“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.” –J. Robert Oppenheimer
Precisely…um…(looks up hours left)…(smacks forehead)
Never mind. Trump is President!
No more “Once and Future” He’s the PRESENT President!
We have somehow survived the last four years. Some faced jail–they have now been freed.
And one man faced bullets;
From THIS:
To THIS:
And he’s off to a roaring start, signing executive orders, some of which are HUGE in their impact. Immediate cessation of DEI. Declaration of a national emergency on the Border. Declaring the cartels terrorist organizations. Freeing up energy production (though nothing was said aloud about using The (strong nuclear) Force).
Alas Holder is still at large.
Comment here until/unless the regular post shows up.
2 days, 11 hours, 59 minutes until the Once And Future President, Donald John Trump, is restored to the office that was Rightfully his the last four years.
Not that I’m counting, mind you.
What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?
Our Turn
[Yes, I did this one ten weeks ago. But it was too cathartic to just throw away.]
We’ve often seen that quote from David Plouffe: “It is not enough to simply beat Trump. He must be destroyed thoroughly. His kind must not rise again.”
This was of course a declaration of intent to annihilate not just Trump, but rather “his kind.”
You know what? I think we should flip it around. David Plouffe’s kind should be destroyed thoroughly and their kind must not rise again.
What is Plouffe’s kind? I suppose it depends on who’s talking and what they are thinking of in particular. Well, at the moment it’s me talking and I am thinking of the sort of maggot who is attracted to politics not to better his world but rather so that he can wield power over others, or line their pockets with “free” money. Often these people end up as what Ayn Rand called “pull peddlers,” receiving money in exchange for using their connections to do favors.
This type is parasitic. Utterly parasitic. And they should be destroyed thoroughly and not allowed to rise again.
The bad news is we will never eradicate them. Useless turds who can’t do anything productive will always be with us. As will the outright sociopaths.
Of course they find Trump to be their enemy. And of course they find us to be their enemy. If we won’t simply lie down and let our “betters” have their way with us, we’re a problem, we’re something to be got rid of. And of late, we haven’t lain down without a protest, as we are “supposed” to do. Dang uppity Garbage Deplorables! We don’t know our place!!!
The good news is we can provide far fewer niches for these parasites. The niches come into being when something that people formerly did of their own free will is taken over by the government; then every aspect of that activity becomes a political football.
Take for instance education. Since the government runs it, if you don’t like what’s being done, you have to form a political movement and try to work your way around the maggots embedded in the bureaucracy. If education were private, then if you didn’t like what they were doing to your child, you’d take your money and your child elsewhere. And people who didn’t even have school-age children presently would have no voice–and not have to pay money. Making it a government “thing” turned it into a political thing, and the maggots began to swarm.
So we wreck them by seriously cutting government and giving them fewer places to exist. Among all of the other benefits, the body politic would have fewer sociopaths and parasites in it.
People like Plouffe are the same type, but they are the full-on political hacks who set policy, rather than implement it. They’re just as bad if not worse; they help government grow, and steer it into serving its own ends, rather than those of the people it is supposed to be serving.
The Deep State is nothing more than a government that serves its own ends.
And we have had enough of this.
They must be destroyed thoroughly, and their kind must not rise again.
This election wasn’t the end, it was the beginning. There are millions of these malignancies in this country and we’ve just defeated two of them. Keep pushing. Now we can go after them wholesale.
It’s our turn.
Our turn.
Our turn.
OUR TURN!
You stole the 2020 election. You’ve mocked and ridiculed and put people in prison and broken people’s lives because you said this thing was stolen. This entire phony thing is getting swept out. Biden’s getting swept out. Kamala Harris is getting swept out. MSNBC is getting swept out. The Justice Department is getting swept out. The FBI is getting swept out. You people suck, okay?! And now you’re going to pay the price for trying to destroy this country.
And I’m going to tell you, we’re going to get to the bottom of where the 600,000 votes [are]. You manufactured them to steal this election from President Trump in 2020. And think what this country would be if we hadn’t gone through the last four years of your madness, okay? You don’t deserve any respect, you don’t deserve any empathy, and you don’t deserve any pity.
And if anybody gives it to you, it’s Donald J. Trump, because he’s got a big heart and he’s a good man. A good man that you’re still gonna try to put in prison on the 26th of this month. This is how much you people suck. Okay? You’ve destroyed his business thing. And he came back.
He came back in the greatest show of political courage, I think, in world history. Like, [Roman statesman] Cincinnatus coming back from the plough [returning to politics to rescue the Roman Republic]. He’s the American Cincinnatus. And what he has done is a profile in courage. We’ve had his back. But I got to tell you, he may be empathetic. He may have a kind heart. He may be a good man. But we’re not. Okay? And you deserve, as Natalie Winters says, not retribution, justice. But you deserve what we call rough Roman justice, and we’re prepared to give it to you.
Steve Bannon, on election night
OUR TURN!!
OUR TURN!!!
OUR TURN!!!
OUR TURN!!!
January 6 Tapes?
Paging Speaker Johnson…this is your conscience calling you out on broken promises.
For all your high talk about your Christian moral background…you’re looking less and less like you have any kind of moral background.
If You are a Patriot and Don’t Loathe RINOs…
Let’s talk about RINOs, and why they are the lowest form of life in politics.
Many patriots have been involved with politics, often at the grassroots, for decades. We’ve fought, and fought, and fought and won the occasional illusory small victory.
Yet we can’t seem to win the war, even when we have BIG electoral wins.
I am reminded of something. The original Star Trek had an episode titled Day of the Dove. It was one of the better episodes from the third season, but any fan of the original series will tell you that’s a very low bar. Still, it seems to get some respect; at a time when there were about 700 episodes of Star Trek in its various incarnations out there, it was voted 99th best out of the top 100.
In sum, the plot is that an alien entity has arranged for 39 Enterprise crew, and 39 Klingons, to fight each other endlessly with swords and other muscle-powered weapons. The entity lives off of hostile emotions, you see and it wants a captive food source. (The other 400 or so Enterprise crew are trapped below decks and unable to help.) Each side has its emotions played and amplified by the alien entity; one Enterprise junior officer has false memories implanted of a brother who was killed by Klingons. The brother didn’t even exist.
Even people killed in a sword fight miraculously heal so they can go do it again.
The second best line of the episode is when Kang, the Klingon captain, notes that though they have won quite a number of small victories including capturing Engineering, can’t seem to actually finally defeat the Enterprise crew. He growls, “What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?*”
Indeed. He may have been the bad guy, but his situation should sound familiar.
We are a majority in this country. We have a powerful political party in our corner. There is endless wrangling.
And yet,
What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?
In our case, that power is the RINOs in our midst. They specialize in caving when on the verge of victory. Think of Obamacare’s repeal failing…by one Republican vote. Think of the way we can never seem to get spending under control (and now our entire tax revenue goes to pay interest on the debt; anything the government actually does now is with borrowed money).
We have a party…that refuses to do what we want it to do, and that refusal is institutionalized. If you’ve been involved with GOP politics, but haven’t seen this, it’s because you refuse to see it. Or because you are part of the problem yourself. (If so, kindly gargle some red fuming nitric acid to clear the taste of shit out of your mouth, and let those not part of the problem alone so they can read this.)
We fight to elect people, who then take a dive when in office. But it’s not just the politicians in office, it’s the people behind the scenes, the leaders of the national, state and county branches of the party. Their job is to ensure that real patriots never get onto the general election ballot. They’re allowed a few failures…who can then become token conservatives who will somehow never manage to win (Jordan), or can be compromised outright (Lauren Boebert?).
That way it doesn’t actually matter who has a congressional majority. I remember my excitement when the GOP took the Senate in 1980. But all that did was empower a bunch of “moderate” puddles of dog vomit like…well for whatever reason forty years later the most memorable name is Pete Domenici. And a couple of dozen other “moderates” who simply had no interest in doing what grassroots people in their party–those same grassroots people who had worked so hard to elect them–wanted them to do.
Oh, they’ll put up a semblance of a fight…but never win. And they love it when we fight the Dems instead of fighting them. Just like that alien entity, whose motto surely was “Let’s you and him fight. It’ll be delicious!”
If you think about it, your entire political involvement has come to nothing because of these walking malignant tumors.
That should make you good and mad.
The twenty five who blocked Jordan, and the hundred people who took that opportunity to stab Jordan in the back in the secret ballot should make you good and mad.
I’ll close this with another example of RINO backstabbing, an infuriating one close to home.
In my county, the GOP chair is not a RINO. She got elected when the grassroots had had enough of the RINOs. Unfortunately the state organization is full of RINOs, and the ousted county RINOs have been trying to form a new “Republican Party” and get the state GOP to recognize them as the affiliate. I’m honestly amazed it hasn’t happened yet.
In other words those shitstains won’t just leave when they get booted out; they’ll try to destroy what they left behind. It’s an indication that they know we know how important that behind-the-scenes party power is.
So they must be destroyed. That’s the only way they’ll ever stop.
We cannot win until the leeches “on our side” get destroyed.
What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?*
We know it. What is going to be done about it?
*NOTE: The original line was actually “What power is it that supports our battle yet starves our victory.” I had mis-remembered it as feeds. When I checked it, it sure enough was “supports” and that’s what I originally quoted. On further reflection, though, I realized my memory was actually an improvement over the reality, because feeds is a perfect contrast with starves. I changed it partway through the day this originally posted, but now (since this is a re-run) it gets rendered this way from the start.
If one must do things wrong, one should do them wrong…right.
RINOs an Endangered Species? If Only!
According to Wikipoo, et. al., the Northern White Rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) is a critically endangered species. Apparently two females live on a wildlife preserve in Sudan, and no males are known to be alive. So basically, this species is dead as soon as the females die of old age. Presently they are watched over by armed guards 24/7.
Biologists have been trying to cross them with the other subspecies, Southern White Rhinoceroses (Rhinoceri?) without success; and some genetic analyses suggest that perhaps they aren’t two subspecies at all, but two distinct species, which would make the whole project a lot more difficult.
I should hope if the American RINO (Parasitus rectum pseudoconservativum) is ever this endangered, there will be heroic efforts not to save the species, but rather to push the remainder off a cliff. Onto punji sticks. With feces smeared on them. Failing that a good bath in red fuming nitric acid will do.
But I’m not done ranting about RINOs.
The RINOs (if they are capable of any introspection whatsoever) probably wonder why they constantly have to deal with “populist” eruptions like the Trump-led MAGA movement. That would be because the so-called populists stand for absolutely nothing except for going along to get along. That allows the Left to drive the culture and politics.
Given the results of our most recent elections, the Left will now push harder, and the RINOs will now turn even squishier than they were before.
I well remember 1989-1990 in my state when the RINO establishment started preaching the message that a conservative simply couldn’t win in Colorado. Never mind the fact that Reagan had won the state TWICE (in 1984 bringing in a veto-proof state house and senate with him) and GHWB had won after (falsely!) assuring everyone that a vote for him was a vote for Reagan’s third term.
This is how the RINOs function. They push, push, push the line that only a “moderate” can get elected. Stomp them when they pull that shit. Tell everyone in ear shot that that’s exactly what the Left wants you to think, and oh-by-the-way-Mister-RINO if you’re in this party selling the same message as the Left…well, whythefuckexactly are you in this party, you lying piece of rancid weasel shit?
Justice
It says “Justice” on the picture.
And I’m sure someone will post the standard joke about what the fish thinks about the situation.
But what is it?
Here’s a take, from a different context: It’s about how you do justice, not the justice that must be done to our massively corrupt government and media. You must properly identify the nature of a person, before you can do him justice.
Ayn Rand, On Justice (speaking through her character John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged):
Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification—that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero—that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions—that to withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement—that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit—and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.
Ayn Rand identified seven virtues, chief among them rationality. The other six, including justice, she considered subsidiary because they are essentially different aspects and applications of rationality.
I’m sure enough of this that I put my money where my mouth is.
The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system. (This doesn’t necessarily include deposing Joe and Hoe and putting Trump where he belongs, but it would certainly be a lot easier to fix our broken electoral system with the right people in charge.)
Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2024 or 2026 is pointless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud in the system is not part of the plan, you have no plan.
This will necessarily be piecemeal, state by state, which is why I am encouraged by those states working to change their laws to alleviate the fraud both via computer and via bogus voters. If enough states do that we might end up with a working majority in Congress and that would be something Trump never really had.
Martin Luther King
The 20th is also Martin Luther King day…a circumstance I find handy this year; it’s a “Floating Holiday” where I work. I can take that day, or take it some other time. I chose this time to take it on Monday.
Of course I’m doing it because it will be cold, and because it’s the end of the Brandon Administration.
But I’ll still say something about MLK. He was a decidedly mixed individual. As are we all. But I think he, and many others of his time, did something important and unpleasant; he (and those others) forced a recognition that even after the Civil War we were being hypocritical on the subject of equality under the law. Those people who descended from those who (shall we say) involuntarily migrated to what is now the United States were still getting the shitty end of the stick in many parts of this country, as a matter of law.
He was one hundred percent correct on that.
Unfortunately his successors have turned the point full circle and want a leg up from the law, supposedly to make up for the past mistreatment, but that can only lead to an endless round of back and forth. There are some signs that MLK himself had he not been killed (he would be turning 96 this year were he still alive), would have been right alongside the race baiters (which include some who were with him), other signs that he wouldn’t have.
But just as Thomas Jefferson penned these words, in spite of owning slaves, the words that eventually shamed us into abolishing the “peculiar institution”:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…
I’ll go with what Martin Luther King said…not all that far from where the Inauguration will take place:
And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
Emphasis mine. Judge people by the content of their character.
That is as it should be.
I see that, sometimes, on “our” side, at Trump rallies.
I see nothing but reverse racism on the Left. To them the world is defined by what one group does to another, some group must be on top shitting on everyone else. And it shows. There’s a false dichotomy in their thinking. Either white shits on black, or black shits on white. The way to recognize it as a false dichotomy, though, is not to gin up a third “group” to make it a trichotomy, or a fourth group to make it, what, a tetrachotomy? quadrichotomy? Is either of those actually a word? Gee maybe we can have a different group on top every week of the year at least until some jackass makes up a 53rd group! (Let’s leave aside the one or two day remainder you get from dividing 365(or 6) by 7. These are leftists studying critical race theory, not mathematicians.)
How about we do soemthing different? How about we work towards a system where the law shits on NO ONE except those who violate the rights of others?
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
Gold went up nicely on Thursday, and dropped a bit on Friday but is still just over the 2700 “dollar” mark for the first time in a while. Silver didn’t kept up with those gains and so the gold-to-silver ratio keeps widening.
*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.
The Final Experiment: More Fallout
The desperate attempts by Flat Earthers to refute the Final Experiment continue.
It might be easier if they could agree on their attack. Is it A) irrelevant because lights in the sky won’t tell us anything about the shape of the Earth? Or B) filmed in a 360 degree studio so it’s fake? If A) is true B doesn’t matter, yet Eric Dubay the guru is going after B, and I’ve heard Flat Earth Dave go with A. (Flat Earth Dave by the way has often debunked a lot of the “it was faked” arguments including the claims that a chromakey glitch showed it was a green screen…when in fact it actually proved there was no green screen.)
We have a couple of videos by Dave McKeegan. These pretty much cover the gamut of ridiculous attempts to debunk TFE
So does this one, in Professor Dave style (which means he’s willing to be a bit insulting)
9 days, 11 hours, 59 minutes until the Once And Future President, Donald John Trump, is restored to the office that was Rightfully his the last four years.
SINGLE DIGITS!!! (Too bad we don’t use binary numbers.)
Not that I’m counting, mind you.
What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?
January 6 Tapes?
Where are the tapes? Anyone, Anyone? Bueller? Johnson??
Paging Speaker Johnson…this is your conscience calling you out on broken promises.
News Flash
Today, it is still the case that Joe Biden didn’t Win.
I realize that to some readers, this might be a shock; surely at some point things must change and Biden will have actually won.
But the past cannot actually be changed.
It will always and forever be the case that Joe Biden didn’t win.
And if you, Leftist Lurker, want to dismiss it as dead white cis-male logic…well, you can call it what you want, but then please just go fuck off. No one here buys that bullshit–logic is logic and facts are facts regardless of skin color–and if you gave it a moment’s rational thought, you wouldn’t either. Of course your worthless education never included being able to actually reason–or detect problems with false reasoning–so I don’t imagine you’ll actually wake up as opposed to being woke.
As Ayn Rand would sometimes point out: Yes, you are free to evade reality. What you cannot do is evade the consequences of evading reality. Or to put it concretely: You can ignore the Mack truck bearing down on you as you play in the middle of the street, you won’t be able to ignore the consequences of ignoring the Mack truck.
And Ayn Rand also pointed out that existence (i.e., the sum total of everything that exists) precedes consciousness–our consciousnesses are a part of existence, not outside of it–therefore reality cannot be a “social construct” as so many of you fucked-up-in-the-head people seem to think.
So much for Leftist douchebag lurkers. For the rest of you, the regular readers and those lurkers who understand such things: I continue to carry the banner once also carried by Wheatie. His Fraudulency didn’t win.
Let’s Go, Brandon!!
His Fraudulency
Joe Biteme, properly styled His Fraudulency, continues to infest the White House, we haven’t heard much from the person who should have been declared the victor, and hopium is still being dispensed even as our military appears to have joined the political establishment in knuckling under to the fraud.
One can hope that all is not as it seems.
I’d love to feast on that crow.
(I’d like to add, I find it entirely plausible, even likely, that His Fraudulency is also His Figureheadedness. (Apparently that wasn’t a word; it got a red underline. Well it is now.) Where I differ with the hopium addicts is on the subject of who is really in charge. It ain’t anyone we like.)
Justice Must Be Done.
The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.
Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
Gold has been jumping up one day each week only to fall the next two days, lately. Well this time the jump was on Friday. Will it drop on Monday and Tuesday? Silver has done slightly better than that on a percentage basis.
*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.
The Final Experiment Fallout
The fallout continues.
Flerfs are saying that 1) it was faked and 2) it was consistent with a flat earth after all and 3) it doesn’t matter, lights in the sky don’t prove the shape of the earth and 4)…well I’m not sure. (Note that sometimes the same Flerf will hold two or more of these positions within minutes of each other.)
Jeran of Jeranism, one of the Flerfs who went on the Final Experiment, apparently has said he is no longer a Flat Earther. But I doubt that he’s gone glober. Here’s a livestream from Friday; I’ve not watched it yet.
As of desired publication time, 12:01 AM on January 4, there are 16 days, 11 hours and 59 minutes before our Once and Future President, Donald John Trump, is restored to his rightful office.
Not that I’m counting, mind you.
What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?
Speaker Johnson Pinging you on January 6 Tapes
Just a friendly reminder Speaker Johnson. You’re doing some good things–or at least trying in the case of the budget–but this is the most important thing out there still hanging. One initial block released with the promise of more…and?
We have American patriots being held without bail and without trial, and the tapes almost certainly contain exculpatory evidence. (And if they don’t, and we’re all just yelling in an echo chamber over here, we need to know that too. And there’s only one way to know.)
Either we have a weaponized, corrupt government or we have a lot of internet charlatans. Let’s expose whatever it is. (I’m betting it’s the corrupt weaponized government, but if I am wrong, I’d like to see proof.)
Justice Must Be Done.
The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.
Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.
Small Government?
Many times conservatives (real and fake) speak of “small government” being the goal.
This sounds good, and mostly is good, but it misses the essential point. The important thing here isn’t the size, but rather the purpose, of government. We could have a cheap, small tyranny. After all our government spends most of its revenue on payments to individuals and foreign aid, neither of which is part of the tyrannical apparatus trying to keep us locked down and censored. What parts of the government would be necessary for a tyranny? It’d be a lot smaller than what we have now. We could shrink the government and nevertheless find it more tyrannical than it is today.
No, what we want is a limited government, limited not in size, but rather in scope. Limited, that is, in what it’s allowed to do. Under current circumstances, such a government would also be much smaller, but that’s a side effect. If we were in a World War II sort of war, an existential fight against nasty dictatorships on the brink of world conquest, that would be very expensive and would require a gargantuan government, but that would be what the government should be doing. That would be a large, but still limited government, since it’d be working to protect our rights.
World War II would have been the wrong time to squawk about “small government,” but it wasn’t (and never is) a bad time to demand limited government. Today would be a better time to ask for a small government–at least the job it should be doing is small today–but it misses the essential point; we want government to not do certain things. Many of those things we don’t want it doing are expensive but many of them are quite eminently doable by a smaller government than the one we have today. Small, but still exceeding proper limits.
So be careful what you ask for. You might get it and find you asked for the wrong thing.
Political Science In Summation
It’s really just a matter of people who can’t be happy unless they control others…versus those who want to be left alone. The oldest conflict within mankind. Government is necessary, but government attracts the assholes (a highly technical term for the control freaks).
