossils can be attributed to the incompleteness of the fossil record."

So there is not a singular missing link, but there are multiple missing links! What a smart way to sweep this issue under the rug. And then we can also say that there was never any evidence for the missing link. Which funnily enough is the whole problem, that there isn't any evidence for a species before human sapiens which would explain our evolutionary connection with another primate species.

If evidence for this missing link would be found, or evidence that would make the missing link unnecessary, I think it would be big news, not go unnoticed and that we find out from our children.

I guess they want our children to think that there are not really any big issues with our current theories. Like they did with us when we were children.

I don't know but if you find out could you put me on the mailing list? Or i guess i could have a child but one of those seems a lot easier.

In all honesty, is there any place where i can view the curriculum that children in my area are being taught? They don't tell us about those changes but they might put it somewhere. I, for one, think the news should do something useful and teach us the updates from time to time. Could you imagine if all that politicking was instead useful scientific information?

Same. That to me felt more shocking than losing Pluto as a planet.

Neptune also has a ring.

Jupiter also has ring, but it is not apparent.

Actually all 4 gas giants have rings, they're just much smaller and less visible than Saturn's. Jupiter and Neptune's rings are very slight, compared to Uranus' substantial ones and of course Saturn's gaudy decoration.

Next she'll tell you that Pluto isn't a planet and there are at least 5 other dinosaurs than T-Rex, diplodocus and raptor...

In all seriousness, it's really quite interesting to see what has changed in 30 years.

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