The Tenth Planet

Analoguesat

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No - not a Dr Who thread this time - but looks like reality has finally caught up with all those sci fi stories:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4730061.stm
 

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yeah, I saw this too, on BBCi (Freeview).

Well, astronomers have been speculating for years, known orbital perturbations must mean there's something else out there, etc, and now they've finally found it! But, turns out it's a big block (I mean, sphere!) of ice, so wouldn't that make it a captured comet, and not a "real planet" ?

In Dr Who, The Tenth Planet (kindly destroyed by the BBC!) had Bill Hartnell, as Dr Who, first encountering the Cybermen (in those days, played by actors with paper bags on their heads), so let's hope there's no real ones.

(added) Orbit is not in Planetary Plane, just like Pluto, also suggesting it's been "captured".
 

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Certainly interesting but 10th planet I don't think so (still what do I know).
Mind you there are many who don't think that Pluto is the ninth planet just a captured asteroid, or a moon from another planet now that would be interesting.
 

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Maybe it's an approaching alien spaceship! Is the orbit hyperbolic, does anyone know yet?

(I watched film Indepence Day, on tv last night!).
 

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Many of these outer system objects go about in pairs, so why stop at ten ?

Theres plenty of evidence that even further out (maybe five times the distance of Neptune), there are a huge number of dirty snowballs, too dark and travelling too slowly for a positive ID.

With the shuttle up and running again (for now) it might be somebody mentions the overdue maintenance stop at Hubble.
 

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Channel Hopper said:
With the shuttle up and running again (for now) it might be somebody mentions the overdue maintenance stop at Hubble.
I thought I had read recently that they've ditched any future missions to service Hubble......However this seems to contradict that click here
 

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Yep, there's still the Oort Cloud out there (somewhere).

Fred Hoyle also wrote a novel called Tenth Planet, which I must have read but have forgotten (his early novels were great, and got made into fine tv sci fi, but his later ones were utterly gaga!).

The mythological concept of "tenth planet" comes from Pythagorean astronomy. 2500 year ago, 8 astronomical bodies were known, mercury, venus, earth, moon, sun, mars, jupiter, saturn. But, Pythagoras though there had to be 10, since that's a "perfect number". So he added the "central fire" (which produced light, which the sun only reflected!). And, the 10th planet, a "counter earth", always on the opposite side of the central fire to us, and therefore always completely invisible (how convenient!).

Pythaogreanism was a religion, there were all sorts of crazy rules, and joining was like becomming a monk or nun. But, as we all know, Pythagoras invented triangles, and where would we be today without those?

For more info on Pythagoreanism, see http://users.ucom.net/~vegan/pythagorean.htm .

(For anyone seriously interested, there's some excellent factual articles on this website, as well as the crazy "new age" stuff!).
 

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spiney said:
But, Pythagoras thought there had to be 10, since that's a "perfect number". So he added the "central fire" (which produced light, which the sun only reflected!). And, the 10th planet, a "counter earth", always on the opposite side of the central fire to us, and therefore always completely invisible (how convenient!).


Another premise for Gerry Anderson and one of his few real actor releases, Doppelganger.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064519/
 

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That reminds me of the space mission to travel to the sun.

'Surely the heat will destroy your craft and yourself' a journalist noted.

Ahh! we've thought of that - 'we're going at night!'

I'll get my coat...
 

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Sorry, I made a mistake above, Fred Hoyle's novel was "Fifth Planet".

(So, only halfway there!).
 

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It would be interesting to know how they found it, the linked BBC article above just mentions "modern techniques", presumably computer software.

Older searches were done by "blinking", ie, a special viewer oscillating between photographic plates in front of an observer's eyes, for many hours. If you read Clive Tombaugh's account of how he discovered Pluto, he was doing that all the time for many months, and it's amazing he still had any eyesight left afterwards!
 

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Whoops, I've made a typo above!

Pluto was discovered by CLYDE (Tombaugh).

Sorry.
 
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