His Truth?
Again we saw an instance of “It might be true for Billy, but it’s not true for Bob” logic this week.
I hear this often, and it’s usually harmless. As when it’s describing differing circumstances, not different facts. “Housing is unaffordable” can be true for one person, but not for another who makes ten times as much.
But sometimes the speaker means it literally. Something like 2+2=4 is asserted to be true for Billy but not for Bob. (And when it’s literal, it’s usually Bob saying it.) And in that sense, it’s nonsense, dangerous nonsense. There is ONE reality, and it exists independent of our desires and our perceptions. It would go on existing if we weren’t here. We exist in it. It does not exist in our heads. It’s not a personal construct, and it isn’t a social construct. If there were no society, reality would continue to be what it is, it wouldn’t vanish…which it would have to do, if it were a social construct.
Now what can change from person to person is the perception of reality. We see that all the time. And people will, of course, act on those perceptions. They will vote for Trump (or try to) if their perception is close to mine, and vote against Trump (and certainly succeed at doing so) if their perception is distant from mine (and therefore, if I do say so, wrong). I have heard people say “perception is reality” and usually, that’s what they’re trying to say–your perception of reality is, as far as you know, an accurate representation of reality, or you’d change it.
But I really wish they’d say it differently. And sometimes, to get back to Billy and Bob, the person who says they have different truths is really saying they have different perceptions of reality–different worldviews. I can’t argue with the latter. But I sure wish they’d say it better. That way I’d know that someone who blabbers about two different truths is delusional and not worth my time, at least not until he passes kindergarten-level metaphysics on his umpteenth attempt.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)
(Paper) Spot Prices
[EDIT: Forgot to do this, as of 2:50 AM I have edited it to actually mean something]
Gold went up nicely on Thursday (possibly responses to those attacks that aren’t terrorist attacks, oh no they aren’t!) but lost a lot of those gains on Friday. Still, it’s a bit up this week. Silver managed to gain a little bit of ground against it. On the whole, though, things seem pretty stable as we head for 47.
*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.
Flat Earthers Strike Back
The guru or pope of the Flat Earth movement–the man who produced those “200 Proofs” videos–has now spoken about the Final Experiment.
According to him it was shot in a studio, one of those fancy 360 dome studios like they use for Mandalorian. (Whatever that is–Star Wars? I stopped following Star Wars after those horrifically bad prequels, Episodes I – III. I honestly should have stopped after Episode I.)
I hate like hell to give this lying turd any views, but here’s his video:
The first point is that he complains the sun in the timelapse changes shape. As if the (alleged) special effects team behind his (alleged) dome studio would be too stupid to not do it that way (heck, it’s more work to do it that way). But okay maybe they did it like that deliberately to double fake us, so that people like me would use the “they wouldn’t be that incompetent” argument. But in fact this shot shows a lot of glare from the sun, and the glare is what is changing shape. Eric Dubay knows this. I know he knows this, because the jackass uses this effect in his own videos!!
In their Gleason’s Map model which many are abandoning (but apparently not Dubay), the Sun never actually dips below the horizon plane since it is always roughly 3000 miles above the flat Earth. Instead it just gets further and further away and eventually we just can’t see it any more; they will invoke “perspective” to explain why it seems to be getting lower and lower in the sky. But getting further and further away would imply that the Sun should look smaller and smaller the closer you are to sunrise and sunset. How does Dubay handle that in his 200 proofs videos? He shows shots of the Sun where the glare orb is of different sizes because of differing atmospheric conditions; he just had to find one with a small glare orb near sunset or sunrise, and one with a bigger glare orb closer to midday.
If you photograph the Sun with a strong enough filter (20 or so stops does it; even seventeen might do it), you know, like I did, you will see it’s always the same actual size. There’s an exceedingly tiny variation over the course of a year because of the Earth’s elliptical orbit, but basically nothing over the course of a day. (This is evidence that the sun is far away compared to distances on Earth.)
Dave McKeegan did a second timelapse of the Sun, tracking it with a filter on. No change in sizes either. Oh, wait. That’s fake. Are my photos also fake? Or the ones taken by many other people around the globe?
The next point is the behavior of shadows. He shows McToon walking around (this is actually the “Where are the Guns, Nathan!?!?!” video, and his shadow apparently changing length and direction, which obviously wouldn’t happen if the object casting the light were far enough away you could treat the light rays as parallel. Well, for someone who likes to invoke “perspective” to explain sun angles, he sure has forgotten the concept here. The man taking the video (McKeegan) was walking around, McToon was walking around; this will cause shadows to appear to pivot. McToon was also getting closer to and further from the camera, and this will make shadows get foreshortened when the object casting them is far enough away. That is actual perspective in action, and Dubay is hoping to find marks too stupid to understand this.
Next, footprints in the snow. Well, you’ll actually see SOME footprints in the snow in the shots Dubay is selecting; but the real issue here is that this snow has been compacted by heavy vehicles driving over it to make a flat area to work in (this space was also used by the Antarctic marathon runners…who of course never saw a sunset either.
No wind? There was wind in other videos.
No visible breath? You don’t get visible breath in dry air. I know this personally since humidity is often quite low here, though not nearly as dry as Way Down Under at Union Glacier.
The bit about the snow is easily explained: Witsit wanted to make sure the camera could see him pick up the snow, so he couldn’t be accused of just picking powder out of an (off camera) bucket. Funny that his due dilligence is being used against him.
A not unrelated rant: One thing a couple of Flerfers have accused me of is believing that the Earth is round solely because I was taught that in school. No. I’ve seen actual evidence for it outside of school, and of course as described above I have evidence that the Sun is far away (which wouldn’t rule out the ancient flat earth theories, but does rule out this stupid pizza world with a firmament model–sort of like a snow globe–that the current crop of FEs is fond of).
Remember, you’re simply watching the behavior of grifters dancing as the evidence that they are full of shit keeps piling up.
No Science Section
Neither the time nor the energy. Last week I divided the post in two and saved the other half off; but it needs fleshing out, a lot of it. I thought about covering a workaday-geology topic (e.g., streams), but it’s almost 9 PM.
23 days, 11 hours, 59 minutes until our Once and Future President, the Rightful President of the United States, is restored to his proper office.
Not that I’m counting, mind you.
[Assumes 0001 publication time. Wordpiss will be wordpiss and it’s unlikely to happen at that time.]
What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?
Speaker Johnson: A Reminder.
And MTG is there to help make it stick.
January 6 tapes. A good start…but then nothing.
Were you just hoping we’d be distracted by the first set and not notice?
Are you THAT kind of “Republican”?
Are you Kevin McCarthy lite?
What are you waiting for?
I have a personal interest in this issue.
And if you aren’t…what the hell is wrong with you?
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
Not a whole lot of movement this week, but enough to push gold:silver over 89! It continues to suck to be heavy on silver and light on gold. Unless, of course, you think this is a buying opportunity for the white metal.
*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.
More Fallout from the Final Experiment
Flerfs seem to fall into two distinct camps lately: 1) Those who claim the whole thing is faked, and: 2) Those who claim that they can shoehorn what happened into the Flat Earth model somehow.
First one first: As more and more footage is being uploaded the claims some make that TFE videos were shot in a soundstage somewhere are looking more and more ridiculous. Aircraft landing, rides on snowmobiles or other vehicles to and from the Union Glacier camp to Midway (the area they did most of their experiments at) show this is no sound stage. Another claim, that the sun was somehow fake: The sun was real by the testimony of even the Flerfs who were there. Jeran burned holes through paper with a magnifying glass, which counters the notion that it’s some sort of sun simulator (never mind the fact that no simulator is going to light up miles of terrain like that).
Second, we’re seeing two main lines of attack. One is that someone named Steven Alonzo allegedly used the flat earth model to predict the sorts of things that Will Duffy asked about, matching Globe Earth predictions. The problem is he used globe based mathematical models to do so! (The sincerest form of flattery being imitation.) Alonzo has allegedly founded a “Flat Earth University” where he lives in Belize.
@2:43 (meaning 2 hours and 43 minutes):
The other is a new flat earth model by someone named Hanvey who has added yet more layers to the “firmament” in order to try to get reflected suns to behave the way seen. So far his videos haven’t impressed anyone except some Flerfers. However, it’s supposedly a work in progress.
Flerfs are counting on these guys to rescue them.
McToon (“Where are the guns, Nathan?!?!”) is going to be able to demolish both, or so he promises. He’s waiting to see which way the Flerfs (those who don’t wake the hell up) jump; to Alonzo or Hanvey.
Also in that video shortly after the bit about Alonzo (at about 2:46:15), is the story of the presentation they gave to the staff of Union Glacier Camp about the Final Experiment. Flerfer Austin Witsit spoke and was seen by the full time meteorologist at Union Glacier. That meteorologist was pissed at Witsit’s condescending attitude and eventually just left. McToon makes a very trenchant point here, which is that if the meteorologist is wrong, people die. If Witsit is wrong, he’s just a lying turd on the internet and his followers won’t die from it. Witsit can be wrong and suffer no consequences because he has no responsibility. The meteorologist can’t be wrong.
2:48:05: “That’s always the thing. They can spout their nonsense because they have zero responsibility. You have responsibilities, you don’t get to be wrong, and continue to be wrong, right? You’re done. You’re done. That’s how it works.”
But someday, someone will die from this crap, just as surely as DEI hires have caused lives to be risked or even lost.
Some Go-Backs
Regarding my article from five weeks ago, where I discussed trans-Neptunian objects (as well as Centaurs) as a class before diving in and looking at the ones that qualify as dwarf planets the following week. I really didn’t tie things together, and I saw something that made it clear.
The TNOs or Kuiper Belt Objects plus “Scattered Disk Objects” orbit just outside the orbit of Neptune. Why not closer? Because Neptune or some other object would eventually get too close to them, and change their orbit–possibly flinging them out of the solar system just like it did with Voyager 2; otherwise putting it into a smaller orbit. And why aren’t they further away? They seem to get as close as they can without Neptune mucking them up, no closer…but they exist right up to that line. Well, go back in time. Maybe there were plenty of these sorts of objects at varying distances…and once Neptune came on the scene, it took care of all of the ones too close to the Sun. In other words, it’s not a coincidence that the Kuiper Belt’s inner boundary is near Neptune’s orbit, rather Neptune caused the boundary to be where it is.
So what happens when Neptune manages to perturb one of these objects? It either gets a speed boost and goodbye…or loses energy and drops into an orbit closer to the Sun. Well…those are the Centaurs! And a Centaur will eventually interact with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, or maybe go for a second round with Neptune. And at that point, it could either be flung out, or become a short term comet.
So now I’ve tied TNOs, Centaurs, and comets together in a way that takes a bunch of different conceptual “buckets” of things and relates them to each other.
(I’m not sure whether to add this to the article from five weeks ago…or to the one on comets…or both.)
Another thing I saw was someone throwing a bunch of solar-system objects (none of them moons) into a table, stripping the names off and considering things like: number of moons, orbit shape (eccentricity), orbit tilt (inclinations), distance from the sun, mass, size, and composition (gas, rocky, rocks with ice, ice with rocks). Of course this looks like a mess, but then he plotted one against another to find trends. For instance eccentric orbits tended to correlate with high inclinations. That’s kind of interesting (unlike most of the ones he showed at first). It got very interesting when he plotted size (diameter) against distance from the Sun. At that point, he got four distinct clumps. Not only that, but those four lumps tended to have the same compositions! So: the largest objects tend to be medium-far from the sun, and they’re all gaseous. The next larger group is closest to the sun and tends to be rocky. Then there’s a distant group–the most distant–of objects that are ice with some rock. Finally the smallest group, farther then the rocky groups, but closer than the gaseous group, that are rock and some ice. The four groups tend to have more things in common within the group: The gaseous objects tend to have more moons. The groups that are rock-ice mixes tend to have those elliptical, inclined orbits.
Of course, he cheated. He put the largest bodies in each of the four groups into the table to begin with. But he insists that even after he adds more and more objects, the groupings persist.
The implication is that the solar system has four different kinds of objects (aside from however you want to handle moons). In the order I described them: Gas giants, terrestrial planets, trans-Neptunian objects, and the asteroids. Now this doesn’t account for “round” versus “lumpy.” Everything except gas giants can be small enough to be lumpy.
Could this illuminate the path to classifying objects in the solar system? No one is satisfied by the current state of affairs, that’s for sure. One thing that has to be accounted for that isn’t, here, is the moons.
Geology
Geology has, until recently, been the study of Earth, the rocks of which it is composed, and how they change over time. In the last few decades, it has become extended to cover the other objects of the solar system, even though the word comes from the Greek γῆ (gê) ‘earth’ (in particular) and λoγία (-logia) ‘study of, discourse’. This is because much of what we have learned down here has served as a basis for studying what is up there, despite a myriad of fascinating differences. (Perhaps it would have been more useful for me to write this before doing the rest of the solar system.)
Geology is a gigantic subject, and since even today it has to do mostly with that ball of rock we stand on every day, it tends to have a ton of practical applications, everything from telling us where to dig or drill to get the good stuff, to advising us where to put buildings, to watching out for hazards like volcanoes and earthquakes. There are a lot of sub-specialties including mineralogy (the study of the actual mineral constituents of rocks), seismology, vulcanology, glaciology, speleology (caves), and so on.
In general outline, one goes from studying minerals, to rocks (composed of mixes of minerals), “unlithified material”–the sorts of things that end up on top of bedrock, like gravel and soil, but also magma (liquid material under the surface of the earth). And then there’s the whole earth, including tectonic plates, the structure of the earth (which I touched on last time).
And then there are landforms like mountains, streams, sand dunes, glaciers, hogbacks, alluvial fans (i.e., the deposits that form near the mouths of streams), and on and on.
A gigantic field with a lot of places where one can do a deep dive.
And to be honest, NOT something I have strong knowledge of. I’ll be learning a lot in doing this series. In the past I’ve had to look up details but at least I had a broad mental outline from which to proceed. With geology, though I know some things, the outline is much sketchier. I’m trying very hard not to get out ahead of my skis here.
It’s best for all of us if I start at the beginning. But before I do that, there are a couple of absolutely basic concepts I have to explain.
Rock Types and the Rock Cycle
Rocks come in three basic types.
The first is “igneous” rocks like granite and basalt. These are rocks that formed directly from cooling magma (and magma is the term for lava that is still underground). This can happen either deep underground as the magma cools (e.g., granite) or above ground when the magma spills out onto the surface during an eruption (e.g., basalt). You can tell how quickly the magma/lava cooled by the size of the crystals–big crystals mean it cooled slowly, so basalt, being the result of an eruption, tends to have smaller crystals than granite, which is formed deep underground and thus tends to cool slowly.
The second is “sedimentary” rocks, examples being shale, limestone and sandstone. These are rocks that form when other rocks erode, are carried elsewhere by water (usually) or wind (sometimes), and are deposited elsewhere as sediment, silt, sand…and then something other than heat or pressure happens to transform it into rock. Perhaps water with a lot of dissolved minerals flows through and the minerals out of solution, acting as cement.
Finally, there is metamorphic rock. This is rock that used to be one of the other two types, but was subject to heat and pressure–not enough to melt it, which would result in igneous rocks–but enough to make it change in structure. Marble is metamorphosed limestone, and slate is metamorphosed shale. Schists can form from either sedimentary or igneous rocks.
There are numerous ways rocks of one type can become rocks of another type, and the full picture is known as the “rock cycle.” A lot of geology’s “big picture” is encapsulated right here.
All three types can erode and form sediment (even sedimentary rock can go through it all again). Metamorphic rock can “cook” too long and go molten and become magma which can only become igneous rock. And so on.
OK, so maybe now some of the things I will have to refer to in the history will make more sense. I had to do this, because geology started when people started looking at rocks.
Early History of Geology
The ancient Greeks wrote some works on stones, in particular Theophrastus (372-287 BCE), and Aristotle, who made many observations on the slow rate of geological change. And then Pliny the Elder (who seems to have written on just about everything) wrote on minerals and metals. He died in the eruption of Vesuvius, 79 CE, a fitting way to go for a geologist…which was only one of his many interests. But Aristotle gets additional credit here because he tried to be strictly evidence-based when he said that geological change was slow. During the middle ages, the mantle was taken up by people in the Islamic world, with Ibn Sina (Avicenna in translation) proposing explanations for mountain formation, earthquakes and other topics. Also in China Shen Kuo (1031-1095) came up with a hypothesis of land formation based on observation of fossil shells in a mountain hundreds of miles from the ocean. He inferred that land was formed by the erosion of mountains and the deposition of silt–in other words, the creation of sedimentary rocks.
The first person considered a truly scientific geologist, however, was Georgius Agricola (1495-1555). He wrote De Natura Fossilium in 1546. This was the first systematic attempt to classify minerals, rocks and sediments since Pliny. He also wrote De Re Metallica (published 1556), which focused more on mineralogy, ores, and mining (and was considered authoritative for almost two centuries afterwards). The two books together made geology a scientific subject for the first time.
Nicholas Steno (1638-1686) gets the credit for some key laws of geology that underlie stratigraphy (roughly the study of rock layers). These are so important that it’s worth hitting the pause button and talking about them. They are:
Steno’s Laws of Stratigraphy
The law of superposition. In undeformed stratigraphic sequences, the oldest layers or strata will be on the bottom, with progressively newer deposits stacked upon it. This can be a bit tricky to apply as sometimes the layers are later flipped over at least 90 degrees, putting the newer layers on top. But there are ways to tell this has happened. Below is an example from Svalbard, Norway of layers of sediment–which eventually hardened into rock–with the oldest layers at the bottom.
The successive layering of rocks like this is known as stratification, and when the information is gathered from all over the world and assembled into a whole, it’s called “the geologic column.”
The principle of original horizontality. Layers of sediment are originally deposited horizontally (not at a slant) under the action of gravity.
Here is an example from the Colorado Plateau (this part of the plateau is actually in Utah). Layers are horizontal.
We now know that in special cases sand (for instance) can be deposited at a slope of up to fifteen degrees, particularly in sand dunes.
Getting ahead of ourselves, these layers were deposited in the Permian through Jurassic times. They show up in widely separated areas. Which brings us to:
The principle of lateral continuity. This states that layers of sediment initially extend laterally in all directions (but not forever). Based on this, rocks that are otherwise similar but are now separated by a valley or something else caused by erosion, were originally “connected.”
In the picture above those layers are seen in Capitol Reef national park and the Canyonlands national park. The different layers are named, from top to bottom: The Navajo Sandstone, layerd red Kayenta formation, red Wingate sandstone which forms cliffs, the sloped purplish portion is Chinle formation, the lighter red stuff further down is Moenkopi formation, and the white layer at the very bottom is the Cutler Formation. This picture isn’t from either of those two parks, rather it’s from Glen Canyon. The point being that these same layers can be identified and named even though they appear in differing places, separated by canyons that were cut through them after they were deposited.
You might get the impression that stratigraphy is purely about sedimentary rock, but lava flows can spill out over sedimentary layers, harden into (usually) basalt, and then be overlain later on by more sediment. This is going to turn out to be very useful, in fact. Also, sometimes igneous rock manages to penetrate through a vertical crack in sedimentary layers. When we see that it’s called a “dike” and it’s obviously newer than any of the layers it cuts through.
Another thing that make things a bit tricky is that a bunch of strata can be deposited, then whatever body of water lays there might disappear for whatever reason, and already-deposited layers can be eroded away. Much later, sediments can start depositing again, but now there’s a time gap at least as long as the dry spell. This is called an “unconformity.” Sometimes it’s obvious because the land tilts during the dry spell; you end up with non-parallel layers when that happens.
Sedimentary rock tends to form very extensive layers, called “formations.” This is different from popular usage where a “formation” might be a distinctive outcropping of exposed rock, like for instance these:
(Garden of the Gods, Colorado Springs). The big double-humped rock on the left is popularly called a “rock formation” but is actually part of at least two different formations in the geologic sense (and I am unable to find their names), as you can tell by the different colors. And this is an instance where the rock layers have been tipped on their sides, in this case by the events that formed the Rocky Mountains.
Geology Gets Going
OK so returning at last to the historical narrative, we are now in the 17th century and things started to take off here.
The Christian world at this time was starting to notice that different translations of the Bible could be significantly different, but the one thing they all agreed on was that the Noachian deluge had formed the world’s geology and geography. So the quest was on: prove with scientific evidence that the Great Flood had in fact occurred!
Yes: Many of these early geologists were what we would today call “Young Earth Creationists.”
So what happened when they went and looked?
In the early 1600s many people began to notice fossils…but there were arguments over what they were. Some thought they were legitimate preserved forms of actual creatures, and others thought they were somehow something that just happened as rocks formed, “sports of nature,” funny rocks that happened to look like things. As crazy as this sounds today, no one had any concept of how a dead animal or plant could somehow be transformed into a rock of the same size and shape. Robert Hooke (1635-1703), Steno, and John Ray (1627-1705) did much of the work to explain how this could happen.
