Dwarf planet candidate appears which takes roughly 280 years to orbit our sun
174 points - today at 7:05 PM
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ddahlen yesterday at 8:44 PM
If anyone is interested, here is its orbit, my old day job was to compute orbits for asteroids and comets.
(This uses wasm, meant for a desktop, and will download the asteroid catalog of about 65mb, you have been warned)
https://dahlend.github.io/ketev/#t=2009-07-01.717&sel=2026%2...
This is a big boy.
ecshafer yesterday at 7:47 PM
There was a lot of negative press and commentary about "demoting" Pluto from being a planet at the time. But its obviously true that it was the right move, and creating this "dwarf planet" class of objects was correct. It was hard to justify Pluto being a planet when Ceres exists, but Eris, Haumea, Makemake and all of these other possible Dwarf planets are the nail in the coffin.
lairv yesterday at 11:18 PM
This is one of the reasons I think it's too early to talk about the Fermi paradox. We still know so little about what's around us in the universe
We've barely confirmed the existence of 10_000 exoplanets in our galaxy, and the methods we use to detect them are heavily biased toward certain ranges of planetary mass and orbital distance
As far as we know, everyone could very well be right here
christophilus yesterday at 7:24 PM
> They even found it in photographic plates from 1937
Pretty rad.
reenorap yesterday at 7:47 PM
Is this Planet X that they have been talking about for a while now?
ajaimk yesterday at 9:06 PM
Could this be Planet X? https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/planet-x/
dvh yesterday at 8:25 PM
> The new dwarf planet candidate, called 2026 ED138, orbits on a plane tiled nearly 25 degrees
I've noticed similar glaring typos in 2 recent articles. In both cases very early in the article. Is it possible that they are adding typos intentionally to mask the AI authoring?
nntwozz yesterday at 9:50 PM
They should call it Twitter.
(Character limit 280)
dzonga yesterday at 8:34 PM
so there's potentially undiscovered planets in our own neighborhood ?
kraig911 yesterday at 7:55 PM
Nibiru!
vld_chk yesterday at 9:19 PM
So, this is another new candidate, different from the one from a week ago?