The area of sky shown here is approximately 0. Happily for us and our families much of the work is done by computers. The telescope is robotically controlled and sends its data to Pasadena every morning where it is searched by a bank of 10 computers at Caltech. Each morning the computers find approximately potentially-moving objects that a human has to look at. The vast majority are some flaw in the camera and are not real solar system objects, but, occasionally, as seen above, a real object makes its presence known.
Because the new dwarf planet is so far away it is moving slower than most of the objects that we find. It is moving so slowly, in fact, that our computers didn't notice it the first time around! We began a special reanalysis a year later to specifically look for very distant objects. Note that initial reports suggested that the discovery date was January 8th. We apologize for the mistake; it was caused because of the craziness surrounding the first day of announcement.
We didn't have time to check our notes and apparently our memories are not as good as they used to be. What is the real name going to be?
Eris When a new object is discovered the International Astronomical Union IAU gives it a temporary designation based on the date it was first seen. Is this object really a planet or a dwarf planet? Is Pluto a planet? What makes a planet? How was the planetary status be decided?
The above gives my personal view on how to resolve the planetary status. The official decision will come from the International Astronomical Union. We had hoped for a timely decision but we instead appear to be stuck in committee limbo. Here is the story, as best I can reconstruct it from the hints and rumors that I hear: A special committee of the International Astronomical Union IAU was charged with determining "what is a planet.
The DPS asked their committee to look in to it. The DPS committee decided to form a special committee. The IAU decided to that it no longer wanted the DPS to look at the question Nothing happened for a long time During the summer of the IAU made a new committee that met for 2 days in Paris and came up with the "everything round is a planet" definition The definition was met with heated opposition at the IAU General Assembly in Prague The strict eight planet definition was agreed upon Whew.
What else is out there? Why does it take so long to announce these discoveries? Soon after the announcement of the discovery of the new planet the suggestion slowly made its way around the internet that we, the discoverers, were somehow violating long standing scientific standards by keeping the existence of the planet "secret" for so long. This suggestion seemed so bizarre to us that we paid no attention at first, but, as with many things on the internet, it has been repeated enough times even reasonable people are starting to believe it.
We would like to quickly dispell this odd misconception that no credible scientist would hold. One of the things that is so strange about this allegation is that it should also be made of every single scientific result that is published in a reputable scientific journal.
In all such cases, scientists make discoveries, they verify their discoveries, they carefully document their discoveries, and they submit papers to scientific journals. What they don't do is make discoveries and immediately hold press conferences to announce them one need only think back to the cold fusion days to remember how thoroughly the scientific community condemns such behavior.
Good science is a careful and deliberate process. The time from discovery to announcement in a scientific paper can be a couple of years. For all of our past discoveries, we have described the objects in scientific papers before publicly announcing the objects' existence, and we have made that announcement in under nine months.
These papers allow other astronomers to verify, confirm, and critique the analysis we have done. Sadly, because we were forced to announce UB prematurely, we have still yet to complete the scientific paper describing this object it is now finally complete!
We find this situation scientifically embarrassing and apologize to our colleagues who are reduced to learning about this new object from reading reports in the press. We are hard at work on this scientific paper, but, as we said above, good science is a careful and deliberate process and we are not yet through with our analysis. Our intent in all cases is to go from discovery to announcement in under nine months. We think that is a pretty fast pace. One could object to the above by noting that the existence of these objects is never in doubt, so why not just announce the existence immediately upon discovery and continue observing to learn more?
This way other astronomers could also study the new object. There are two reasons we don't do this. First, we have dedicated a substantial part of our careers to this survey precisely so that we can discover and have the first crack at studying the large objects in the outer solar system. The discovery itself contains little of scientific interest.
Almost all of the science that we are interested in doing comes from studying the object in detail after discovery.
Announcing the existence of the objects and letting other astronomers get the first detailed observations of these objects would ruin the entire scientific point of spending so much effort on our survey.
Some have argued that doing things this way "harms science" by not letting others make observations of the objects that we find. It is difficult to understand how a nine month delay in studying an object that no one would even know existed otherwise is in any way harmful to science! Many other types of astronomical surveys are done for precisely the same reasons. Astronomers survey the skies looking for ever higher redshift galaxies.
When they find them they study them and write a scientific paper. When the paper comes out other astronomers learn of the distant galaxy and they too study it.