One important thing is to note that fossils appeared only in sedimentary rocks, or possibly (if we were lucky) were still identifiable in metamorphic rocks that were originally sedimentary. Another is that fossils are usually formed from hard body parts, bones, shells, and exoskeletons. You’ll find fossils of clams, but not of jellyfish–not unless you’re extremely lucky. And this means that for those creatures who have their hard body parts on the inside (like vertebrates) it’s uncommon to get any impression of the skin. We are getting better at detecting such things even when they’re extremely subtle.
Hooke, Steno, and Ray rejected the notion that all fossils resulted from the Great Flood. In their minds there were too many of them, scattered throughout the geologic column all over the world, for it to have happened all within one year.
But others disagreed, and we had a school of thought in geology called “Diluvialism,” where the Great Flood is considered responsible for (at least) the fossils. This was a real hypothesis, being investigated by many responsible geologists, and was taken quite seriously for a number of decades.
During the late 1600s and early 1700s, diluvialism and a young Earth was most geologists’ starting point. It isn’t any more. What changed?
Diluvialists collected a lot of fossils, but they were “small stuff.” Dinosaur and mammal fossils had not yet been noticed–that would start rolling in the early-to-mid 1800s. In looking for fossils, mid 1700s geologists like Giovanni Arduino (1714-1795), Johann Gottlob Lehmann (1719-1767) and many others started noticing things about the rocks that contained them. Namely mountain building, volcanism (meaning igneous rocks), deposition (sedimentary rocks), etc. There were so many different kinds of processes they simply couldn’t have been all due to some single uniform process like the Great Flood. So, many reasoned, the recent stuff was due to the Great Flood, but other items in deeper, older strata were perhaps created from nothing or were products of the chaos that God put order to in Genesis.
Enter Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788), who eventually became hugely influential. He saw the huge array of things that those prior geologists had found, and decided to do some experiments. Buffon reasoned that the Earth as a whole was once hot (and is known to still be hot on the inside) so he heated spheres of minerals and recorded how long it would take for them to cool off. Extrapolating from this he determined that Earth was roughly seventy five thousand years old. He wrote that up in 1778, and the Sorbonne forced him to retract the claim.
James Hutton (1726-1797) was coming to a similar conclusion. He was a doctor by training but had become more and more interested in geology. He eventually wrote a book “Theory of The Earth” in 1788. He argued that nothing “special” had to be invoked to explain the Earth, just the same processes we see around us today, erosion and deposition. This was known as uniformitarianism, He also was the first to recognize metamorphic rocks as a distinct group.
However other geologists held out for catastrophism, brief catastrophic episodes, and not necessarily only the Great Flood; and they had good arguments for this. I’ll say more later.
By the end of the 1700s, due to these and many other lines of investigation, geologists were coming to accept that the Earth was far older than one would think, based on an absolutely literal reading of Genesis. They had to be dragged to this conclusion by the weight of what they were seeing. They didn’t want it to be true. They were Christians…and believed the Bible could not be wrong. They had to conclude that they were misinterpreting Genesis.
So now we had a couple of competing theories as to what was going on throughout this extended time. We already had the notions of uniformitarianism and catastrophism, which refer to the rates of changes, but what about the nature of the changes? We had the neptunists led by John Walerk, Johan Gottshalk Wallerius and Abraham Werner who thought all of the geographic strata–including igneous rocks! had formed from an ocean that had covered the entire Earth (sort of like a slow Flood).
The other competing theory was Plutonism, whose main proponent was Hutton. Here the Earth was formed through the gradual solidification of a molten mass (which was also what Buffon believed), volcanic processes were king. Hutton was convinced that the Earth was “immeasurably” old. (Which was certainly true…he couldn’t measure it!)
The truth of course is that both water and volcanism are important. “And” logic definitely applies. And this turns out to be true of uniformitarianism vs. catastrophism, too. Both happen. Remember Eugene Shoemaker and his asteroid and comet impacts? And remember the really bad day a lot of dinosaurs had ‘way back when.
As time went on, more and more evidence piled up. The Earth is old. We didn’t know how old, precisely, but figures in the range of a few thousand years rapidly became untenable. The evidence has only gotten much, much more weighty and our ability to date things much more precise, since then.
I’ve elided much in this account and I should be a bit more specific because I know some people simply won’t believe what I just wrote. So here’s just one avenue of investigation, out of many.
Mount Etna, on Sicily, overlooks the city of Catania, and it is the largest volcano in Europe. Furthermore, it’s always simmering, and erupts often enough, and usually mildly enough, that to the locals it’s just another aspect of the weather.
Scottish geologist Charles Lyell (1797-1875) visited Etna in the early-to-mid 1800s and realized he could estimate how long it had taken to build up to its present size. He was able to determine the size of the mountain, from the lowest lava layers which rest on limestone (which has fossils in it). He also knew that Etna erupts regularly, and that we had records of those eruptions clear back to Roman times.
Etna is about 3km high, and circular, with a radius of 25 km, so it roughly forms a cone, and the volume is approximately 2000 cubic kilometers. Going through the records, the average lava flow was about 0.02 cubic kilometers though there had been a larger eruption in 1669. On average, eruptions have been happening at a rate of 5 per century. So since Roman times (2000 years ago), we’ve seen a total of 2 cubic kilometers come out of Etna. If the rate of the last two thousand years is typical, then Etna is two million years old.
Of course, there’s an assumption there that the rate has held constant for two million years. But based on the distribution of the smaller cones on the slopes of Mt. Etna, and the fact that we can distinguish different lava flows, it looks pretty steady. If it were ever (say) a hundred times more active than it is now, we’d see fewer and bigger lava flows further down into the volcano. It probably has varied some, but not by nearly enough to make the difference between 2 million years and six thousand years. Consider: 99.9 percent of the lava happened over two thousand years ago; for 6,000 years to be the maximum age of Etna, that 99.9 percent would have to have happened within a span of 4,000 years–in other words five hundred times as fast on average, as the 2000 years we have historical records for. We’d know if Etna’s activity had changed that much, the volcano would look very different below the surface than it actually does.
[Modern dating methods apparently show an age for Etna of 500,000 years or so. Lyell was off by a factor of four, which isn’t bad given what he had to work with.]
There’s more to this particular sub-plot…but it will have to wait until I lay some more groundwork.
In particular, the next thing to talk about is the geologic time scale.
Final Thoughts
In the meantime, I’m going to drag out my soap box.
Today, Young Earth Creationists like to complain that no one will take them seriously when it comes to the age of the Earth, because the mainstream geologists have a “presupposition” that the Earth is old. They have to fight against a “mainstream” that is just predisposed against them. And no one will give them a chance.
What is a “presupposition,” anyway? Well, to start with let’s just say it’s basically walking through the door into nature’s classroom–a figure of speech meaning going out into the world and examining it–thinking you already know the answer to the question you want to (pretend to) ask.
Recall, though, that in the 1700s geology must have looked like a present-day Young Earth Creationist’s idea of paradise. The mainstream geologists thought just like they do, that the Earth was 6000 years old.
The geologists from the 1700s had a presupposition too, one that said the Earth is 6000 years old (give or take). I don’t fault them for it. They had nothing else to go on. It fell to them to find something. So what happened when these people and their presupposition went “through the door” and into nature’s classroom, went out into the field, got dirty and sweaty climbing hills and mountains, crossing ravines, wading in streams so they could look at rocks, take copious notes, making as many drawings, and finally, lugging samples?
These people realized their presupposition was wrong. The weight of the evidence was simply too great to bear. I alluded to Mount Etna, but that’s only a minuscule fraction of a percent of what has come to light both before it and after. It simply made no sense to people who had actually been there and done that with their eyes open and their brains engaged, to cling to a young Earth age.
They were good scientists. They didn’t let their preconceived notions force them to ignore what they saw. They didn’t behave like today’s Flat Earthers, cramming their fingers into their ears, squeezing their eyes shut and saying “Nuh-uh! I know it’s flat, anything else must be fake.”
And this was only the beginning. It’s now two centuries later, and the weight of now centuries of unearthed (literally) evidence points in the same direction.
Is someone aware of all of this holding onto a “presupposition” when they refuse to take seriously those that are ignorant (often willfully so) of that evidence?
Or is it the other way around? Is it the Young Earth Creationists who are the ones with the presupposition? Are they projecting? I maintain that the answer is yes. And today, I can fault them for it, because we have more than enough info to counter the presupposition. It’s worse than that though: The YECs from two centuries ago were willing to abandon their presupposition in the face of the evidence; the modern YECs will do their damnedest to come up with scenarios ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous to torture the data to make it somehow conform to the presupposition. They desperately cling to it in a way the prior YECs did not. And it is, right now, pushing many of them to a breaking point, as much of a breaking point as The Final Experiment is for the flerfs.
I’ve just made some strong statements in that paragraph, but I will be backing them up over the next few posts.
For those of you who haven’t just rage quit, see you next week.
What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?
This post is scheduled to go “live” at 10:01PM MST on Friday, December 20, 2024. That’s 00:01 EST on Saturday, December 21, 2024 for those of you in that benighted timezone near the Atlantic Ocean.
As of that moment, there are 30 days, 11 hours, and 59 minutes until our rightful President of the United States is restored to office.
Not that I’m counting, mind you.
January 6 Tapes Reminder
OK…I’m sick and tired of reminding you to no effect, Speaker Johnson, so I’ll do the more emotionally satisfying thing and call you a cowardly, lying, fraudulent sack of diarrhetic monkey shit.
Johnson, you are a cowardly, lying, fraudulent sack of diarrhetic monkey shit!
A Caution
Just remember…we might replace the RINO candidates. (Or we might not. The record is mixed even though there is more MAGA than there used to be.) But that will make no difference in the long run if the party officials, basically the Rhonna McDaniels (or however that’s spelled–I suspect it’s RINO), don’t get replaced.
State party chairs, vice chairs, secretaries and so on, and the same at county levels, have huge influence on who ultimately gets nominated, and if these party wheelhorses are RINOs, they will work tirelessly to put their own pukey people on the ballot. In fact I’d not be surprised if some of our “MAGA” candidates are in fact, RINO plants, encouraged to run by the RINO party leadership when they realized that Lyn Cheney (and her ilk) were hopelessly compromised as effective candidates. The best way for them to deal with the opposition, of course, is to run it themselves.
Running good candidates is only HALF of the battle!
Biden Gives Us Too Much Credit
…we can move on to the next one.
Apparently Biden (or his puppeteer) has decided we’re to blame for all of the fail in the United States today.
Sorry to disappoint you Joe (or whoever), but you managed to do that all on your own; not only that, you wouldn’t let us NOT give you the chance because you insisted on cheating your way into power.
Yep, you-all are incompetent, and so proud of it you expect our applause for your sincerity. Fuck that!!
It wouldn’t be so bad, but you insist that everyone else have to share in your misery. Nope, can’t have anyone get out from under it. Somehow your grand vision only works if every single other person on earth is forced to go along. So much as ONE PERSON not going along is enough to make it all fail, apparently.
In engineering school we’re taught that a design that has seven to eight billion single points of failure…sucks.
Actually, we weren’t taught that. Because it would never have occurred to the professors to use such a ridiculous example.
Justice Must Be Done.
The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.
Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.
Kamala Harris has a new nickname since she finally went west from DC to El Paso Texas: Westward Hoe.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)
Spot Prices
All prices are Kitco Ask, 3PM MT Friday (at that time the markets close for the weekend). (Note: most media quotes are for the bid…the price paid by the market makers, not the ask, which is what they will sell at. I figure the ask is more relevant to people like us who wish we could afford to buy these things. In the case of gold the difference is usually about a dollar, for the PGMs the spread is much wider.)
Silver down over a dollar…which sounds bad until I tell you it went up fifty cents on Friday, and is still down over a dollar. So Thursday, it really sucked. And the gold:silver ratio is getting really, really bad.
The only thing that went up is…miracle of miracles…platinum, which is still on fricking sale.
*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.
It Sucks To Be A Flat Earth Charlatan
If you are a flat earth charlatan, my just telling you you suck would be the LEAST bad aspect of your life. How can you look at yourself in the mirror?
As for everyone else (including Flat Earth true believers–i.e., the victims of the charlatans), you all likely know that The Final Experiment (TFE) happened this last week. At this point the participants are on their way home, except for Critical Think, whose flight from Punta Arenas to Santiago Chile isn’t for another day or two. Then he flies directly from Santiago to Sydney Australia…oh, wait, I forgot, that flight doesn’t exist according to Flat Earthers.
In many cases they collected terabytes of data. (“tera” is what comes after “giga” if you don’t know. “Tera” equals “trillion” (twelve zeroes) and that should be easy to remember because both start with t.) One person recorded over 24 hours of 11K video (not a time lapse, full time video) of the sun. Others took numerous sun spot shots (and they have thousands of emails from people like me waiting for them, for comparison). But it’s taking them days to get back, and now they have to deal with the holidays. So don’t expect much out of them before New Year’s. As for the documentary the one flat-earther professional is putting together, who knows how long that will take. They have all kinds of stuff, that should sink this bullshit once and for all, but won’t, because many of their followers are having cult psychology kick in. “Terabytes of evidence against my position? It must be fake. I can’t possibly just be…wrong about this.”
I’ll post a couple of videos here, some of them are repeats. This one is SciManDan, a Glober who was not part of TFE, talking about various types of copium being taken by the Flerfs:
Here’s something new I found. Lots of clips up front of the Flerfer charlatans insisting that what was seen could not possibly exist–which to me would mean that what was seen invalidates the Flat Earth. But these people move the goal posts. Once that evidence comes up, they need something else…yeah, that is what you need to disprove flat earth. (Marred by the fact that Peterson confuses Ushuaia Argentina with Punta Arenas, Chile):
And this is one I posted earlier. McToon (Glober) is letting Nathan Oakley (Flerfer Charlatan) have it with both barrels.
Wolf took exception to this, thinking McToon was over the top. I disagree. Oakley is a fraudster. This is the least of what that species of “human” deserves. They should have “CON MAN” tattooed on their foreheads.
I will, nevertheless post a Nathan Oakley response:
Precession of the Equinoxes
We’ve got a lot of prerequisites fresh in our minds, so let’s take up precession of the equinoxes, a subject that seems to come up frequently. And I’d normally not touch it with a ten foot pole or a lot of graphics. An animation would be best honestly, and I found one but I wish it showed a bit more (like relation with the Earth’s orbit).
Remember this from last week?
Since the Earth’s axis of rotation is tilted about 23.5 degrees with respect to its orbit, the celestial equator is tilted 23.5 degrees with respect to the ecliptic, as shown below.
Last Week
But then I went on to say:
But since we’re thinking in a set of coordinates that goes from the celestial equator, we think of it the other way around: we think of the ecliptic being tilted with respect to the celestial equator.
Me rambling on more, last week
Well this time we are going to think the the way the diagram shows; the ecliptic will be the basis of another coordinate system, known as…drumroll…the ecliptic coordinate system.
There are actually two ecliptic coordinate systems, one centered on the Sun (heliocentric), the other on the Earth (geocentric). Since the planets generally orbit in planes almost aligned with the Earth’s orbital plane (which is the ecliptic plane), and the Sun is the center of gravity of the solar system, the sun-centered system is very useful for talking about the solar system. Indeed, even though I didn’t mention it at all in the recent series on the planets, I have used it here–go back to the articles on the great conjunction almost exactly four years ago; I did those plots in that system.
But we’ll focus on the Earth centered (geocentric) version this time.
For both systems (as well as the equatorial system I talked about) the primary line is the one pointing towards the vernal equinox (or March equinox, or (sometimes) the “first point of Aries”). It lies in the “reference plane” of all systems. For the ecliptic system, the “poles” are simply a line perpendicular to the ecliptic plane; in the diagram above they are called the north and south ecliptic poles.
In the ecliptic system, the two coordinates are called ecliptic longitude and ecliptic latitude and both are measured in degrees; no mucking around with hours of right ascension and minutes and seconds of arc that aren’t the same kind of minutes and seconds as the other minutes and seconds.
In the heliocentric system longitude is represented by l (italic lower case L) while in the geocentric system it’s represented by Greek letter lambda, λ. Latitude is represented by b (heliocentric) or β (geocentric).
Or, if you know the distance to whatever it is you’re considering, you can go Cartesian, a grid instead of spherical coordinates:
x = r cos β cos λ y = r cos β sin λ z = r sin β
The x axis points towards the first point of Aries, the y axis is 90 degrees counterclockwise from it in the ecliptic plane, and z points toward the north ecliptic pole. The formula is the same for the heliocentric system (swapping b for β and l for λ) and it was the Cartesian version of the helicentric system I worked with in those old posts from four years ago. (And similar conversions can be done with equatorial coordinates.)
[Digression: Both equatorial and ecliptic coordinates are considered “right handed” coordinate systems. Why? Imagine pointing the fingers of your right hand along the x axis, then bending them to point along the y axis (or, if in spherical coordinates, curling the fingers in increasing longitude or right ascension). Raise your thumb like “thumbs up” and it points along the z axis. On a left handed system, this works for the left hand instead. I find this easier than whiddershins and diesel or whatever those words were.]
Imagine a line drawn from “Autumnal Equinox” through the Earth to “Vernal Equinox.” It’s the intersection of the celestial equatorial plane and the ecliptic plane. (Two planes that aren’t parallel and aren’t the same plane, will intersect in a line.) It just happens to be the case that Earth is tilted in such a way that this particular line represents the intersection (and is the X axis in both the equatorial and ecliptic systems).
What if it were in a different place? It’s pretty arbitrary, isn’t it? Why couldn’t it be in a different place?
It would be, if the Earth’s equator were oriented differently–meaning, also, “if the earth’s axis were pointed differently.” Oh, I suppose the Earth’s orbital plane could shift, but that’s much harder than shifting the poles.
I can say this with confidence because the Earth’s axis does indeed shift direction! It does so without changing the angle between the celestial equator and ecliptic. Over the course of some 26,000 years the line of intersection shifts through a full 360 degrees. (And unlike almost everything else…it goes clockwise.) The first point of Aries precesses and the line points to the two equinoxes, so this is precession of the equinoxes.
If you are having trouble visualizing this, well, we’re both in luck. I found a good animation.
By about 30 seconds in you can see how it works.
The effect of this is to move the first point of Aries (represented with that ♈ symbol) around the ecliptic…which means it moves through the Zodiac. The first point of Aries was actually in Aries from about 2000 BCE to 1 CE, then it was in Pisces. It’s about to leave Pisces and shift into Aquarius (“the Age of Aquarius” actually means something…but nothing magic here).
As the first point of Aries moves, the Earth’s axis draws a cone through space, scribing circles on the celestial sphere centered on the ecliptic poles.
There are two other effects of this.
First off, it mucks up both equatorial and ecliptic coordinate systems, because the x axis, the primary axis…is moving! With ecliptic coordinates, you could probably just ignore this…and say we’re going to use the x axis direction from (say) 2000 and just leave it there. Big deal. The fundamental plane doesn’t change. Even if you let the X axis change, the Z axis does not, and you can just add or subtract a correction from ecliptic longitude and be current.
But this precession of the equinoxes absolutely hoses the equatorial coordinate system, because the fundamental plane itself shifts. And we can’t just go on using an old set of axes; the point of the equatorial system is so that you can be assured that if you set a telescope to a certain declination, it will stay at that declination as the earth rotates (even if you don’t have the telescope track whatever you’re looking at). So we issue new charts every fifty years ago, epoch 1950, epoch 2000; with all star coordinates shifted. At some point we will need to switch to something newer–or perhaps they’ll just let computers do the work of listing coordinates according to where the equinoxes are right now.
The other effect is on our year. Just like we have sidereal and solar days, the first being one rotation as seen from the stars, the other being one rotation as seen from the Sun, we have sidereal and tropical years.
A sidereal year is how long it takes for Earth to return to the same spot in its orbit, as seen from far away, in the stars (a sort of “God’s Eye View” of the situation). But our calendar does not track the stars, it tracks the seasons, and the interval between two crossings of the March equinox is called the “tropical year.” We set our calendar up so that the average length of a year (in whole days) is as close to one tropical year as possible. Otherwise, our calendar shifts with respect to the seasons. (We had trouble with that while following the “every four years is a leap year” rule. The calendar would slip against the seasons about 3 days every four hundred years. So we changed the calendar to drop three leap years out of every four centuries. The old schema is called the “Julian calendar” while the new one is the “Gregorian calendar”, each named after the person who instituted the system.)
A calendar year is the interval between one equinox and the next time we’re at that equinox, not (quite) the amount of time it takes for the sun to (apparently) return to the exact same place in the sky.
