Press Conference in Brazil to Announce Discovery in Outer Solar System | Hacker News Reader

Press Conference in Brazil to Announce Discovery in Outer Solar System

eso.org

131 pointsmariusz7969 comments

Early leak of press announcement:

"Brazlian researchers discover asteroid with rings"

"The European Southern Observatory announced this week the discovery of rings around an asteroid 1.4 billion miles from Earth. Chariklo is the largest of the class of asteroids orbiting the sun between Saturn and Uranus known as Centaurs."

Google cache before it was thaken down: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...

http://www.wral.com/discovery-an-asteroid-with-rings/1351096...

Well, that is pretty boring. But still, thanks for providing some actual information ;).

By the way, I find it a bit excessive that, if it is in fact this what they found, they set up a media embargo and everything. It's a pretty nice finding, but nothing massive.

Not that important tiny detail: Oiapoque and Chuí are not referenced as the rivers, but as the northest (Oiapoque) and southest (Chuí) cities of Brazil. "from Oiapoque to Chuí" is a popular expression to refer to the whole extension of brazilian territory.

Whoa! I guess the big news here is that rings around such a gravitationally weak body would be a rare occurrence in nature... indicating a high possibility of an artificially designed / constructed structure.

Edit: Not sure if I am being downvoted for stating the obvious or the incredulous :)

Imagine aliens racing space cars in a circle around an asteroid, on a track made of ice, it's the Niribu 500 :)

So you're not saying it's aliens... but it's aliens?

More importantly, this website is not reddit... Right?

It will become reddit if it is treated as such

With an even shittier interface.

How did these comments got approved anyways?

A bit of light humour sometimes isn't a bad thing :) It's called "boredom hacking" :) We know it'll have nothing to do with aliens, we can only hope...until one day it's real and they kill us all :)

Did that actually go into effect after all?

No. It was changed to be off by default, with moderators able to turn it on per-thread as needed. I haven't seen it on, even when people are actively insulting each other.

That is a gigantic leap.

For mankind.

You're exactly right. A race of beings sprung up out of the mud of their home world, discovered science, space travel, faster than light travel, decided to visit a solar system and place an artificial ring around a rock in the distant outer reaches of a solar system, and then... profit?

Actually ceramic materials make the best protection against missiles like bullets or meteorites. So an advanced race of star travelers would not use metal-skinned ships, they would coat their vessels with a thick layer of porous rock. All we can see is that outer protective skin. Inside the star travelers live generation after generation patiently waiting until they find a habitable planet to take over.

And then they immediately die because life is designed for a planet, not the other way around, unless by habitable you mean a planet that is uninhabitable, artificially made habitable.

It's our monolith!

A race of beings sprung up out of the mud of their home world, discover science, space travel, decide to visit a nearby rock, and place some plastic glued to a metal pole on it, and then... profit?

If this is an artificial item - a big honking if - there's not enough known about it to draw any significant conclusions. It could be their version of a flag. It could be a relay satellite. It could be a billboard to advertise McJxrqins.

Its a long range antenna in the big network in he sky. Currently receiving Discovery Channel and Fox Sports Saturn.

Do you also believe comets are likely artificially designed/constructed in nature?

They aren't as rare as rings; hence no.

It's a prototype Ringworld.

Or a Culture Orbital...

So that's where ___ went!

-----

(insert as you like from the below, or reply with your own)

• the body of Jimmy Hoffa

• Saddam's WMD's [0]

• Elvish Presley

• Michael Jackson

• the needed parts to finish Healthcare.gov

-----

[0] I know, I know. They went to Syria, and Isreal destroyed some of them. It's a joke.

You can have anything with rings in space

Or better, anything can orbit gravitationally the lightest of objects (as long as things like electrostatic forces are not overwhelming it)

Anything with a velocity bigger than a certain velocity (not sure how this is called - orbital velocity) and smaller than the escape velocity can orbit something in space (in this case atmosphere is not a problem)

Orbit yes; but ring formation I imagine would require a delicate balance of forces to maintain equilibrium. Which would imply this ring is either very young or formed by an extraordinary coincidence or umm.. curated.

wtf do you really believe the best possible explanation for a phenomena you know barely anything about which isn't outside of physical possibility (merely a supposed low likelihood) is "alien design"? Really?

When theories were built that way we used to call it "religion" not "science". Alien attributions seem pretty much a modern sci-fi/fantasy religion to me.

So, not an alien derelict?

Hm. So not a 1x4x9 flat black monolith on Europa...

http://aerospace.firetrench.com/2014/03/20-seconds-that-chan...

This was published yesterday, hasn't been taken down yet. The DOI is 10.1038/nature13155.

I think the importance goes up a lot if the rings are made of water as conjectured in parent. Getting access to water in space without dragging it out of a gravity well would make asteroid mining much easier. There's water in comets but their availability is not nearly as reliable.