Other astronomers cull large databases such as the 2MASS infrared survey to find rare objects like brown dwarves. When the paper comes out other astronomers learn of the brown dwarves and they study them in perhaps different ways. Still other astronomers look around nearby stars for the elusive signs of directly detectable extrasolar planets. When they find one they study it and write a scientific paper You get the point.
This is the way that the entire field of astronomy -- and probably all of science -- works. It's a very effective system; people who put in the tremendous effort to find these rare objects are rewarded with getting to be the first to study them scientifically.
Astronomers who are unwilling or unable to put in the effort to search for the objects still get to study them after a small delay. There is a second reason that we don't announce objects immediately, and that is because we feel a responsibility not just to our scientific colleagues but to the public.
We know that these large objects that keep being found are likely to be the result of intensive interest by the public, and we would like to have the story as complete as possible before making an announcement.
Consider, for example, the instantaneous Ortiz et al. Headlines in places like the BBC web site breathlessly exclaimed "new object may be twice the size of Pluto.
We quickly got the truth out, but just barely. Sadly, other interesting aspects of EL61 also got lost in the shuffle. No one got to hear that it rotates every 4 hours, faster than anything else known in the Kuiper belt. Or how that fast rotation causes it to be shaped like a cigar. Or how we use the existence of the satellite to calculate the mass.
All of these are interesting things that would have let the public learn a bit more about the mysteries of physics and of the solar system. In the press you get one chance to tell the story. In the case of the instantaneous announcement of EL61 the story was simply "there is a big object out there.
Given that we do precisely what other astronomers do and that we are actually very prompt about making announcements, where did the crazy ideas that we should be announcing objects instantly come from? Interestingly, there is one area of astronomy in which instantaneous announcement is both expected and beneficial to all. In the study of rare, quickly changing objects, such as supernovae, gamma ray bursts, comets, and near earth asteroids, astronomers quickly disseminate their results so that as many people as possible can study the phenomenon before it disappears or changes completely.
No one discovers a comet and keeps it to himself to study, because by the time the study was done the comet would be gone and no one else could study it ever again. The people initially suggesting that we were wrong to not announce our objects instantly are, for the most part, a small group of amateur astronomers who are familiar with comet and near earth asteroid observation protocols.
We can only assume that this familiarity led them to their misconceptions. Kuiper belt objects are not quickly changing phenomena. The survey first spotted the new planet in October , but it was not until 8 January that Brown realised the object was so distant that its brightness meant it had to be very big. Calculations showed it was near the most distant point of its year orbit — in years it will be only 36 times as far from the Sun as the Earth is.
A graphic of its orbit can be viewed here. Infrared observations could provide that information, but the planet was too faint and cold for the Spitzer Space Telescope to spot. But Spanish astronomers independently discovered one of the two other big new Kuiper Belt objects, and on 28 July the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts published an orbit based on their data for the object it designated EL The following morning, Brown received a phone call claiming that unknown hackers had stolen some of his data and planned to publish it as their own.
That led him to announce the planet and a third object — temporarily designated FY9 by the Minor Planet Center. We have never seen satellites like this before. Marcos van Dam, adaptive optics scientist at the W. Keck Observatory and co-author on the paper describing the discovery.
Since , this system has been providing very high spatial resolution imaging in the infrared comparable to that of visible light images from Hubble Space Telescope. With LGS AO, observers not only get higher resolution, but the light from distant objects is concentrated over a much smaller area on the instrument detector, making faint detections possible. The results are quickly advancing the understanding of binary Kuiper belt objects, a region in the Solar System beyond the orbit of Neptune.
But then we found a moon in the Santa system, and then we found another moon circling Xena, and they both look very similar to one another. This leads us to conclude that the largest objects in the Kuiper belt may have been subject to collisions. We could also tell that it was not an image artifact because it did not rotate with the sky and was consistent in each of the 24 images. By morning we knew that we had made a major discovery. It is currently about 97 astronomical units from the Sun an astronomical unit is the million-mile distance between the Sun and Earth , and is larger than the size of Pluto.
It takes years to complete one trip around the Sun versus years for Pluto and has a very steep angle in relation to the other planets, about 45 degrees off from the orbital plane of the other nine planets. Xena also has a very elliptical orbit, coming in as close as 3.
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