Actually since a calendar year is a whole number of days, we want the average length of a calendar year to be equal to the amount of time it takes to return to the same equinox (or solstice).
Since, as seen from either the north celestial pole or the north ecliptic pole, the Earth orbits counterclockwise but the equinoxes shift slowly clockwise, the effect is that one tropical year elapses just before the Earth can finish a full orbit with respect to the stars. How much before? About 1,224.5 seconds faster, roughly 20 minutes, 24.5 seconds. You can estimate the exact amount of time it will take the equinoxes to precess by dividing the number of seconds in a sidereal year by 1,224.5 and you get 25,772 years–which invariably gets rounded to 26,000 when you see this talked about in science popularizations. And this makes sense because it happens that the rate itself does vary; it’s not always 1,224.5 seconds per sidereal year.
13,000 years or so from now, Earth will be on the other side of its orbit when springtime hits the Northern hemisphere…but even though the Earth will be on the other side of its orbit, it will still be called March 21, because the calendar tracks the seasons, not the stars.
Speaking Of Earth
Go back through my series of articles on planets, moons, comets, asteroids and the Sun, and it appears I left one thing out, something fairly high up on the list.
The sixth largest body in the solar system.
Yep. I never talked about the third round rock from the Sun, Earth.
I picked that picture because it was taken from the Galileo space probe. The one that went to Jupiter. Before it got to Jupiter, it played gravity assist pinball, getting a boost from Venus then two assists from Earth. It was the first interplanetary probe to return to Earth (though it didn’t linger).
It also took pictures of the Simpson desert in Australia and the Ross ice shelf in Antarctica (the latter is a mosaic assembled from smaller images).
It was useful to see how Galileo’s cameras would behave taking pictures of a known target.
And the Earth is well known; we’ve been stomping around on it for millennia.
So: the basics.
Earth has a radius of 6,371 kilometers. (Try to take so much as one orbital dynamics class without having that number burned into your brain by the time of the final exam.) That is an average. Through the poles, it’s 6356.752 kilometers, through the equator, it’s 6378.137 kilometers. The mean density is 5.513 grams per cubic centimeter…and that is a record for any round body in the solar system. (Metallic asteroids will be higher of course.) It even beats out Mercury which has a large (for its size) core.
Density is useful for helping to figure out what something is made of. A lot of those outer planet moons have very low densities, indicating they’re mostly ice; others have slightly higher densities, indicating they’re more rock than ice…and so on. A typical rock has a density of about 3, and ice is just below 1.
I’ve often talked about the average density of different bodies in the solar system, and you may have wondered how we could possibly know this. It’s not as if we’ve sampled Earth at all depths, much less any of the other bodies we’ve only flown by once.
It turns out we can know this, relatively easily in fact. The average density of some planet or moon is its mass, divided by its volume, so we need to know two other things to get the density. Volume is easy: once you have a radius, r, you can compute the volume of the object via (4/3)πr3. Mass is a little trickier, but we can get most of the way there if something is in orbit around the body. The orbital speed for a circular orbit is v = √(μ/R). Since we’re after the mass, let’s rearrange that a bit: v2R = μ This time R stands for the orbital radius (not the radius of the planet). That other letter, Greek mu (μ), is the gravitational parameter of the body–that’s different for every body. So if we know the distance between the satellite and its primary, and we time how long it takes to orbit (T), we can get the velocity readily (2πR/T). We can substitute into the first formula and get μ = 4π2R3/T2 And then we have this “gravitational parameter” thingie, based totally on the orbital radius and the time it takes the satellite to orbit.
(Gravitational parameter is another thing we had burned into our brains…but at least I’ve managed to forget its value since then. I just looked it up, Earth’s gravitational parameter is 3.986 x 1014 m3/s2. Except I was used to deal with kilometers per second, so I used 3.986 x 105.
But we wanted mass. Well it turns out that μ is equal to the mass of the primary, M, times the gravitational constant, G. But that’s as far as we could go for about a hundred years; we could measure μ, but we actually had no idea what G was, so we couldn’t get from μ to M. In the late 1790s Henry Cavendish was able to measure the gravitational force between known masses, so this time, he knew the mass, and could compute G. As soon as he did that, every known value of μ, be it for Earth, the Sun, Jupiter, Saturn, could be used to compute a mass. So.
Earth is being orbited by the Moon, so we could do the calculations above and arrive at the total mass of the Earth, then divide by the volume. If a body didn’t have a satellite, though, we were SOL. So we found ourselves in the situation where we knew Uranus’s mass better than we knew the mass of Venus, even though Venus is much closer. Uranus has moons, Venus does not. And of course moons themselves didn’t have anything orbiting around them, so we couldn’t determine their masses, except in the case of our Moon, which is big enough to have a noticeable effect on the Earth.
Once we could send spacecraft out there, though, we could determine masses, by watching how much their trajectories bent as they flew by. That’s a hyperbolic orbit, and the formulae for it also contain μ.
So with Earth being far denser than typical rocks, what’s inside of it? One cause of higher density might just be that rocks deep down might compress some under the weight of the rocks above them, and we now know that this is part of it. But we still need Earth to be largely made of stuff quite a bit denser than average ol’ rocks.
And so we get something like this diagram (which is not to scale, the ocean and crust are drawn much too thick):
The liquid outer core and solid inner core are believed to be composed mostly of iron, with densities ranging from 9.9 to 13.1 grams/cubic centimeter. (Iron on the surface has a density of 7.874–clearly the iron in the core is compressed.) But given that we can’t drill down even to the mantle, much less down to the core, how do we know this? We can kind of guess that the innards are iron, since iron is very common in the universe (supernovas happen when stars try to fuse iron; the supernovas end up basically barfing the iron out into space). And we get meteorites consisting of mostly iron, to reinforce that. But liquid? How much?
That one’s a bit harder than computing average density. But the answer, in one word, is “seismology.”
If you think I’m just going to leave it there…you don’t know me very welly.
Seismic waves are waves through the solid material of Earth, resulting from earthquakes, volcanoes, movements of magma underground, and even man-made explosions. There are all sorts of different kinds of seismic waves, and different ways to divvy them up.
One is surface waves vs. Body waves. Surface waves travel along the surface of Earth, while body waves travel through the whole body of earth. Surface waves will tend to get weaker in proportion to distance, while body waves will get weaker in proportion to distance squared. (There’s a good intuitive reason for this. Think about a surface wave traveling away from its source ten kilometers. The entire energy of the wave is contained along a circle 2π x 10 km in circumference. Wait for the wave to reach a 20 km distance, all of the energy is distributed along 2π x 20 km of line. Twice as much, so the wave will be half as strong. Body waves travel outwards along consistent hemispheres, not circles, and the hemisphere’s area multiplies by four when the radius doubles.)
Body waves, in turn, come in two types: P (or primary) waves, and S (or secondary) waves. These names come from the fact that the P waves move faster, so they reach seismographs first. Below is an example, the P wave hits, then the S wave.
The two types are fundamentally different. P waves are longitudinal…which means that the medium the wave is traveling through moves in the same direction the wave is moving. This is very much the way sound works; the sound wave consists of denser and less dense atmosphere and the air molecules move towards and away from the sound source to build up bands of compression and rarefaction. Below is a diagram of a longitudinal wave traveling from left to right.
I said they are much like sound waves, and in fact when a P wave reaches the surface, it will often make a noise. Travel speeds are 330 m/s in air, 1450 m/s in water and 5000 m/s in granite.
Secondary waves are transverse (like light waves).
They take roughly 1.7 times as long to cover the same distance as a P wave, and there is one other key difference: They don’t go through fluids. P waves do but they will bend. In fact both will curve when the density of the medium changes (this is another example of refraction).
So we can glean some information about what’s inside the Earth just by looking at how seismometers in different parts of the world react to strong earthquakes. S waves never show up more than 103 degrees away from the epicenter of an earthquake, beyond that, you are in the S wave “shadow”–a shadow cast by a liquid layer deep inside the Earth. P waves have a much complex shadow pattern, as seen below, caused by an abrupt bend in the wave at the core boundary. The core doesn’t stop P waves, but it does bend them sharply.
So we know we have a liquid core outer core. How do we know what it’s made of? It does cause Earth’s magnetic field so we know it’s a metal. Meteorites (which came off other bodies of the solar system) come in many different types but occasionally one will show up that is almost pure metal, and that will be roughly 90 percent iron, ten percent nickel. (In fact the meteor that created the Barringer or “Meteor” crater in Arizona was an iron-nickel type.)
So that’s the beginning of how we know what’s inside there. We get the occasional mantle rock brought up by geologic processes, too.
[It just occurred to me this is another bit of evidence for a globe shaped earth. S wave shadows exist. Plot them on a globe, and compare to the origin of the waves. Then do the same on the flat earth disc. Which of the two patterns is symmetric and simple to explain, and which is just some random-seeming curve-bounded area with no obvious physical explanation? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone else bring this up.]
I’m going to leave it there.
“But Steve, you skipped over Earth in your series on the planets, and this is all we get?”
You proceed from a false premise. This isn’t part of the series on the planets and moons and other stuff in our Solar System. That series is over.
This is the first part of a new series, on geology. There will be more, lots more.
37 days, 11 hours, 59 minutes until the Once And Future President, Donald John Trump, is restored to the office that was Rightfully his the last four years.
Not that I’m counting, mind you.
What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?
Our Turn
[Yes, I did this one five weeks ago. But it was too cathartic to just throw away.]
We’ve often seen that quote from David Plouffe: “It is not enough to simply beat Trump. He must be destroyed thoroughly. His kind must not rise again.”
This was of course a declaration of intent to annihilate not just Trump, but rather “his kind.”
You know what? I think we should flip it around. David Plouffe’s kind should be destroyed thoroughly and their kind must not rise again.
What is Plouffe’s kind? I suppose it depends on who’s talking and what they are thinking of in particular. Well, at the moment it’s me talking and I am thinking of the sort of maggot who is attracted to politics not to better his world but rather so that he can wield power over others, or line their pockets with “free” money. Often these people end up as what Ayn Rand called “pull peddlers,” receiving money in exchange for using their connections to do favors.
This type is parasitic. Utterly parasitic. And they should be destroyed thoroughly and not allowed to rise again.
The bad news is we will never eradicate them. Useless turds who can’t do anything productive will always be with us. As will the outright sociopaths.
Of course they find Trump to be their enemy. And of course they find us to be their enemy. If we won’t simply lie down and let our “betters” have their way with us, we’re a problem, we’re something to be got rid of. And of late, we haven’t lain down without a protest, as we are “supposed” to do. Dang uppity Garbage Deplorables! We don’t know our place!!!
The good news is we can provide far fewer niches for these parasites. The niches come into being when something that people formerly did of their own free will is taken over by the government; then every aspect of that activity becomes a political football.
Take for instance education. Since the government runs it, if you don’t like what’s being done, you have to form a political movement and try to work your way around the maggots embedded in the bureaucracy. If education were private, then if you didn’t like what they were doing to your child, you’d take your money and your child elsewhere. And people who didn’t even have school-age children presently would have no voice–and not have to pay money. Making it a government “thing” turned it into a political thing, and the maggots began to swarm.
So we wreck them by seriously cutting government and giving them fewer places to exist. Among all of the other benefits, the body politic would have fewer sociopaths and parasites in it.
People like Plouffe are the same type, but they are the full-on political hacks who set policy, rather than implement it. They’re just as bad if not worse; they help government grow, and steer it into serving its own ends, rather than those of the people it is supposed to be serving.
The Deep State is nothing more than a government that serves its own ends.
And we have had enough of this.
They must be destroyed thoroughly, and their kind must not rise again.
This election wasn’t the end, it was the beginning. There are millions of these malignancies in this country and we’ve just defeated two of them. Keep pushing. Now we can go after them wholesale.
It’s our turn.
Our turn.
Our turn.
OUR TURN!
You stole the 2020 election. You’ve mocked and ridiculed and put people in prison and broken people’s lives because you said this thing was stolen. This entire phony thing is getting swept out. Biden’s getting swept out. Kamala Harris is getting swept out. MSNBC is getting swept out. The Justice Department is getting swept out. The FBI is getting swept out. You people suck, okay?! And now you’re going to pay the price for trying to destroy this country.
And I’m going to tell you, we’re going to get to the bottom of where the 600,000 votes [are]. You manufactured them to steal this election from President Trump in 2020. And think what this country would be if we hadn’t gone through the last four years of your madness, okay? You don’t deserve any respect, you don’t deserve any empathy, and you don’t deserve any pity.
And if anybody gives it to you, it’s Donald J. Trump, because he’s got a big heart and he’s a good man. A good man that you’re still gonna try to put in prison on the 26th of this month. This is how much you people suck. Okay? You’ve destroyed his business thing. And he came back.
He came back in the greatest show of political courage, I think, in world history. Like, [Roman statesman] Cincinnatus coming back from the plough [returning to politics to rescue the Roman Republic]. He’s the American Cincinnatus. And what he has done is a profile in courage. We’ve had his back. But I got to tell you, he may be empathetic. He may have a kind heart. He may be a good man. But we’re not. Okay? And you deserve, as Natalie Winters says, not retribution, justice. But you deserve what we call rough Roman justice, and we’re prepared to give it to you.
Steve Bannon, on election night
OUR TURN!!
OUR TURN!!!
OUR TURN!!!
OUR TURN!!!
January 6 Tapes?
Paging Speaker Johnson…this is your conscience calling you out on broken promises.
For all your high talk about your Christian moral background…you’re looking less and less like you have any kind of moral background.
If You are a Patriot and Don’t Loathe RINOs…
Let’s talk about RINOs, and why they are the lowest form of life in politics.
Many patriots have been involved with politics, often at the grassroots, for decades. We’ve fought, and fought, and fought and won the occasional illusory small victory.
Yet we can’t seem to win the war, even when we have BIG electoral wins.
I am reminded of something. The original Star Trek had an episode titled Day of the Dove. It was one of the better episodes from the third season, but any fan of the original series will tell you that’s a very low bar. Still, it seems to get some respect; at a time when there were about 700 episodes of Star Trek in its various incarnations out there, it was voted 99th best out of the top 100.
In sum, the plot is that an alien entity has arranged for 39 Enterprise crew, and 39 Klingons, to fight each other endlessly with swords and other muscle-powered weapons. The entity lives off of hostile emotions, you see and it wants a captive food source. (The other 400 or so Enterprise crew are trapped below decks and unable to help.) Each side has its emotions played and amplified by the alien entity; one Enterprise junior officer has false memories implanted of a brother who was killed by Klingons. The brother didn’t even exist.
Even people killed in a sword fight miraculously heal so they can go do it again.
The second best line of the episode is when Kang, the Klingon captain, notes that though they have won quite a number of small victories including capturing Engineering, can’t seem to actually finally defeat the Enterprise crew. He growls, “What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?*”
Indeed. He may have been the bad guy, but his situation should sound familiar.
We are a majority in this country. We have a powerful political party in our corner. There is endless wrangling.
And yet,
What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?
In our case, that power is the RINOs in our midst. They specialize in caving when on the verge of victory. Think of Obamacare’s repeal failing…by one Republican vote. Think of the way we can never seem to get spending under control (and now our entire tax revenue goes to pay interest on the debt; anything the government actually does now is with borrowed money).
We have a party…that refuses to do what we want it to do, and that refusal is institutionalized. If you’ve been involved with GOP politics, but haven’t seen this, it’s because you refuse to see it. Or because you are part of the problem yourself. (If so, kindly gargle some red fuming nitric acid to clear the taste of shit out of your mouth, and let those not part of the problem alone so they can read this.)
We fight to elect people, who then take a dive when in office. But it’s not just the politicians in office, it’s the people behind the scenes, the leaders of the national, state and county branches of the party. Their job is to ensure that real patriots never get onto the general election ballot. They’re allowed a few failures…who can then become token conservatives who will somehow never manage to win (Jordan), or can be compromised outright (Lauren Boebert?).
That way it doesn’t actually matter who has a congressional majority. I remember my excitement when the GOP took the Senate in 1980. But all that did was empower a bunch of “moderate” puddles of dog vomit like…well for whatever reason forty years later the most memorable name is Pete Domenici. And a couple of dozen other “moderates” who simply had no interest in doing what grassroots people in their party–those same grassroots people who had worked so hard to elect them–wanted them to do.
Oh, they’ll put up a semblance of a fight…but never win. And they love it when we fight the Dems instead of fighting them. Just like that alien entity, whose motto surely was “Let’s you and him fight. It’ll be delicious!”
If you think about it, your entire political involvement has come to nothing because of these walking malignant tumors.
That should make you good and mad.
The twenty five who blocked Jordan, and the hundred people who took that opportunity to stab Jordan in the back in the secret ballot should make you good and mad.
I’ll close this with another example of RINO backstabbing, an infuriating one close to home.
In my county, the GOP chair is not a RINO. She got elected when the grassroots had had enough of the RINOs. Unfortunately the state organization is full of RINOs, and the ousted county RINOs have been trying to form a new “Republican Party” and get the state GOP to recognize them as the affiliate. I’m honestly amazed it hasn’t happened yet.
In other words those shitstains won’t just leave when they get booted out; they’ll try to destroy what they left behind. It’s an indication that they know we know how important that behind-the-scenes party power is.
So they must be destroyed. That’s the only way they’ll ever stop.
We cannot win until the leeches “on our side” get destroyed.
What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?*
We know it. What is going to be done about it?
*NOTE: The original line was actually “What power is it that supports our battle yet starves our victory.” I had mis-remembered it as feeds. When I checked it, it sure enough was “supports” and that’s what I originally quoted. On further reflection, though, I realized my memory was actually an improvement over the reality, because feeds is a perfect contrast with starves. I changed it partway through the day this originally posted, but now (since this is a re-run) it gets rendered this way from the start.
If one must do things wrong, one should do them wrong…right.
RINOs an Endangered Species? If Only!
According to Wikipoo, et. al., the Northern White Rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) is a critically endangered species. Apparently two females live on a wildlife preserve in Sudan, and no males are known to be alive. So basically, this species is dead as soon as the females die of old age. Presently they are watched over by armed guards 24/7.
Biologists have been trying to cross them with the other subspecies, Southern White Rhinoceroses (Rhinoceri?) without success; and some genetic analyses suggest that perhaps they aren’t two subspecies at all, but two distinct species, which would make the whole project a lot more difficult.
I should hope if the American RINO (Parasitus rectum pseudoconservativum) is ever this endangered, there will be heroic efforts not to save the species, but rather to push the remainder off a cliff. Onto punji sticks. With feces smeared on them. Failing that a good bath in red fuming nitric acid will do.
But I’m not done ranting about RINOs.
The RINOs (if they are capable of any introspection whatsoever) probably wonder why they constantly have to deal with “populist” eruptions like the Trump-led MAGA movement. That would be because the so-called populists stand for absolutely nothing except for going along to get along. That allows the Left to drive the culture and politics.
Given the results of our most recent elections, the Left will now push harder, and the RINOs will now turn even squishier than they were before.
I well remember 1989-1990 in my state when the RINO establishment started preaching the message that a conservative simply couldn’t win in Colorado. Never mind the fact that Reagan had won the state TWICE (in 1984 bringing in a veto-proof state house and senate with him) and GHWB had won after (falsely!) assuring everyone that a vote for him was a vote for Reagan’s third term.
This is how the RINOs function. They push, push, push the line that only a “moderate” can get elected. Stomp them when they pull that shit. Tell everyone in ear shot that that’s exactly what the Left wants you to think, and oh-by-the-way-Mister-RINO if you’re in this party selling the same message as the Left…well, whythefuckexactly are you in this party, you lying piece of rancid weasel shit?
Justice
It says “Justice” on the picture.
And I’m sure someone will post the standard joke about what the fish thinks about the situation.
But what is it?
Here’s a take, from a different context: It’s about how you do justice, not the justice that must be done to our massively corrupt government and media. You must properly identify the nature of a person, before you can do him justice.
Ayn Rand, On Justice (speaking through her character John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged):
Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification—that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero—that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions—that to withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement—that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit—and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.
Ayn Rand identified seven virtues, chief among them rationality. The other six, including justice, she considered subsidiary because they are essentially different aspects and applications of rationality.
I’m sure enough of this that I put my money where my mouth is.
The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system. (This doesn’t necessarily include deposing Joe and Hoe and putting Trump where he belongs, but it would certainly be a lot easier to fix our broken electoral system with the right people in charge.)
Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2024 or 2026 is pointless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud in the system is not part of the plan, you have no plan.
This will necessarily be piecemeal, state by state, which is why I am encouraged by those states working to change their laws to alleviate the fraud both via computer and via bogus voters. If enough states do that we might end up with a working majority in Congress and that would be something Trump never really had.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
Gold blooped up over 2700 on Wednesday then got beaten with the ugly stick the last two days, but still ended up a bit up for the week. Silver, however, didn’t end up for the week. Platinum continues to be on sale.
