Astronomers Surprised to Find Asteroid With Rings | Hacker News Reader

Astronomers Surprised to Find Asteroid With Rings

wired.com

54 pointsplatz23 comments

That we can predict the alignment and make observations of such unimaginably distant objects never ceases to amaze me. There's just something - I don't know - satisfying about the collective drive to figure things out and accumulate knowledge.

Also, this discovery puts me in mind of my favorite new science fiction series, The Expanse [0].

0: https://www.goodreads.com/series/56399-expanse

ESO press release: http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1410/

Paper: http://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/es...

I'm surprised this is a surprise. There are asteroids/minor planets with moons. Why not rings?

If you put a ring on an asteroid, i think that everyone would agree that it would stay there. What's surprising is that the dominate theories of ring formation don't really allow for something this small to form rings. Too small for tidal forces. Weak gravity would mean it's hard to hold the products of a collision. If the asteroid has shepherd satellites, they would be even weaker.

At least, that's why I'm surprised.

Not if the asteroid passed through a comet tail, esp tangentially, it could easily capture water ice which would condense to a ring. Look at the gravity on phobos and demios which are way smaller than this thing.

> The cosmic bling

...is the name of my new hip-hop group

Captured & crushed Kuiper belt object, perhaps tossed in by Neptune???

Water Ice? Looks like a breadcrumb to me.

What do the other asteroids call him, the Lord of the Rings?

He probably has the title of Ring Bearer.

You mean Ring Bear?

This new comment approval system is working out great.

Yes because

A)There's tons of conversation going on here in this topic and B)Burn anyone at the stake who wants to make a post that is less than serious (I think this is my one and only time doing that on HN).

My precious comments...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7449857

If I understand correctly they are per thread and disabled by default.

No more jokes on HN?

HN has never been a very good environment for jokes. One of the big goals of HN was to optimize for signal, both quality and quantity. Jokes are noise. If you want to do Reddit-style pun threads, you can go to one of the many subreddits that welcomes those. There is no shortage of places to find jokes on the Internet, but there is a severe lack of places where you can find thoughtful comments by knowledgeable people.

Paul Graham wrote in one of his essays about Hacker News:

The most dangerous form of stupid comment is not the long but mistaken argument, but the dumb joke. … Whatever the cause, stupid comments tend to be short. And since it's hard to write a short comment that's distinguished for the amount of information it conveys, people try to distinguish them instead by being funny.

… Bad comments are like kudzu: they take over rapidly. Comments have much more effect on new comments than submissions have on new submissions. If someone submits a lame article, the other submissions don't all become lame. But if someone posts a stupid comment on a thread, that sets the tone for the region around it. People reply to dumb jokes with dumb jokes.

(What I've Learned From Hacker News: http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html)

I agree. Sometimes, though, a properly inserted joke can dissolve heated arguments. In NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) it's called a 'Pattern Interrupt.'

HN has never been anti-joke but it's always been anti-distraction. You can make jokes on HN but the only way they're not going to be downvoted into oblivion is if they don't distract from the subject or are exceptionally funny.

But the approach by pg was a sledgehammer, moderation is a really hard subject. Being able to collapse (and collapsed) by default stuff voted off-topic or below threshold would have worked just well. HN has much to learn or just flat out implement from Reddit. While lobste.rs has much smaller codebase, their tagging and moderation system is way better.

Can I get an invite to Lobste.rs ?

No, I mean Ring Bearer

http://www.wedding.com/ring-bearer

I know, was joking.

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