Not really. At those distances, beyond the frost line [1] pretty much everything solid is bound to be mostly water. Ice is plentiful even in the main belt asteroids and in this case we're talking about the Centaurs that lie much farther away - of course, their distance also makes them ineligible for any short-term mining endeavors.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frost_line_%28astrophysics%29

Shame it's not broadcast, nowadays it should be a given, in my opinion. Why keep it closed to "members of the media", particularly when we all know how often they screw up these stories?

Not only there is no broadcast, but there is also strict embargo on the information, until after the conference.

Embargos are designed to give every news outlet sufficient time to write up their stories and do their background reasearch without having to worry to rush to print to beat their competitors. In practice it's questionably useful.

Http redirects to https, which is awesome. Except they don't support any 'new' ciphers. So I can't connect.

Site only supports

      TLS_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_MD5 (0x4)
      TLS_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_SHA (0x5)

> Http redirects to https, which is awesome.

Huh..? Here it's doing the opposite (but will check again once I get home if it's just at work..)..

Or weren't you talking about the eso.org website?

Some recent papers by the team's leader, Felipe Braga-Ribas, are at [1]. I'm not any astronomer, but they mainly seem to concern studies of the atmospheres of the outer planets and mintor planets using observations of stellar occultations.

Maybe the announcement is about Pluto's atmosphere, or detection of atmosphere around an asteroid or one of the Centaurs?

[1] http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Felipe_Braga-Ribas/publi...

> Each of the outer planets: Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune and of course Saturn have rings.

What? Really?

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rings_of_Jupiter

OK, so there are things I don't know, and more importantly there is water in fairly easily accessible places dotted around our Solar System.

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know. —United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld

When you have kids, your internal Wikipedia gets an update. :-) I had no idea about the rings until I read a book about planets to my kid. Then he started telling me that there were other dwarf planets besides Pluto. I told him that he was wrong. Then I went to a new book, and had to explain that "Even Papai makes mistakes."

Getting current on science is one of the great perks of having kids.

I agree. I get an amazing thrill from learning even some small new fact about our solar system. However, I'd argue that you don't have to wait until you have kids to get current on science. Maintaining general knowledge about the world around us is beneficial to everyone, and I believe that recognizing how much of a universe there is beyond our existence can help keep things in perspective.

And with all the Internet, Wikipedia, and several prominent science-oriented television shows today, keeping up is easier than ever.

Mee too! It touches me to have my kids begging me to see the next episode of Cosmos as if it was Games of Thrones.

> Then I went to a new book, and had to explain that "Even Papai makes mistakes."

Probably the most important thing for your kid to learn.

And oh boy he likes to remind me of this lesson. :-)

Science through press conferences. Exactly how you're not supposed to do it.

Hot on the heels of the discovery of Big Bang's gravitational waves there's now news that for the first time ever alien live has been witnessed, in the form of Silver Surfer ridin' dat wave.

This is very cool, I'm anxious to see the full announcement and see what is said. I want to hear what others in the field see and have to say as well because I would never think a body with a diameter of just 250 km could actually have enough gravitational power to maintain rings.

Read up on the Hill sphere: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_sphere

How much mass you need to retain rings isn't an absolute quantity. It depends on distance and size of other masses. A 250km body in Earth orbit couldn't retain its own rings because Earth's gravity would dominate the system. But a 250km body in deep space with no competition could.

Neptune can actually maintain satellites at a greater distance than Jupiter can, despite Jupiter having over 10x the mass. This is because Jupiter has closer competition from the Sun and Saturn, while Neptune has enormous amounts of space to itself.

I have to admit that this excites me a lot more than Oculus and Facebook, even if the latter will have a more immediate impact on my life.

Virtual worlds or space. That is the dilema.

If the universe is holographic, wouldn't it be kind of the same thing?

I wonder if it's better to just wait until the discovery is announced before submitting and upvoting? The speculation's fun, but, y'know. The announcement is in just a few hours.

"We have found the inventor of Bitcoin. At 15 AU, harassing him will be extremely expensive, however we hope NASA will do the right thing and repurpose their 2025 europa lander"

Planet X???

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planets_beyond_Neptune

Come on, Reapers. Or even Reavers.

It has to be Nibiru (or better known as Planet X)!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibiru_cataclysm#Planet_X

Big alien motherships on their way to acquire Facebook?

I think you mean "Facebook to acquire big alien mothership" ;)

Oops, what the heck was I thinking? Of course.

I guess Zecharia Sitchin was right. They be a comin' for our gold, dontcha know.

The beginning of The Fifth Element ..

Breaking news: From some undisclosed confirmed sources, it appears they discovered a new planet after Pluto. Could this be planet Nibiru?

I don't understand why this was voted down. The sources were trusted and the news was accurate.

It's the Klingons.

They want their beer back :) http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/mar/25/star-trek-warnog...

Event Horizon has returned.

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