*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.
The Final Experiment Begins
I wrote this first bit on Tuesday. Then realized my mistake. Rather than try to edit it, I think I’ll just tack on the next bit, written on Wednesday, and leave both parts in, plus what I come up with Thursday and Friday. It might give you some insight into what I choose to call a “thought process.”
My First Take [Written Tuesday, to be read Saturday]
It starts today. After a few days’ travel the four Flat Earthers, four Globers, and Will Duffy (who put the whole thing together) have now arrived at nearly 80 degrees South latitude, where they will enjoy several days of uninterrupted daylight.
Assuming, of course that globe earth is true. I’d normally not have to put that caveat in but under present circumstances, it’s necessary.
I contacted Will Duffy and will be taking photographs of the Sun over the next few days to bolster the data set. People all around the globe will be doing this.
Duffy dropped a video on Tuesday the 10th, mentioning someone that dang near everyone forgot. Including me, though as I watched the video I did guess what it was before he said it.
The video starts with a recap. Before the Final Experiment was announced, the Big Name Flat Earthers were adamant that there was no 24 hour sun in Antarctica. Once the Final Experiment was announced, they scurried like cockroaches when you flick the lights on, coming up with crazy rationales…followed by more crazy rationales.
Oh, the participants (including the Flat Earthers, who are really paid off shills) secretly went to the NORTH six months ago and filmed the sun there. Whoops–that won’t work, because the Sun would be traveling in the wrong direction. No problem, the film will be run backwards. Except that one of the Flat Earthers plans to wear a body cam. Run THAT backwards and people will be walking backwards. That string of Grade-A Stupid was their second resort; it came about after the first suggestion–that they’d be going north right now was instantly shot down on the grounds that you have 24 hour darkness in the Arctic right now.
[It’s funny that they’re changing their position on what a 24 hour sun means before they see the results. It’s almost as if they knew all along that the Final Experiment would show a 24 hour sun and were lying six months ago, and for years before that, when they said there was no 24 hour sun in Antarctica, but willing to stake their whole line of bullshit on it because they figured no one would actually offer to send them on a $31K trip to see for themselves.
Yeah, almost as if. In fact, these people are duplicitous cunts.]
There is not only a twenty four hour sun according to the Globe model…there is going to be a 24 hour moon! And, at least up to six months ago, Flat Earthers would have considered this impossible too. But! No one has ever videoed it, at least nothing can be found on YouTube.
(Contrary to grifter flerfer assertions, there are plenty of 24 hour Antarctic sun videos on YouTube, and not just the one that had an edit in it that was readily acknowledged and explained by the uploader…once someone actually bothered to ask him instead of leaping to conclusions about his motives. Of course the flerfers will say ALL of these have been doctored but when you demand evidence for that they change the subject.)
On the 14th the moon will be full. It should be visible in daylight, opposite the sun. If the Sun is to the north, the moon should be visible to the south. If the sun is to the west, the Moon should be visible to the East.
By the 19th the moon will be a waxing gibbous (as seen from the northern hemisphere, the right hand crescent is dark; it should be the left hand side as seen in Antarctica because the observer is upside down with respect to what we’re accustomed to (we in the Northern Hemisphere I think). At that point it will follow the Sun around the sky, trailing it by a bit less than 120 degrees. (If the sun is directly in front of you (“twelve o’clock”) the moon will be at about four o’clock. Both will move right to left [not left to right as in the Northern hemisphere].)
For those who need a quick refresher on terms like “twelve o’clock” and “four o’clock” as directions:
A nice timelapse from the 17th onward should show a visible change in the moon’s phase over the span of 24 or better yet 48 hours. Let’s see what Will Duffy comes up with.
Flat Earthers: What are you going to do if there’s not only a 24 hour Sun, but also a 24 hour Moon? Are you going to create a brand new set of outrageous theories and ridiculous excuses for the Moon, like you did for the Sun? Or will you just do the right thing, and finally acknowledge that we live on a globe?
I am throwing down the gauntlet, right here, right now. If we return from Antarctica with videos of both a twenty four hour sun, and a twenty four hour moon, this debate is over. Done. Finished. This is The Final Experiment.
Will Duffy of The Final Experiment, in the video linked above
But this is actually WRONG! [Written Wednesday]
In fact, I realized on Wednesday that the Moon will not be visible at all from Antarctica at this time of year! (And I am by no means the only person to realize this. Plenty of comments for the video, in fact, are from people who spotted this. They checked online. I, on the other hand realized from first principles there would be a problem.)
What!?!
[At this point, I wrote what eventually became the science part of this post. You can go read it, or not…but what follows might not make sense without it.]
OK, let’s step back a bit, and get back to the Final Experiment, applying what we’ve learned.
The reason there’s a twenty four hour sun near the June solstice in the Arctic or near the December solstice in the Antarctic, is because the sun’s declination is extreme enough that it never sets in these locations. If you look at that last diagram, right now the Sun is near the left hand side, almost where that sun is drawn onto the far side of the sphere. Look carefully, it shines onto the south pole, albeit at an oblique angle. Earth rotates, but no matter what, the south pole is lit as long as the sun stays near there. That’s the current situation in Antarctica.
“Okay, Steve, but we dove down this rabbit hole because you got cranky about the twenty four hour moon. So what about the moon?”
The moon will be full on the 14th. Which means that on that day, it is on the opposite side of the celestial sphere from the sun. That way the Sun lights up the same side we are looking at, because the Sun is behind us as we face the Moon.
Is the Moon exactly opposite of the Sun on the celestial sphere? No. It usually is not exactly opposite on a full moon. But when it is, we get a lunar eclipse, because the Moon is actually traveling through the Earth’s shadow.
We need to know a bit more about the Moon’s orbit. Wikipedia says the inclination of the Moon’s orbit is 5.145 degrees relative to the ecliptic. (Oh, goody, just for once the data is in the most convenient form!) The plane of the Moon’s orbit intersects the ecliptic just like the celestial equator does, somewhere. In fact that intersection line moves a lot. But we don’t need to know where. We just need to know that the moon is never more than 5.145 degrees away from the ecliptic.
Now since we’re conservatives and old school, we go to a table and look something up. the declination of the Sun on December 14th:
The table says 23 degrees, 11 minutes south. Or almost exactly 23.2 degrees south. That’s the declination of that point of the ecliptic.
The opposite point on the ecliptic…near where the Moon will be, since it’s full on that date, is at 23.2 degrees north declination. The Moon is not more than 5.145 degrees off of this. I’m going to round that to 5.1, and say the Moon will have a declination of between 28.3 and 18.1 North.
So if I duck-duck-go that, there’s another table of lunar declination and it turns out that on the 14th the moon will be anywhere from 25 1/4 degrees to 27 1/4 degrees north declination. Later on the 16th its declination will be almost 26 1/2 degrees north.
That’s close to where the right hand Sun is in that diagram above. THAT Sun always shines on the north pole as the Earth rotates, never on the south pole.
In other words, if the moon is at that point (and it will be), it won’t be visible from the south pole, or anywhere within 25 degrees of the south pole. It will be below the horizon, all of the time. They will never see the moon at all.
If Will Duffy is expecting to take a video of a twenty four hour moon while he’s down there, he’s going to be sorely disappointed.
Is Will Duffy a chimp who didn’t think to check on this? Well, let’s think about this very carefully.
The moon not being visible in Antarctica for days is also a prediction of the Globe Earth. The flat Earth would never make a prediction like this, for exactly the same reason it won’t predict either 24 hours of sun or 24 hours of darkness in Antarctica. So if you are in Antarctica and don’t see the moon “over there” away from the Sun, like I described above, and never see it for days on end, the Globe model is in fact successful. Furthermore, any sight of the Moon would be evidence against the Globe Earth.
But note I not only said “you,” I emphasized it. Because there’s an important epistemic point here. If you don’t go to Antarctica, but someone else goes and says he didn’t see the moon, do you trust him? If he shows you pictures of a sky with no moon in it, how do you know he didn’t just face the wrong way deliberately when taking the picture, to avoid photographing the moon that was actually there? Oh, a really hard-core fisheye would photograph the whole sky…and immediately be condemned by the flerfers as NASA photoshop. (And you’d want a filter over it, one that wouldn’t let the moon through, because you don’t want the Sun–which will also be there–to burn a hole in your camera’s sensor.) The point is, someone who went to Antarctica can’t prove to you that he didn’t see the Moon. [He can prove to you that he saw the Sun, by producing photos with the Sun in them, but a photo with no Moon in it can happen even if there’s a Moon up.]
And the big-name flerfers who aren’t going to Antarctica A) won’t accept anything a glober says and B) won’t accept the testimony of the flerfers who went. [They’ll believe it because based on their recent behavior, they know the globe is true. They won’t accept it, though because that would be them admitting they are grifting pieces of shit.] Remember, now the flerfers in Antarctica are all “shills” just for having the intellectual integrity to go and look!
So how do you prove the Moon is behaving in accordance with glober predictions?
You have someone in the Arctic make the movie of the 24 hour moon. Because the moon will be 24 hours as far south as 63 1/2 degrees north latitude. In other words, Fairbanks will be able to see it for a few days. Prudhoe Bay will have no trouble seeing it the full length of time. People in Northern Scandinavia and Russia will have no trouble. There are plenty of people “up” there (I’ve even seen YouTube channels by some of them, talking about the round the clock darkness). And a pro photographer with the right equipment should be able to get “up” there, too.
And I believe this is what Will Duffy is doing.
He talked about a 24 hour moon happening at this time. He talked about a 24 hour moon happening in Antarctica (without being specific as to when). He never quite says he will see the 24 hour moon on this trip.
“But, he says he’s going to make a video!”
No, he says he will hopefully procure a video of the 24 hour moon. Elsewhere he says obtain. Not take it. Procure it, obtain it, do not necessarily mean he makes it himself.
Alternatively, he had someone film a 24 hour moon, six months ago, during Antarctic night.
I don’t think he’s a chimp who forgot to look it up. His phrasing is too careful. He knows.
I do think, though, that an Arctic 24 hour Moon won’t be helpful; if Flat Earth can predict a 24 hour Sun during north hemisphere summer time, it should have no problem with 24 hour Moons in the Arctic. What Flat Earth has a harder time explaining is why 24 hour full Moons only occur in the Arctic around December. What forces the Moon to be at its farthest north when the Sun is at its farthest south? They’re running around in two separate race tracks over the disc in that model.
OK, so let’s think about this, some. Imagine being at the south pole, just before sunrise. Early September. You have 24 hour pre-dawn twilight. The moon could well be above the horizon when it is at first or third quarter (a “half moon”) and it would be up for 24 hours. That would be another cool way to get a 24 hour moon video. And that could have happened just this last September. That would be a 24 hour moon in Antarctica, filmed under conditions short of completely brutal.
So I’m waiting to see what Will has up his sleeve.
Thursday Writings
A slight clue dropped on Thursday…Duffy dropped another video acknowledging the difficulty, and agreeing that he never actually said he expected to see a 24 hour moon this coming week.
It doesn’t tell us how he’s planning to do it. Some commenters speculate he’s simply planning to stay for an extra week until the moon rises. That would be cool, but I think he want some witnesses, preferably at least one flat Earther, to stay with him.
More Goodies
Jeranism, one of the flat Earthers going to Antarctica, was near the southern tip of South America this last week, preparing to fly to Union Glacier. He made this video in the middle of the night, twilightdirectly to the south. This is in perfect accord with the globe model, where at that latitude (56 degrees south, if memory serves) the sun is just twelve degrees or so below the horizon at that point in the circle. The flat Earth model does not allow for this, so he has already seen enough evidence that he should give it up. I heard elsewhere he had noted the sunrise and sunset being to the southeast and southwest, also in perfect accord with the globe (as I will explain in the “science” section).
Astronomical Coordinate Systems
This is a bit of a quick and incomplete lesson on celestial coordinates. This is a working tool of astronomy that often gets glossed over in popularizations and certainly in “science journalism.” But there are millions of amateur astronomers who know this stuff really well.
In order to look at something, you have to know where to look, and in order to report a discovery (and amateur astronomers often make discoveries, e.g., of comets), you have to be able to tell others where to look.
Astronomers in some ways operate in a two dimensional realm. If you specify a direction without a distance, you know where to look, since everyone is pretty much at the same location, Earth. (This direction can change slightly when it’s the Moon we are talking about–this is how the ancient Greeks figured out how far away it is. Everything else is so far away, the difference across the 13,000 km diameter of the Earth is insignificant.)
Astronomers have this concept of a “celestial sphere” for visualization purposes. It’s not a literal hard surface, but they conceive of it as being centered on the observer, with a very large, perhaps even infinite, radius. You are on the inside of the sphere, looking outward. The surface is two dimensional, and astronomical coordinates specify points on that sphere with two numbers. (In the deep sense that’s what “two dimensional” means).
How do those coordinates work? There are multiple schemes used. There are two major different systems; they work totally differently and each have their strengths and weaknesses. Astronomers (particularly amateur astronomers) think in either or both systems depending on context. There are two other commonly used ones as well, one of them quite useful for working in the solar system (so I should have covered it a few months ago, right?), the other more useful for discussing the Milky Way galaxy. I’m not going to discuss them here.
Let’s take up the conceptually easy one first.
Local Horizontal Coordinates
Imagine yourself standing on a flat plane, the horizon plane. It’s basically an extension of the horizon out to infinity.
The celestial sphere is centered on you. How do you specify locations on it? First, you measure along the horizon an angle from north, clockwise. This is called the azimuth. North is 0, east is 90, south is 180, west is 270, then back around to north which is sometimes called 360 as well as 0.
Then you measure up from the horizon, another angle. This is called the altitude (or more often in my experience, the elevation, but this diagram says altitude).
The zenith is directly overhead. Azimuth can be anything, elevation is 90 degrees. One more important line is the “celestial meridian,” the line running from due south to the zenith, and then down to due north. This doesn’t seem to mean much at this point but it will turn out to be very useful.
This system is also used a lot in aviation, it’s ideal, for instance, for specifying the direction of an airplane seen by a radar. Also, those numbers at the ends of runways actually are a reference to azimuth; an runway with (say) 15 painted at the end runs in the 150 degrees azimuth direction. That’s the direction you need to point your plane to land on that runway (assuming you want to stay on that runway after touching down, that is). The one difference is here they determine which way north is with a compass, rather than off of true north. And, yes, at the other end of the runway the number is 33, because if you’re landing there, you’re flying in the opposite direction, which will differ by 18 (= 180 degrees).
Artillery is another application. Once they’ve computed the exact direction you need to fire the gun (based on a number of things including curvature of the earth) it’s easy to tell someone to point the gun at azimuth 267 elevation 39. (Actually I think they are more precise than that.) Also surveying; it’s relatively easy to measure the direction of a mountain, then how far it sticks up above the horizontal plane.
Some telescopes have mounts that swivel around a vertical axis, then allow you to tilt the telescope up; this is called an “azimuthal” mount (or more commonly, an “alt azimuth” mount) because it naturally follows this coordinate system.
An alt-azimuth mount is used for a lot of very large amateur telescopes; the other alternative (which will be discussed in due course) is much more expensive and impractical for large telescopes.
But there’s an even more specialized case. There’s a thing called a “transit telescope.” It does not swivel horizontally at all. It can only move in elevation. And it’s fixed so that its azimuth is either 180 or 0. In other words it can point only along the celestial meridian. Here is an example:
It doesn’t seem like such a thing would be very useful, but in fact it’s very useful. I’ll explain in due course.
The local horizontal coordinate system, by the way, works quite naturally for flat Earthers as well. In fact it’s in some ways more natural for them, because everyone on Earth is believed by flat Earthers to have the same horizon plane. On a spherical earth, every point on the globe has its own unique version of this system (though it’s very hard to tell the difference for distances less than a few miles). The ancient flat earth model had the celestial sphere at a great distance (effectively infinity) so this was a natural for them (the earth was flat and finite, and the stars were fixed to a literal sphere that would rotate around the earth, with stars actually going under the earth after they set). The modern flat earth model conceives of the sky as being a big physical dome only a few thousand miles away, so it makes some difference where you are on earth, describing the location of some star. You could be directly under it, but someone a few thousand miles away will see the star as not being overhead. The orientation of the system is the same for both people but their centers will be offset enough to make a difference.
So LHC is easy…but it has a major drawback. As the Earth rotates west-to-east, the sky appears to rotate east-to-west, and the stars will move along arcs that do not conveniently follow either the elevation or azimuth axes of such mounts. Literally from one second to the next, the stars change coordinates!
[A geek inside joke: LHC is a “left handed” coordinate system, unlike most, and people often claim that LHC really stands for “left handed coordinates.”]
Celestial Coordinates
It would be handy to have a system where the stars do not change coordinates. That way you can look up a star’s location. You then have to do some math to figure out, based on your location and the time, where the star should be in your local horizontal coordinates, but at least you can (in principle) do the math and know where to look. (Nowadays there are web pages and apps to do that for you.) But there’s a very important point here. The formulae to do this were derived based on a full celestial sphere (not a flat earther dome) and they require your location specified on a globe. If the Earth were flat, and the stars on a small dome, these formulae would not work because they’d be based on nonsense.
But they do work. Perfectly. You can predict sunrise and sunset times and azimuths decades in advance. You have to correct for refraction which is worse near the horizon, but then these formulas are dead-nuts on, without fail. The celestial sphere and spherical earth models work, and they work because the models are in accord with reality. Flat earth provides you no mathematical method whatsoever to even attempt to do these computations…much less a method that would actually give you the right fooking answer every time, in every place.
With that rant out of the way, I have to do an aside: There’s a caveat about what I am about to describe. Absolutely nothing in the sky is truly stationary. But there are fast motions (the Earth’s rotation, the Earth’s orbiting the Sun, the motion of the Moon and planets) that you can readily observe, and others that take decades to become apparent, and even then perhaps only with very sensitive instruments. We will ignore everything but the fast motions. I’m going to skip right past precession of the equinoxes and proper motions of the stars and perturbations to the Earth’s orbital plane. They’re there, but too small to make any difference in the short term, and people usually teach them after they teach the “simple” case I am presenting here. OK, finally we can move on.
I alluded to there being four major systems. The other three are all designed so that star, galaxy and nebula coordinates don’t change (at least not over the span of decades). They are the equatorial, ecliptic, and galactic coordinates. We are going to talk about equatorial coordinates here. How do they work? They are actually defined by analogy with the Earth. With the Earth, we specify two numbers and they identify a unique point on the Earth’s surface. (The fact that the Earth isn’t quite spherical introduces a lot of complications that only matter when you’re trying to be really, surveyor-grade precise…ugly, ugly math; I’ve had to deal with it.)
Similarly we can specify two numbers, and identify a specific location on the celestial sphere, and we even have analogues to the equator and poles.
On Earth, we have latitude and longitude. Latitude essentially [not quite because it’s an ellipsoid] measures distance away from the equator, in degrees along the Earth’s curved surface, or in other words, how far north or south the point is. Longitude measures an angle east or west from some meridian line (a line which runs from the north pole to the south pole, intersecting the equator at a ninety degree angle). The choice of meridian line is arbitrary; we’ve settled on using the one that runs through the observatory at Greenwich, England.
We can do something similar to latitude and longitude on the celestial sphere. It turns out that since the Earth rotates, we can extend that axis of rotation (which goes from the north pole through the center of the earth to the south pole) out to infinity; the points where it touches the celestial sphere are the north and south celestial poles. The poles are stationary [aside from the caveat above].
Similarly you can think of a plane that goes through the equator of the Earth and the center of the Earth. You can extend that out to infinity, and where it crosses the celestial sphere, that is the celestial equator.
You can measure an angle from the celestial equator north or south to some object out in space (a planet, star, nebula or galaxy). However, we don’t call it a latitude, we call it a declination.
The constellation of Orion actually straddles the celestial equator. If you are in the northern hemisphere, the right hand star of the three on Orion’s belt, Mintaka, is nearly dead-on the celestial equator; it’s 0.3 degrees south declination. (If you’re in the southern hemisphere, Orion looks “upside down” compared to what we see in the US, and Mintaka will be the leftmost star in Orion’s belt. If you’re still confused, it’s the first of the three to rise or set.)
The stars are stationary [besides the caveat]. On the other hand, the planets–indeed any object within the solar system–move visibly.
The Earth orbits the Sun. That causes the Sun to appear to move against the celestial sphere. The Earth’s orbit is a plane. The intersection of that plane and the celestial sphere is yet another circle, called the ecliptic.
Since the Earth’s axis of rotation is tilted about 23.5 degrees with respect to its orbit, the celestial equator is tilted 23.5 degrees with respect to the ecliptic, as shown below.
But since we’re thinking in a set of coordinates that goes from the celestial equator, we think of it the other way around: we think of the ecliptic being tilted with respect to the celestial equator.
The other planets’ orbits are in almost the same plane as our orbit. So what we see from Earth is that the other planets stick pretty close to the ecliptic. From the outside, looking in, looking at the solar system edge on, they stay almost in the same plane, sometimes a bit above and a bit below:
So when we draw the celestial sphere, we can draw the ecliptic on it. This line is the line the Sun appears to move along in the course of a year. The constellations this line goes through are the zodiac. Sort of. It actually goes through Ophiuchus as well as the “astrology sign” twelve, between Scorpius and Sagittarius, but no one is an Ophiuchus. (Actually since Ophiuchus is the “Serpent Bearer” Steve Irwin could have qualified. Unfortunately he was born at the wrong time of year.)
There are four key points on the ecliptic. Two of them are where the ecliptic intersects the celestial equator, they are the equinoxes, one the vernal equinox and the other the autumnal equinox. As the sun (appears to) move(s) along the ecliptic (counter clockwise in the diagram above) over the course of a year, it will cross from south of the celestial equator to being north of it at the vernal equinox, then from north to south at the autumnal equinox. The other two points are unlabeled on the diagram; those are the ones where the sun is furthest north or south from the celestial equator, these are the solstices. The December solstice is near the left edge of the diagram, the June solstice is near the right edge.
The solstices are where the Sun is at its minimum and maximum declination, respectively. (Stop and think about that, until it’s clear.) This is why the Sun is low in the sky at noon in December, and much higher at noon in June (or vice versa for southern hemisphere folks).
Those four points define the beginnings of the seasons. For example the center of the Sun’s disc will cross the vernal equinox at 3:01 PM Mountain Daylight Time [you guys in the Eastern time zone can do the conversion for a change instead of making us people in flyover country do it] on March 20th, 2025. That is the beginning of northern hemisphere spring. More immediately and relevantly, at 2:20 AM Mountain Standard Time on December 21 (a week from today), Winter begins; the Sun is, at that moment, at its lowest declination, or (another way of saying the same thing) its greatest southern declination. It’s pretty close to that declination right now.
I haven’t yet talked much about the celestial sphere equivalent of longitude, and deliberately so; I needed to discuss the ecliptic first. Because it turns out the vernal equinox is the “reference longitude” on the celestial sphere. It’s the zero line.
Only we don’t call it longitude, we call it “right ascension.” And traditionally, we don’t measure it in degrees, we measure it in hours, 24 to the circle–fifteen degrees make up one hour. And in minutes, 60 to the hour, and seconds, 60 to the minute. (Unfortunately degrees are divided up into 60 minutes and the minutes are devided into 60 seconds, so now we have two different kinds of “minutes.” A minute of right ascension is four minutes of the 360 degree circle.
(Sometimes right ascension is measured in degrees, that’s probably going to become the standard someday.)
Why is it called right ascension? I don’t know. This is a puzzler, because as seen from the Earth the numbers go up to the left, as you face south. (We are “outside” the sphere in the next diagram, in a sort of “God’s Eye View,” so they go up to the right. Maybe God named it right ascension.)
So here’s that first “celestial sphere” diagram, with the declination and right ascension lines and ecliptic, and solstices, and equinoxes, drawn onto it. The really bright “Sun” is at the Vernal Equinox. The one farthest to the right as you look at the diagram is the June solstice, the one on the far side of the globe is the Autumnal equinox, and all the way over on the left, is the December solstice.
Here is a map, plotted as if declination and right ascension were planar coordinates, of the sky, with the official boundaries between constellations noted. Note that the ecliptic is a sort of “roller coaster” track. The sun moves right to left along it over the course of a year.
[Side note: Notice, by the way that the Sun is actually in Pisces at the vernal Equinox…not just about to enter Aries, as the zodiacal signs’ association with calendar dates would imply. That is a result of the procession of the equinoxes having been able to act for a couple of thousand years since astrology was invented. In fact, we will eventually reach a point where the Sun will be just leaving Aquarius at the vernal equinox. That is what “the Age of Aquarius” means.]
So why on Earth is right ascension done in hours? To answer that, we need a bit of history. Before there were atomic clocks, how did we determine the time, and do so with some degree of precision?
Remember that transit telescope? You use one of those. You then watch for a specific star to cross the center of the telescope; when it does that it crosses your celestial meridian. You look up the right ascension of that star…and read off hours, minutes and seconds. That’s what time it is.
Well…not really. More work must be done. What you have is the sidereal time; the time with respect to the stars. (At this moment, you set a special sidereal clock to that time; if it’s accurate you don’t need to set it again for a while. Note though that a sidereal clock seems to run fast; it goes through one “day” in 23 hours, 56 minutes, and some number of seconds I’m too lazy to look up.) You have to do a bit of computation still. Sidereal time only matches your local solar time if the Sun happens to be at 12h right ascension. So you get to do some subtraction, where the sun is versus where that star is, and NOW you have your local solar time. Then you gotta correct for the fact that the Earth’s orbit is elliptical which means the sun’s motion along the ecliptic speeds up and slows down, to get your mean solar time (that involved looking something up in a table that someone else calculated, saving you the skull sweat). THEN you have to correct for the fact that you’re not in your time zone’s central meridian. That’s a simple addition or subtraction. And then…add a gratuitous fricking hour if you’re on daylight saving time.
THIS is why people used to call the observatory to get the precise time.
Mintaka, that belt star in Orion, is at 5h 32m right ascension. So, if it’s on the meridian right now, exactly south or north of you, the sidereal time is 5h 32m. Note though someone to the west or east of you is not seeing the star cross at the same time you are. You are your own personal time zone when it’s sidereal time!
Or think about it a different way. On the first day of (northern hemisphere) spring, the Sun is at RA 0h. When it crosses the meridian (i.e., at solar noon where you are), the sidereal time is 0h, which is sidereal midnight! Half a year later, the first day of fall, the Sun is on the other side of the sky, and it crosses your meridian at 12h sidereal time. Which means that at that time of year the Earth is facing the opposite direction (with respect to the stars) at noon, than it was on the first day of Spring. Sidereal time is actually a measure of which way the Earth is facing, with respect to the stars, not the sun. Solar time is a measure of which way the Earth is facing, with respect to the Sun. (If you find that confusing, you’re not alone. One of the Flerfer talking points is designed to exploit that confusion.)
Telescopes (and cameras) can be mounted on an equatorial mount.
There are two ways for this to pivot, one around the bar with the weights on it, for declination, and the other at 90 degrees to this, through the part that shows as diagonal lower left to upper right. That part of the mount should be set up parallel to the Earth’s axis of rotation, that way pivoting on that will change the right ascension the telescope is pointing at. This one has a cap at lower left, because there’s actually a small telescope inside the mount. You use that small telescope to ensure that you’ve pointed that axis directly at the north celestial pole; then you’re good to go. That axis is often motorized, too, so it will cause the telescope to turn as the sky turns. This is advantageous for long-exposure photography through the scope. That’s the advantage of this kind of mount, and the advantage of this coordinate system; as the earth rotates, a telescope can stay pointed at the same place simply by rotating through right ascension. There are other designs, too, like a fork mount:
The fork pivots around the black dot at its bottom for right ascension, declination is managed by the two joints joining the telescope to the fork. For extremely heavy telescopes you get an English or Yoke mount:
A yoke mount. This is the 100 inch Hooker telescope, which Edwin Hubble used to determine that those spiral nebula things were galaxies and that the universe was expanding. It is one of the two most historically important telescopes, the other being the one used by Galileo.
And finally the horseshoe mount, used by Palomar. If the telescope is actually pointing through the horseshoe, it’s looking very near the north celestial pole.
So here we are; we understand the celestial sphere, we understand the ecliptic, we understand how they tie together to define the seasons. As one last parting shot here, I’ll point out that the celestial poles are necessarily on the celestial meridian.
How do you as an observer standing somewhere on planet Earth, fit in? I’m showing a whole sphere of stars, but at any given time we can only see half of that sphere; the nighttime sky is half of the celestial sphere.
Remember these diagrams are for illustration purposes only. The real situation is the sphere should be drawn very large (oh, say a mile across) and the Earth should look like a pinhead. Even that isn’t enough, but it’s a lot closer.
What do you, standing in some particular spot, actually see? How does the equatorial celestial system relate to your local horizontal coordinates? I’m going to assume the northern hemisphere (as the people who draw the diagrams usually do), and so here’s the usual diagram.
There’s the viewer, standing somewhere in North America. It’s oriented so that he is standing vertically, which gives quite a tilt to the equatorial celestial sphere. Projected onto the celestial sphere is the viewer’s horizon.
In this diagram we are pretending the Earth is not moving, but rather that the sky is; an object on the equator appears to move clockwise, as you’re facing south. Turn around and face north, and the celestial sphere appears to be rotating counter clockwise around the pole. That pole is almost at the north star, Polaris.
The pole is above the horizon by a certain angle. What is that angle?
That turns out to be easy. If you were standing at the north pole latitude 90 degrees North, the celestial pole would be directly overhead, which is to say, 90 degrees above the horizon. If you happened to be on the equator, latitude 0, though, the north celestial pole would be sitting due north, on the horizon, i.e., 0 degrees above the horizon.
So in essence the altitude above the horizon of the celestial pole, is equal to the north latitude of the observer. This is true in the southern hemisphere as well, almost; the altitude of the south celestial pole is equal to the south latitude of the observer. Notice that the stars will appear to circle the south celestial pole in the clockwise direction (this is probably easiest to see if you imagine the paths around the opposite pole marked in the middle diagram below).
This is why the globe earth model predicts that the stars will appear to spin clockwise in the Southern hemisphere. Furthermore, it doesn’t matter where you are standing (Africa, Australia, South America); you will the SAME stars rotating about the same pole. This is impossible on the flat Earth, since people facing south are facing in completely different directions on the disc world. The stars cannot simultaneously be circling around a point due south to all viewers, when the direction “due south” is different for every viewer.
One more thing: Notice in the right hand diagram, that some stars will never set; the ones fairly close to the celestial pole run in circles that are small enough they don’t dip below the horizon. In fact, it’s those stars within a certain angle of the pole, and that angle is also the same as your latitude. Conversely facing south, there are stars that will never rise above the horizon, again a circle of stars centered on the south celestial pole, and being within “your latitude” degrees of the south celestial pole.
When at the North pole, you can see every thing in the north celestial hemisphere, all of the time, but can never, ever see anything in the south celestial hemisphere.
And this applies not just to the stars but to the Sun. During the six months the Sun is in the northern celestial hemisphere, it too can be seen all of the time; the north pole therefore has six continuous months of daylight. Once the Sun goes into the south celestial hemisphere, you get six months of night. Similarly, the south pole has six months of daylight when the Sun is in the south celestial hemisphere, and six months of darkness otherwise.
For places on Earth near to, but not at the pole, there is some period of time less than six months long during which the Sun’s declination is high enough that the Sun does not set, and you have a twenty four hour sun. At Union Glacier, the site of the Final Experiment, the latitude is 79.75 degrees south so any time the sun’s declination is 10.25 degrees south (or further south than that) Union Glacier has 24 hour sun.
When on the equator, absolutely everything will be visible for half of the sidereal day, but if it’s something close to either pole, it won’t get that high in the sky. The celestial poles themselves will be sitting right on the horizon.
Here’s one more diagram showing, for three different declinations, an object’s apparent path across the sky, for someone at 35 degrees north latitude.
The object is the sun, at the two solstices (declination +/- 23.5 degrees) and on the equinoxes (declination 0).
When the sun is at a high declination, it rises in the northeast, climbs high in the sky, is at its highest as it crosses the meridian directly south of the observer, then sets in the northwest. When the sun is at equinox, it rises directly due east, climbs somewhat high in the sky, culminating at the meridian, then sets precisely to the observer’s west. Finally when the sun is at a low declination, it rises in the southeast, doesn’t get too far up in the sky, but does reach a maximum at the meridian, and then sets in the southwest. Note that different fractions of the total sun path are below the horizon. Most of the Dec. 21 path is below the horizon, which is why the daytime is so short in winter. Conversely the summer path is mostly above the horizon, which makes for long summer days. The sun is covering the same ascension angle in the same time, it’s just that more of the total arc is above the horizon in the summer, and less in the winter.
In the southern hemisphere imagine all of those sun paths leaning the other way, with the south celestial pole above the horizon. Now the December 21 path is the one that has most of its length above the horizon. The sun rises in the southeast, swings around to a high spot north of the observer (and, of course, on the meridian), then sets in the southwest. This is another concrete prediction of the Globe Earth; the flat earth has the sun circling around a point well north of the observer, so the sun should start in the northeast, come closest north of the observer, then set in the northwest. At no time in the Flat Earth model is the Sun ever to the south of the observer, certainly not at sunrise and sunset (provided the observer is further south than 23.5 degrees south latitude).
So here we are. This is how celestial coordinates work. And they do work.
I found this whole kerfuffle about the 24 hour moon to be a “teachable moment.” That’s a Leftist mislabeling of “perfect moment to try to indoctrinate people” but I actually mean “teachable moment.” Flerfers reading this will, I hope, accept it as possibly the first coherent/comprehensive explanation of the topic they’ve ever read (assuming it is coherent), then they can decide for themselves whether it makes sense (though I hope they take into their accounting that it works and can predict, e.g., sunrise and sunset with perfect accuracy).
This one ran a bit overlong but I hope it was illuminating.
44 days, 11 hours, 59 minutes until the Once And Future President, Donald John Trump, is restored to the office that was Rightfully his the last four years.
Not that I’m counting, mind you.
What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?
January 6 Tapes?
Where are the tapes? Anyone, Anyone? Bueller? Johnson??
Paging Speaker Johnson…this is your conscience calling you out on broken promises.
Day of Infamy
One thing that many are counting is the 83rd anniversary of the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.
When I was a kid it seemed like every account of World War II didn’t just call it an “attack” but rather a “sneak attack.”
It seems that we were as outraged by the “sneak” as we were by the “attack.” What made it a sneak attack was that it happened with no declaration of war by Japan. Here we are at peace with each other and WHAM!! our Pacific fleet is burning or already at the bottom of the harbor. (We can argue whether Roosevelt knew it was going to happen and let it happen, or whether we just got caught napping…either way the effect on the public was the same. I do think Roosevelt was on some level happy that we were in the war; he had up to that time wanted to help the allies a lot more than the American people did.)
If the telling in Tora! Tora! Tora! is to be believed (and I tend to believe it), the Japanese didn’t intend it to be a sneak attack. They intended to pass their declaration of war on to our government and then attack almost immediately, but slow decoding of the dispatch prevented that from happening; the attack happened before the message was delivered.
Whether that would have made a difference in the level of resolve we felt, is another question entirely. And so we have a straight line from this–the photograph taken from one of the Japanese aircraft just after the start of the attack, educating us on the folly of bottling up our fleet and parking our aircraft too close together:
To these two photographs, taken from two different aircraft, the Enola Gay and the Bockscar after they did a couple of “physics package” demos to complete Japan’s education in the folly of their foreign policy:
We had learned the lesson Japan had taught us on this day in 1941.
We are excellent teachers as well as studentsl we reinforced our lesson for the Japanese by repeating it. But we did a slightly different demo the second time–plutonium instead of U-235–in order not to be too repetitive.
The lesson stuck. Japan hasn’t been a problem on that scale, since.
And now, on to the Deep State, which needs a salutary lesson of its own.
News Flash
Today, it is still the case that Joe Biden didn’t Win.
I realize that to some readers, this might be a shock; surely at some point things must change and Biden will have actually won.
But the past cannot actually be changed.
It will always and forever be the case that Joe Biden didn’t win.
And if you, Leftist Lurker, want to dismiss it as dead white cis-male logic…well, you can call it what you want, but then please just go fuck off. No one here buys that bullshit–logic is logic and facts are facts regardless of skin color–and if you gave it a moment’s rational thought, you wouldn’t either. Of course your worthless education never included being able to actually reason–or detect problems with false reasoning–so I don’t imagine you’ll actually wake up as opposed to being woke.
As Ayn Rand would sometimes point out: Yes, you are free to evade reality. What you cannot do is evade the consequences of evading reality. Or to put it concretely: You can ignore the Mack truck bearing down on you as you play in the middle of the street, you won’t be able to ignore the consequences of ignoring the Mack truck.
And Ayn Rand also pointed out that existence (i.e., the sum total of everything that exists) precedes consciousness–our consciousnesses are a part of existence, not outside of it–therefore reality cannot be a “social construct” as so many of you fucked-up-in-the-head people seem to think.
So much for Leftist douchebag lurkers. For the rest of you, the regular readers and those lurkers who understand such things: I continue to carry the banner once also carried by Wheatie. His Fraudulency didn’t win.
Let’s Go, Brandon!!
His Fraudulency
Joe Biteme, properly styled His Fraudulency, continues to infest the White House, we haven’t heard much from the person who should have been declared the victor, and hopium is still being dispensed even as our military appears to have joined the political establishment in knuckling under to the fraud.
One can hope that all is not as it seems.
I’d love to feast on that crow.
(I’d like to add, I find it entirely plausible, even likely, that His Fraudulency is also His Figureheadedness. (Apparently that wasn’t a word; it got a red underline. Well it is now.) Where I differ with the hopium addicts is on the subject of who is really in charge. It ain’t anyone we like.)
Justice Must Be Done.
The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.
Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
Gold down and silver up. This is good news for silver, which has been rising relative to gold, finally recovering somewhat from the disproportionate beating it took since the election.
*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.
The Final Experiment
…starts in one week.
Eric Dubay of the two hundred proofs contradicting himself, at one turn insisting he’d love to go to Antarctica to see for himself, and when offered the opportunity, refusing to concede that he had ever said so.
Disgraceful behavior from the Flerfers. Predicted by the globers. Will Duffy initially didn’t believe they’d turn on their own like this (as the globers said they would), but finally just had to come out and call them on it.
In related news, one of the globers had to back out for medical reasons. The Final Experiment is actually getting a special campsite at almost 80 degrees South–one where no terrain will occlude the Sun– and now they were below the threshold (nine) that the company doing the logistics actually needed for the special camp. So Duffy had to find someone to take the open slot.
And who stepped up? A full-blown, Hollywood-grade documentary producer named Jonathan Mariande. He will make a documentary of the trip.
AND MARIANDE IS A FLAT EARTHER.
This will make it even harder for the Flerfers to tap dance around what happens.
It must be great to be a charlatan and make money off of suckers…until the truth outs. Then suddenly you see your life turning to garbage. Sorry, no sympathy from me.
It Came From Deep Space
If there’s one thing almost all of the moons of the outer solar system…and all of the TNOs…share in common it’s that they’re largely made out of water ice.
Honestly if anyone tries to sell you on the idea that space aliens are going to come here to steal our water, just laugh in their faces.
They don’t even have to come almost all the way to Earth just to filch water from our TNOs, they certainly have similar things in their own systems. Water is the most common heteronuclear molecule (i.e. composed of more than one kind of atom) in space.
Which makes sense. Half of all of the “stuff” in the universe that is not hydrogen and is not helium, is oxygen. And after being blasted out into space in a planetary nebula or supernova, the first thing an oxygen atom is likely to find (once thing settle down enough to let it hang onto eight electrons) is a hydrogen atom, or even a hydrogen molecule, because there are seventy grams of hydrogen for every gram of oxygen…which means 1100 hydrogen atoms for every oxygen atom. There’s plenty of helium around too but that’s fluff from a chemical standpoint. So the first thing that lone oxygen atom is going to find isn’t another oxygen atom to form O2, but hydrogen, to form OH then another to form H2O. Badda-bing! Water.
This notion of most solid things being made largely out of water ice is foreign to us, because Earth is almost purely rocks (which, OBTW, generally contain plenty of oxygen) and (deep, deep down) iron-nickel. If Earth actually had its share of water, it’d be Water World, with no rocks within hundreds of miles of the surface. It would look like Europa would look, if Europa melted. (Europa probably has more water in that subsurface ocean than Earth has in total, in spite of being much smaller than Earth.)
Where did our water go? It got blown away by heat. When the Earth first formed it was a molten mass; the water certainly vaporized, and at those temperatures Earth’s gravity would not hold it. Then the stream of energy and particles from the Sun would simply have whisked it away. (In fact we still lose a tiny bit of water vapor this way from our atmosphere even at our current temperatures.)
The next natural question is…OK, it’s not necessarily the next natural question, but this is my post and I’m going to go there anyway: So what would happen if one of those mostly-ice objects somehow ended up getting close to the Sun? The same thing.
You don’t have to take my word for it. This actually happens, a lot. Have a look.
Comet Hale-Bopp
Yes. Comets are basically bodies from the outer solar system that somehow end up getting into an orbit that brings them closer to the Sun. They spend billions of years “out there” just minding their own business, when some other body–perhaps another comet, or a planet, maybe even a rogue planet (one that has escaped its parent star) wanders through and perturbs its orbit, and it drops towards the Sun.
It’s now in a highly elliptical orbit. Depending on where it came from the comet may be regarded as a “short period” comet if it came from the Kuiper Belt or the scattered disk–places I talked about last time–or it may be a “long period” comet if it came from further out.
Further out?
It’s the existence of so many long-period comets that has convinced astronomers that the Kuiper Belt and scattered disk are not the outermost parts of the solar system. Instead it’s thought that these long-term comets originate from a very sparse and gigantic zone called the “Oort Cloud” (pronounced like “port” without the “p”) named after Jan Oort who first proposed it. (Note the third Dutch astronomer who has had a major role in this series on the solar system.)
These orbit anywhere from 2000 to 50,000 AU, though estimates of that upper end vary; I’ve seen numbers as high as 200,000 AU for the upper bound, and so will you by the time you finish this.
For reference, the nearest (other) star to our solar system is at a distance of 268,551 AU (or 1.3 parsecs or 4.25 light years). [Which should tell you how ridiculously far apart stars are in comparison to the sizes of solar systems…much less the sizes of the stars themselves.]
We have never, ever detected an object that is in the Oort Cloud. Too far away, and too small. We only know about it from backtracking comets. And because of these “ambassadors” from the Oort cloud, we know a fair amount about the objects in the Oort Cloud, as a class. We can’t send a probe to them, not in this lifetime, but they sometimes come most of the way to us.
History
Comets have been known, and feared, since ancient times.
The night time sky is mostly changeless. Oh, the stars shift a bit westward from one night to the next, but after a full year, you’re back where you started from; that in fact is a direct consequence of our yearly orbit about the Sun.
We see planets and the moon moving around, but they are at least somewhat predictable (even by very ancient peoples); they tend to stick being near a band about the sky called the ecliptic. In fact the Sun stays on the ecliptic though that’s a bit harder to see since you can’t see the Sun and the stars at the same time. The point being the planets were predictable and though some people tried to do “woo” with planetary positions, people in general weren’t scared of them.
There were also shooting stars, but even though those are quite unpredictable, they’re fairly frequent.
But a comet? Comets are big, spectacular, hang around for months, and completely unpredictable. There could be a big one next year. Or not. Thus they tended to be regarded as bad omens.
And then came Sir Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley.
Isaac Newton, I’ve discussed enough. He was able to show that a force that could be described mathematically (and thus, precisely) was responsible for the orbits of the planets. At that point they became viewed as essentially a clockwork. His work was published in Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687, thanks in part to Edmond Halley’s funding and encouragement.
Halley had already made observations of a comet that showed up in September of 1682. He used that data to show that that comet, too, was in an orbit fully consistent with Newton’s gravitation, but rather than a nearly circular orbit, the comet was in a highly elliptical orbit–one with an eccentricity of 0.96658, where 0 is circular and 1.0 is a parabola or line segment. And the orbit has a period of 76 years. Its semi-major axis (i.e., halfway along its length) is 17.737 AU, its nearest approach to the Sun is 0.59279 AU (inside the orbit of Venus), while its furthest distance is 35.14 AU, beyond the orbit of Neptune (which wasn’t known yet!).
Halley published this in 1705, along with data on other comets.
But here was the key implication: There’s be another comet in 1682+76=1758, but it would actually be the comet of 1682, returning.
And sure enough, sixteen years after his death in 1742 at the age of 82, a comet showed up…and it was in the right place, following the right path. That comet is now known as “Halley’s Comet.” (“Halley,” by the way, rhymes with “Valley,” at least that’s the way most people with that name pronounce it today. We’re not 100% sure that’s they way they pronounced it back then, it might have rhymed with “Holly.” Or it may actually have been Hail-ee, as it is commonly pronounced by non-astronomers.)
[Note, by the way, that the animation shows Halley’s comet orbiting clockwise. Yes, it’s retrograde just like irregular satellites are. But if you think about it other than minimum distance this looks an awful lot like an irregular satellite.]
Halley had predicted a comet. And thus, comets became something explicable. Sure, we couldn’t predict when the next long term comet would show up, but the short term ones we could predict like clockwork, and either kind, once visible, would follow predictions as to their path across the sky.
Well, mostly. The difficulty is, that an orbital calculation assumes the object isn’t under any kind of thrust. But when a comet is near the Sun, it’s constantly outgassing as it warms up…and those jets of gas act like random rocket burns. But now we knew what comets are, and that took all of the supernatural “woo” out of them.
And the terror. Well, mostly; but 1910 is a special case of panic caused by scientific illiteracy.
Once comets became an irregular but nevertheless normal phenomenon, astronomers started looking for them. Any unexpected, diffuse blob in a telescope could turn out to be a comet in the early stages of warming up and outgassing. Charles Messier (1730-1817), in fact, made it a hobby to look for comets, and made a catalog of objects–ones that were nebulous in appearance but were not comets–that had fooled him, so that he could check against it in the future to weed out false alarms. This is now known as the Messier catalog, and although it’s by no means comprehensive (it has 110 objects in it), it’s famous. Many objects in the sky are known by their Messier numbers, for example M 31 in Andromeda (the “Andromeda Galaxy”) or M 1, the Crab Nebula. Amateur astronomers even hold “Messier Marathons” during the one month of the year when they are all visible sometime, somewhere, between dusk and dawn, trying to get all of them. (On my one attempt, I got all but 15 or so of them.) Messier did discover 13 comets, and co-discovered a fourteenth.
Now that we knew what we were looking for, we have found Halley’s comet in records from 240 BCE, in Chinese chronicles. And then in 164 BCE in a couple of Babylonian tablets…actually fragments of tablets. And again in 87 BCE in more Babylonian tablets. (And it may be depicted on Armenian coins.)
The appearance of 12 BCE was recorded in China. It likely passed pretty close to Earth then. It so happened that in Rome, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa died at that time, so the Romans took it as an omen of his death. It is also sometimes cited as a possible Star of Bethlehem (though it seems a bit early for that to me).
There is a possible record of the appearance of 66 CE, the Chinese recorded its appearance in 141. Then we apparently missed one, because the next one is 374, then 451 (heralding the defeat of Attila the Hun). Past that point, we can find every single appearance in the records. The most famous of these was in 1066, meaning someone was going to have a very bad year. Well, it was either going to be Harold (if he lost the English throne) or William (if Harold stopped him from seizing the British throne). It’s convenient that no matter what happens, the comet will turn out to have been an omen! And of course we know that Harold lost out to William the Conqueror, bringing the French language with him. (And English spelling has sucked ever since.)
The comet is depicted on the Bayeaux Tapestry, telling the history of the Battle of Hastings:
Speaking of the Star of Bethlehem, in 1305 Giotto di Bondone produced a work, the Adoration of the Magi, which depicts the star of Bethlehem as a comet. How did he know what a comet looked like? He had seen Halley’s comet in 1301, and that time, it was visually spectacular.
As it turns out, one of the probes that visited Halley’s Comet in 1986, was named Giotto after this artist.
In 1835 the comet appeared, and Mark Twain was born two weeks after its closest approach to the Sun. It was during this apparition that German astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (who also developed the Bessel functions–very eclectic stuff) suggested that jets of evaporating material might supply enough force to alter a comet’s orbit.
In 1909 Twain stated that he “came in with Halley’s comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'” And sure enough, Twain died on 21 April 1910, the day after the comet’s closest approach to the Sun.
In 1910, we had the benefit of spectroscopy and photography. We could tell from the light, what the comet was made of. One thing found was the toxic gas cyanogen. Earth was expected to pass through the tail of the comet, so a panic ensued with people afraid all life on Earth would be snuffed out, and thus buying gas masks and “anti-comet pills” that were useless (a better record than COVID “vaccines”). The fact of the matter is that a comet’s tail is so diffuse it had no effect.
Here’s the comet in 1910, taken from the Yerkes Observatory, at the time home to the largest telescope in existence. (It still is the largest refracting telescope in existence.)
Based on my grandfather’s recollection, it was a spectacular appearance. Or perhaps he was remembering a different comet; the Great Daylight Comet of [January] 1910, which could be seen even in daytime!
Speaking of comet tails…now would be a good time to discuss the structure comets. Or it may be a bad time. But this is my post, so we will.
The Anatomy of a Comet
At the very heart of a comet is the nucleus. This is the icy object that–when it’s out in the Kuiper Belt, Scattered Disk, or Oort Cloud, just minds its own business, it’s a bunch of ice, dust, and rocks, mostly water ice but also carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane and ammonia. They range from 100 meters across to possibly as much as 30 km across. Often they are called “dirty snowballs.” Comets that have passed by the Sun multiple times in the past will tend to have more rock and dust at their surfaces–any ice there boiled off during a previous visit. They are very dark in color, reflecting as little as four percent of the light that reaches them.
Surrounding the nucleus is the coma, it’s basically the sum total of all of the stuff that is outgassing from the comet, and any dust that is being carried along with the outgassing. It can be thousands or even millions of kilometers across.
Here you can see the nucleus of the Hartley comet, complete with very active jets of material:
The tails form…yes, I said “tails”…when the coma material interacts with either solar radiation or the solar wind. One tail will be curved and will consist of the dust and other (relatively) heavy particles. The other is the gas tail, pure gases, and that one will always point directly away from the Sun; these are lighter things that are pushed away instantly by the pressure of the solar radiation.
The gas tail glows because the gases become ionized…in other words it actually emits light. The dust tail, on the other hand shines by reflected sunlight (like planets do).
Tails have been known to be 3.8 AU long… that’s over half a billion kilometers.
The one statistic that I clearly remember reading a lot when I was younger was how rarefied a comet’s tail is. For all of the visual appearance, it’s a near perfect vacuum (just not as close as space normally is). But I haven’t been able to nail it down on the internet. Suffice it to say it’s very, very sparse.
Here’s an animation
So, comets are huge, when they’re active.
Comets that pass by the Sun multiple times will eventually run out of ice to have vaporize. They may then resemble asteroids, or the object may have no cohesion and become swarms of small objects–dust particles, mostly. Those can eventually cause meteor showers on Earth when the Earth eventually passes through them. There are a number of these over the course of a year, generally named for the constellation the meteors seem to radiate from as seen from the ground. Typically there are good and bad years for meteor showers, depending on whether Earth is cutting through the center of the swarm or not.
Categories of Comet
As alluded to above, comets are roughly divided between short period and long period. Short period, or to many astronomers, just plain “periodic” comets are generally those whose period is less than 200 years. Usually, but by no means always, they orbit in at a low inclination, close to the ecliptic, the plane of the planets’ orbits, and in the same direction as the planets. This is an important clue. Short term comets are generally former long term comets that passed too close to one of the planets and had their orbits perturbed. Many will be sub-grouped into “families” based on the outermost extent of their orbits; that’s thought to be an indication as to which planet did the deed. In the case of Halley’s comet, since its orbit extends just a bit past Neptune’s orbit, it’s believed that Neptune perturbed its orbit. The largest of these families is (no surprise) the Jupiter family. There are also comets that orbit within the asteroid belt…they have the right composition, but very little outgassing happens that far away from the Sun.
Long Period comets can have periods of thousands or even millions of years. Those latter are our evidence for the existence of the Oort cloud. Comets C/1999 F1 and C/2017 T2 (PANSTARRS) have a semi major axis of 35,000 AU and a period of six million years. If you missed them when they first showed up, you’re basically out of luck as far as seeing them the next time. You’ll have to wait for them to reach their maximum distance from the Sun…over a light year (!), then come back.
But some comets are literally never expected to come back; those are the single-apparition comets.
If the Kuiper Belt and Oort cloud seem a bit bewildering here is another diagram for comparison…actually it’s three diagrams, one each of the asteroid belt, Kuiper Belt and Oort cloud. These are not drawn to any kind of scale; for instance in the last diagram the planet orbits and Kuiper belt are much too big; and as always the planets themselves and even the Sun are drawn much too large (they should be much less than one pixel in size).
Other Famous Comets
There are over 3,500 known comets. Most never get bright enough to be seen with the naked eye, but some become famous for one reason or another. Halley’s comet, of course, is the undisputed celebrity.
9P/Tempel was discovered in 1867 by William Tempel, and has a 5.6 year period. We lost track of it in 1898 and assumed it had disintegrated, but it was rediscovered in 1967. It turned out that its orbit had been perturbed, and that is how we lost it; it wasn’t where we expected it to be. We have sent probes to this one.
Kohoutek (C 1973 C1) in 1973 was a fizzle. Early estimates of how bright it would get made it seem as if it would be one of the brightest comets of the century, but then…big nothing! And it faded from sight by the end of January 1974. It’s hard to predict how bright a new comet will be, because we rarely have a good feel for how much ice it has, how deeply it’s buried, and so on. On a comet’s second trip, though, we will have a past history to go off of.
Kohoutek is a classic long term comet. Its measured eccentricity was between 0.9999 and 1.0. A 1.0 orbit is an escape orbit (barely), so we don’t expect to see Kohoutek again any time soon. Current estimates are that it is in a 75,000 year orbit. It passed only 0.14 AU from the Sun, meaning it went inside the orbit of Mercury.
Hyakutake in 1996 passed very near Earth (about 15 million km) over the north pole and was readily visible late at night (rather than being buried in twilight. I went outside the city away from the lights to see it as it traversed the Big Dipper and it noticeably moved in just ten or fifteen minutes. This was an unusual opportunity, comets are usually brightest (as seen from Earth) near the sun so it’s unusual to see a bright comet in a truly dark sky.
The comet came in from “below” the plane of the ecliptic (bottom center), crossed the plane of the ecliptic then over our north pole on March 22, zipped through perihelion (closest approach to the Sun, then dropped below the plane of the ecliptic and exited, lower right. Unlike with Kohoutek, this probably isn’t Hyakutake’s first visit; it’s in a 17,000 year orbit with an excentricity of “only” 0.99989.
The Ulysses spacecraft–one studying the Sun–passed through Hyakutake’s tail.
Hyakutake, however, was overshadowed by Hale Bopp, just a few months later in 1997. Hale Bopp is actually the comet I used at the beginning of this post. I unfortunately never got a good look at it. At most I saw some fuzz at twilight, and then it would set. I could never get far enough away from the city fast enough at sunset to get a good look at it. Apparently it came into its own later, after I had given up on it. So for me Hyakutake was “the” comet.
So I really missed the boat on this one, but I’ll get another crack at it in abut 2400 years. This is by no means a short-period comet but it has a significantly shorter period than Kohoutek and Hyakutake, and its orbit has a semi-major axis of a mere 177 AU.
Shoemaker-Levy 9 This one, no one would ever have cared about (other than Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker, and David Levy, the co-discoverers of it the comet. They discovered it in 1993…and it had already broken into 21 pieces, probably sometime in 1992 when it approached Jupiter (yes…tidal forces!). But then when they plotted its orbit, the astronomers realized two things: the pieces were actually in orbit about Jupiter, not the Sun, and also that they were going to make direct hits on Jupiter in July of 1994! (Hard to believe that was thirty years ago!)
By the time it hit, Shoemaker-Levy 9 was in twenty one pieces and every one of them hit Jupiter.
The comet fragments were up to 2 km in diameter…meaning before it broke up it was actually pretty big.
How would Jupiter hold up getting pummeled like this?
The bad news is the pieces hit just into the dark side of Jupiter. That means we couldn’t see the actual moments of impact from Earth. Hubble got retasked to look; The Ulysses probe got retasked…and the Galileo orbiter was 1.6 AUs out, but it could actually see the impact site. NOTHING was more important than this.
One of the most famous pictures in astronomy is of the black holes the impacts left in Jupiter’s atmosphere.
The largest piece, G, hit with 6,000,000 megatons of of energy. It took months for the atmosphere to recover from the hits. Some of the blemishes were the size of Earth.
Perhaps we will leave such smoking holes in the Deep State, shortly.
This was particularly poignant for Eugene Shoemaker. He almost got to go to the Moon on Apollo 17 as the geologist, but for medical reasons never got to do it. He was however the head of the geology program for many years..
But one of his big “things” was warning people about the dangers of possible future asteroid and comet impacts. He spent time studying Meteor Crater in Arizona, he discovered that the Ries in Germany was an old impact crater (that wasn’t hard. It turned out that St. George’s church in Nördlingen was built out of rock that clearly had been altered by the force of an asteroid impact (it’s very distinctive; no volcano or other Earth-bound force can produce it). After that all he had to do was find the right quarry in order to bag his…er…quarry.
Geologists and astronomers had pooh-poohed his warnings, but Shoemaker-Levy 9 vindicated him completely. Now we’re quite aware of the very real danger of being hit by one of these objects. We’ve had two significant…but still very small…pieces hit since 1900, both in Russia: 1908 Tunguska and 2013 Chelyabinsk.
Exploration
When recounting the history of Halley’s comet, I stopped at 1910, not 1986. That’s because we were able to send probes…yes more than one…to the comet because we had plenty of advance notice. In fact we sent five probes. The European Space Agency sent Giotto, the Soviet Union sent Vega 1 and Vega 2, Japan sent Sakigake and Suisei.
NASA didn’t do a damned thing. However they did send a mission, ICE, to another comet the year before, and therefore the first mission to study a comet was an American probe. Another six missions have been sent to other comets since, including one lander and one deliberate impact:
Deep Space (launched 1998) used an ion drive for manuevering. It had two targets, it missed its first target and managed to reach its second target.
Stardust (launched 1999) actually captured dust from Wild, one of its target comets, and launched a capsule that returned that dust to Earth. So we got to put bits of comet into test tubes in a lab here on Earth. The other comet was…well let me hold that until later.
CONTOUR (launched 2002) was intended to study two comets but failed. Plan B was to head to yet a third comet, but the spacecraft couldn’t be contacted. Can’t win ’em all.
All missions up to that time were flybys, but we actually set up an orbiter, Rosetta, launched by the European Space Agency in 2004. It orbited 67P Churymov-Gerasimenko in 2014 and attempted to land. In the meantime, it took pictures, like this one.
Rosetta had company; ESA had launched two probes on the same day and Philae‘s purpose from the start was to land on the comet. It actually ended up bouncing multiple times, and ended up in partial shadow, limiting its useful lifetime. Philae was last heard from in 2015.
Finally there was Deep Impact, launched in 2005. Yes, one of the two big “asteroid hitting the Earth” movies from 1998 bore that name, but neither Wikipedia page references the other, so there’s not even a “name inspired by…” connection that I can find. The goal here was to study the internal composition of a comet, so the probe actually launched an impactor, and then photographed the light flash. That was comet 9P/Tempel (a fairly well known comet, though not as famous as Halley’s comet). The main craft went on to take the picture of Hartley I showed above.
Tempel is actually a fairly well known comet, it was first observed in 1867 by William Tempel, and has a 5.6 year period. We lost track of it in 1898 and assumed it had disintegrated, but it was rediscovered in 1967. It turned out that its orbit had been perturbed, and that is how we lost it; it wasn’t where we expected it to be.
Here is a composite image based on photographs taken by Deep Impact before the impact.
Here is a photograph taken by the impactor, before it became like a bug on a windshield, on July 4, 2005.
If that’s a bit boring. how about an “oh, SHIT!” GIF?
Or as seen from the main spacecraft:
The impact speed was 10.3 km/second and delivered energy equivalent to 4.7 tons of TNT. We predicted that the crater would be about 100 m across. Only in 2011 did we find out…thanks to a flyby by Stardust, that the crater was roughly 200 m across.
The Impactor bore a CD with the names of 625,000 people encoded on it.
Smack! in Popular Culture
What would happen if one of these hit the Earth?
Well, it would suck. A 1 km wide body hitting us would make every hurricane and earthquake in history put together look like nothing; the entire planet would be affected.
Consider that a long term comet will be moving at pretty close to solar escape velocity. Which when it hit the earth would be about 42 km/sec. Earth would be moving at 30 km/sec. The typical scenario is a right-angle collision, basically Earth getting T-boned by the comet; that’s a collision speed of 51.6 km/sec. Under very unusual (but not impossible) circumstances where the comet’s closest approach is 1 AU and it happens to be headed in exactly the opposite direction to Earth’s motion it could be a head-on collision at 72 km/second, but that’s so unlikely that it’s only worth contemplating if you are so tired of winning that 51.6 km/sec isn’t enough to adequately ruin your day.
An object of, say, 1km in size popping in at that speed would be catastrophic, especially if it hit the ocean. Humanity would probably survive–a death toll of 90+ percent is not 100 percent, but the survivors might find themselves blown back into the stone age…and the lasting effects would make “climate change” look like a mouse fart. Make the asteroid or comet much bigger and…we probably wouldn’t survive.
Tempel, by the way, averages about 6km across. Fortunately it doesn’t cross our orbit and if it did, it wouldn’t be at quite that high a speed.
This doesn’t mean we haven’t contemplated both comet and asteroid strikes. We know an asteroid strike either killed off the dinosaurs, or helped do so. We have those two movies from 1998, Deep Impact and Armageddon. Deep Impact was from a scientific basis a much better movie but it didn’t have Bruce Willis in it.
We also have fiction. Lucifer’s Hammer (1977) was a book by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. They’re both good authors, and they are even better when they work together. It details the discovery of a comet that’s going to come very close to Earth, and follows a number of different people before, during and after the impact. The survivors fight to maintain civilization in the face of torrential rains that lasted for months, hordes of other survivors reduced to barbarism, and the incipient ice age triggered by the impact. Highly recommended.
And then it turned out that the original concept of the novel was that alien invaders had deliberately caused the impact, this time with a moonlet brought from Saturn. For whatever reason their editors had rejected that concept, but Niven and Pournelle had the last laugh; in 1985 they published Footfall, quite possibly the best alien invasion novel ever. And yes, the aliens dropped one in the Indian ocean, killing billions. Also Highly recommended.
Where Our Water Came From
Not every cometary collision is a bad one though. I mentioned at the beginning of this post that Earth lost its water back at the beginning, so the question arises, how is it we have any now? We believe that it was mostly brought in by comets, shortly after the planet cooled. There were a lot more of them back then, and Earth did its part to reduce the numbers.
Nemesis?
In 1984, it was suggested that we might be a binary star. Some very faint red dwarf could be orbiting at about 95,000 AU, outside of the Oort cloud (depending on which estimate for its outer bound is correct), and perturbing comets’ orbits, eventually leading to huge numbers of comets reaching the inner solar system. This would make sense if the red dwarf were in an elliptical orbit, and doing the perturbing only when closest to the Sun. There seemed to be a 26 million year recurring pattern of mass extinctions (not as big as the dinosaur killer or the Great Dying at the end of the Permian, but mass extinctions nonetheless).
With an effect like that, the hypothetical star has been named Nemesis.
Surely we’d know already if we were a binary star? I mean, come on. We don’t see this except on movie screens.
Not necessarily! Most stars are red dwarfs, they’re incredibly faint. None of them are visible to the naked eye at night. None of them, not even the closest one we know of now, Proxima Centauri. So one of these would not be obvious. We’d only be able to tell if we happened to look at the right one and measured its distance and speed. There is a systematic survey being made of red dwarfs, starting with the ones that appear brightest and working their way down. Conceivably, we could get a “hit.” If it’s close enough we could even conceivably send a probe, but it’d be by far the biggest space project ever, and we wouldn’t live to see the pictures.
But as of now, Nemesis is considered very unlikely. Many astronomers think we may once have had a Nemesis but it could have been lost when another star came relatively close sometime in the past.
The End?
That’s comets in a nutshell. Many are denizens of the outermost marches of the Solar System.
As usual I could only scratch the surface of the topic.
This is, I believe, the last of the series on our solar system.
As of desired publication time, 12:02 AM on November 29th, there are 51 days, 11 hours and 58 minutes before our Once and Future President, Donald John Trump, is restored to his rightful office.
Not that I’m counting, mind you.
What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?
Speaker Johnson Pinging you on January 6 Tapes
Just a friendly reminder Speaker Johnson. You’re doing some good things–or at least trying in the case of the budget–but this is the most important thing out there still hanging. One initial block released with the promise of more…and?
We have American patriots being held without bail and without trial, and the tapes almost certainly contain exculpatory evidence. (And if they don’t, and we’re all just yelling in an echo chamber over here, we need to know that too. And there’s only one way to know.)
Either we have a weaponized, corrupt government or we have a lot of internet charlatans. Let’s expose whatever it is. (I’m betting it’s the corrupt weaponized government, but if I am wrong, I’d like to see proof.)
Justice Must Be Done.
The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.
Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.
Small Government?
Many times conservatives (real and fake) speak of “small government” being the goal.
This sounds good, and mostly is good, but it misses the essential point. The important thing here isn’t the size, but rather the purpose, of government. We could have a cheap, small tyranny. After all our government spends most of its revenue on payments to individuals and foreign aid, neither of which is part of the tyrannical apparatus trying to keep us locked down and censored. What parts of the government would be necessary for a tyranny? It’d be a lot smaller than what we have now. We could shrink the government and nevertheless find it more tyrannical than it is today.
No, what we want is a limited government, limited not in size, but rather in scope. Limited, that is, in what it’s allowed to do. Under current circumstances, such a government would also be much smaller, but that’s a side effect. If we were in a World War II sort of war, an existential fight against nasty dictatorships on the brink of world conquest, that would be very expensive and would require a gargantuan government, but that would be what the government should be doing. That would be a large, but still limited government, since it’d be working to protect our rights.
World War II would have been the wrong time to squawk about “small government,” but it wasn’t (and never is) a bad time to demand limited government. Today would be a better time to ask for a small government–at least the job it should be doing is small today–but it misses the essential point; we want government to not do certain things. Many of those things we don’t want it doing are expensive but many of them are quite eminently doable by a smaller government than the one we have today. Small, but still exceeding proper limits.
So be careful what you ask for. You might get it and find you asked for the wrong thing.
Political Science In Summation
It’s really just a matter of people who can’t be happy unless they control others…versus those who want to be left alone. The oldest conflict within mankind. Government is necessary, but government attracts the assholes (a highly technical term for the control freaks).
His Truth?
Again we saw an instance of “It might be true for Billy, but it’s not true for Bob” logic this week.
I hear this often, and it’s usually harmless. As when it’s describing differing circumstances, not different facts. “Housing is unaffordable” can be true for one person, but not for another who makes ten times as much.
But sometimes the speaker means it literally. Something like 2+2=4 is asserted to be true for Billy but not for Bob. (And when it’s literal, it’s usually Bob saying it.) And in that sense, it’s nonsense, dangerous nonsense. There is ONE reality, and it exists independent of our desires and our perceptions. It would go on existing if we weren’t here. We exist in it. It does not exist in our heads. It’s not a personal construct, and it isn’t a social construct. If there were no society, reality would continue to be what it is, it wouldn’t vanish…which it would have to do, if it were a social construct.
Now what can change from person to person is the perception of reality. We see that all the time. And people will, of course, act on those perceptions. They will vote for Trump (or try to) if their perception is close to mine, and vote against Trump (and certainly succeed at doing so) if their perception is distant from mine (and therefore, if I do say so, wrong). I have heard people say “perception is reality” and usually, that’s what they’re trying to say–your perception of reality is, as far as you know, an accurate representation of reality, or you’d change it.
But I really wish they’d say it differently. And sometimes, to get back to Billy and Bob, the person who says they have different truths is really saying they have different perceptions of reality–different worldviews. I can’t argue with the latter. But I sure wish they’d say it better. That way I’d know that someone who blabbers about two different truths is delusional and not worth my time, at least not until he passes kindergarten-level metaphysics on his umpteenth attempt.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
Gold took a ninety dollar thumping on Monday, seemed to be going nowhere the rest of the week, but has recovered a little bit on Friday. The same is pretty much true of the other precious metals, though one will note rhodium actually dropped a bit. The gold:silver ratio still sucks (if you’re a silver fan).
*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.
Flat Earth Cowards
Just remember that David Weiss, Eric Dubay, Mark Sargent, Nathan Oakley, Dean Odle, and Volker Meyer, all Flat Earth proponents on the internet, are intellectual cowards at best, and knowing fraudsters (politespeak for motherfucking liars) at worst, and I am in this case inclined to believe the worst.
After years of maintaining that the Sun does indeed set in Antarctica during the southern summer, but then claiming people aren’t allowed to go look, they’ve turned down the opportunity to go look. Worse, many of them condemn Jeranism, Whitsit Gets It, and Lisbeth Acosta for going.
Any reasonable person looking at this behavior should see the hallmarks of a fraudster. The fraudster wants you to believe what he says unconditionally. The fraudster wants you to 1) ignore the lack of evidence for his position and 2) the actual evidence against his position. This is a system for protecting lies.
Would someone condemn people for going and looking, if they sincerely thought their position was true?
These people are pushing bullshit and they know they are pushing bullshit. These people are lying turds.
By contrast, eight of the globers who spend time debunking flerfers are going, one is paying for himself, one is getting the free ride offered as part of TFE, the other six are crowd funded. Globers also crowdfunded Lisbeth to go when the anonymous donor who funded a drawing for the flerfers turned out to himself be a flerfer fraud. Globers crowd funding her, not flerfers. All of the globers (and many who are not going, such as Professor Dave Explains) have vowed to remove their anti-flat earth content and post a statement that the earth is flat, if the sun actually sets for those at the Final Experiment.
Who is acting confident in their position…and who is acting like they are afraid this whole thing will make it obvious they are simply worthless shitbag liars?
On The Fringes? The Trans-Neptunian Worlds
There are nine objects that are likely “dwarf planets” (i.e. objects too small to be “real” planets, but which are nevertheless rounded by their own gravity and orbit the Sun directly). It’s difficult to confirm the roundness of many of these as all we can see of them is a fuzzy blob, even with the Hubble Space Telescope.
Here they are:
Name Minor Planet Number
min, max distances, (mean) (in AUs)
Eccentricity (0=circular, 1=parabola)
Inclination to ecliptic (degrees)
Period (years)
Year Discovered
Precovery Date
Ceres 1
2.55- 2.98 (2.77)
0.0785
10.6
4.60
1801
–
Pluto 134340
29.658- 49.305 (39.482)
0.2488
17.16
247.94
1930
1909
Quaoar 50000
41.900- 45-488 (43.694)
0.04106
7.9895
288.83
2002
1954
Sedna 90377
76.19- 937 (506)
0.8496
11.9307
11,390
2003
1990
Orcus 90482
30.281- 48.067 (39.174)
0.22701
20.592
245.19
2004
1951
Haumea 136108
34.647- 51.585 (43.116)
0.19642
28.2137
283.12
2003
1955
Eris 136199
38.271- 97.457 (67.864)
0.43607
44.040
559.07
2005
1954
MakeMake 136472
38.104- 52.786 (45.430)
0.16126
28.9835
306.21
2005
1955
Gonggong 225088
33.781- 101.190 (67.485)
0.49943
30.6273
554.37
2007
1985
Orbital Parameters of the nine likely dwarf planets
A word of explanation: The “precovery” date is the oldest image found of the object, when they go back looking to see if anyone ever accidentally photographed it. This seems like a bit of trivia, but those images can be extremely useful for determining the orbit of the object (not just the semi major axis, inclination and eccentricity but also the longitude of the ascending node, argument of perihelion and time of perihelion–those three orient the orbit (along with the inclination) and put the object at a certain spot in the orbit). This is why astronomers never throw away an astrophotograph; it may be beneficial decades later.
It should be noted that the full list of possible dwarf planets is 28 objects long, based on estimated diameters, though some have no names (just minor planet numbers). For the sheer sake of self-preservation, one should probably hope that 229762 Gǃkúnǁʼhòmdímà does not make the list, as !Kung words are notoriously hard to pronounce. (No, I am not making that up.)
By the opposite token, only Ceres and Pluto are absolutely solidly confirmed to be dwarf planets; it pretty much takes a spacecraft mission to confirm it.
Ceres is an outlier, obviously, because it’s the only object in the table that isn’t a trans-Neptunian object. I’ve covered asteroids already, so from this point forward I am going to ignore the world Ceres. (Never was much into baseball anyway.) Aside from Ceres the other oddball is Sedna, with a huge eccentricity and a huge orbit; it makes all of the others pale in comparison.
What would a well behaved full-blown classical planet look like in that table? It would have a low eccentricity and a low inclination. Quaoar actually behaves more like a planet than any of the others in the table (even including Ceres).
Here is another diagram, showing relative sizes, shapes, colors and brightnesses of these and some other objects. The color is of course an average color. In some cases there’s uncertainty as to size (as with Sedna), in which case a half-arc is shown at the maximum diameter. This one might reward a right-click-and-open-in-new-tab.
So now let’s take a look at these in more detail; I’m going to save Sedna and Pluto for last (and not bother at all with Ceres).
Quaoar
Quaoar (pronounced kwah-wahr, though more strictly speaking it should be “kwa’uwar” with the ‘ representing a glottal stop as you hear in the Hawaiian pronunciation of Hawai’i) is named after a deity of the Tongva people, and for me at least that answers nothing until I go look up “Tongva people.” It turns out they were a tribe in what is now the Los Angeles basin. (They also call themselves the Kizh.) Their language is distantly related to Aztec.
Quaoar was discovered 4 June 2002 by Chadwick A. Trujillo and Michael E. Brown at the Palomar Observatory (they were not using the big 200 incher but one of the smaller (but still big) instruments, the Samuel Oschin telescope. They were running a survey looking for Kuiper belt objects (little did they know…). Once it was determined that Quaoar was not in a resonance with Neptune (making it a qubewano-class TNO), the naming convention dictated it be named after a creation deity; Brown and Trujillo consulted with some present-day Tongvas to be sure it was an appropriate name.
Quaoar is an elongated ellipsoidal shape averaging 1090 km across, making it less than half the size of Pluto (2,376.6 km). (We know it’s not perfectly spherical because its brightness varies over a span of 17.68 hours–which we infer is its day. This could just be brightness differences, like with Iapetus, but we’ve also watched Quaoar cross in front of stars and timing the length of the blackouts leads to different estimates of the diameter.) Quaoar is also a very dark object reflecting only 12% of the light it gets from the Sun (which ain’t much to begin with!) It’s somewhat reddish, like 20000 Varuna and 28978 Ixion (both objects that are on the “long list” of possible dwarf planets).
So if it’s not really round, what’s the deal with it being considered a dwarf planet? Normally any rocky body over 900km or so, or any icy body between 200-400 km across should go round. If it’s slowly rotating it should be a bit oblate (wider at the equator than through the poles). A faster rotation should resemble Haumea’s case (see below). So how can Quaoar not be round? It’s absolutely big enough. It’s possible that Quaoar used to rotate more quickly, froze into shape and then Weymot slowed its rotation down due to tidal effects. (Saturn’s moon Iapetus has a similar situation going on but is not as extreme.)
Here are the discovery images put together as a GIF. It’s easy to spot when there’s an arrow, isn’t it?
And now (drumroll) our best image, from the Hubble space telescope:
And yes, Quaoar has a moon, Weywot, discovered by Brown in February 2007; Weywot is the son of Quaoar in Tongva mythology. Weywot is about 200 km across (though some places in Wikipoo show it as smaller), which makes it too small to be rounded (the smallest rounded object known is Mimas (Saturn’s “Death Star” moon), at 396.4 km; there is at least one non-rounded objects that are larger: Neptune’s moon Proteus). Quaoar also has a ring.
Here are a couple more diagrams, the first being a picture of Quaoar’s orbit (in cyan and blue) compared to Neptune (white) and Pluto (red). The two spheres are not only about the right sizes, comparatively speaking (but not compared to the size of the orbits!), but they are correctly colored (an average color) and even the brightness (albedo) is correct.
And another, an “overhead” view with Quaoar in yellow, Pluto in magenta/pink, Neptune in blue, and a few other TNOs in a drab green.
On the whole, we know next to nothing about this one…and that’s pretty much going to be true of most of the others. They’re just too doggone far away.
Orcus
Orcus is estimated to be anywhere from 870-960 km across, thus about the size of Ceres. It’s fairly bright, neutral in color and largely made of water ice; apparently the ice is mostly crystalline so maybe sometime in the past there was cryovolcanism (i.e., water volcanoes).
Orcus was discovered by Michael Brown, Chad Trujillo and David Rabinowitz on 17 February 2004 (note that two of these astronomers also discovered Quaoar). In this case, Orcus got named after one of the Roman gods of the underworld, because it’s a plutino.
What is a plutino? Plutinos are objects that, like Pluto, are in a 2:3 orbital resonance with Neptune, orbiting twice in the time it takes Neptune to orbit three times. (Note in the chart above it has nearly the same year, and mean orbital distance, as Pluto.) But Orcus tends to be furthest away from the Sun when Pluto is closest, and vice versa.
Here we see a Hubble Space telescope image of Orcus, and its moon Vanth. Vanth is estimated to be 475 km across by some, which is easily large enough to end up in that “Medium Small” 250-500km size bucket with Mimas, Hyperion, Proteus and Nereid, but other estimates put it below that 400 km line yet still in that bucket. Considering it’s likely frozen solid, and how rigid ice is at those temperatures, it’s not expected to be a round moon. (Note that I made a point to talk about any moon in that size bucket, and above, as I went through the 8 big planets.)
Vanth was named after an Etruscan deity, a “psychopomp” who guides the deceased to the underworld.
It is, however, big enough that the center of gravity of the Orcus-Vanth system is actually outside of Orcus, making it a double object. Vanth orbits Orcus in 9.54 days, and appears to rotate in the same amount of time. The rotation of Orcus, on the other hand, has been harder to nail down, so we don’t know if both bodies are tidally locked or just Vanth.
All in all, Orcus is often thought of as an “anti Pluto” since it’s phased the opposite of Pluto and has a (proportionately) large moon like Pluto. It’s even more striking when you see the visual of the orbit (Neptune’s orbit in white, Pluto’s orbit in red, Orcus in cyan and blue–note the color changes when the object crosses the ecliptic, and note the spheres are to scale with each other, the correct colors and albedos, again):
Haumea
Haumea is named after the Hawai’ian goddess of childbirth. It was discovered by Mike Brown at Caltech, but announced by a team headed by Jose Luis Ortiz Moreno at the Sierra Nevada Observatory…not our Sierra Nevadas, but rather the ones in Spain. There’s controversy over who should get the credit for this one. It’s the third largest TNO after Pluto and Eris. Here’s a picture, again from the Hubble Space Telescope:
This one’s a bit odd. Based on watching it fluctuate in brightness, it’s a very elongated triaxial ellipsoid, meaning it has a long axis, a medium axis at right angles to that, and a short axis at right angles to the other two. Here’s an artist’s rendering of Haumea:
But this is actually the shape one would expect of a rapidly rotating object under hydrostatic equilibrium; Haumea rotates in about four hours.
So how long are the axes? Haumea is roughly 2100 by 1680 x 1074 kilometers. Or perhaps 2322 x 1704 x 1026. Depending on whose numbers you believe. Either way, it’s a sizeable object.
Haumea has moons, as you likely noticed…not just one but two of them known so far. Hi’iaka (upper right in the picture) is a medium-small moon about 310 km across, in that same “bucket” as Mimas, but probably not rounded. Namaka (lower left) is roughly 170 km across. They are named after two daughters of Haumea, the patron goddesses of the Big Island of Hawai’i, and the sea, respectively.
(That brings us, by the way, to the end of the list of medium-small moons: Mimas, Hyperion, Miranda, Proteus, Nereid, Vanth, and Hi’iaka… or does it? It turns out ttwo additional objects on the long list of possible dwarf planets, Salacia and Varda, also have moons in this size bucket. And there’s an almost perfectly-matched double body, Lempo (at 272 km) and Hiisi, with the best estimate for Hiisi being 251km (just squeaking by). If there’s one thing about TNOs, it’s that they tend to have comparatively large moons!)
Haumea is as bright as snow, with an albedo of 0.73…meaning that 73 percent of the light that hits it is reflected back. It seems to have crystalline ice on it, which is puzzling, because crystalline ice should only form above 100 K, and Haumea is at 50K, and only amorphous ice should form at that temperature. Furthermore once it forms, cosmic rays plus what’s left of the solar wind out there should degrade it to amorphous ice in about 10 million years. On top of that, old surfaces out there end up covered in tholins (“star tar”), making them appear red. So it seems that Haumea’s surface is new, but we don’t know how that could have happened. (I could spitball it, but that would be worth less than you paid for this article.)
Haumea appears to have a ring, discovered as it passed in front of a star.
Haumea turns out to be the largest member of a family of objects that have similar orbits and it appears they may all be remnants of a larger body that broke apart due to a collision. But it appears to have happened at least a billion years ago based on orbital dynamics considerations, so that won’t explain the white, crystalline ice surface of Haumea.
The New Horizons probe that went to Pluto actually took some pictures of Haumea on three different occasions…from quite a distance however. The 2007 shots were from 49 AUs away, others were in 2017 at 59 AU and in 2023 at 63 AU. Still, being able to compare the “side view” from what we see on Earth has been helpful.
Haumea’s orbit turns out to resemble Makemake’s (see below). As a bonus Quaoar is also shown:
Eris
We talked about Eris a lot last time. With a diameter of 2326 km it’s a smidge smaller than Pluto, but it’s denser (more rocks, less ice) but is considerably more massive than Pluto, 27% more in fact. As pointed out last time, if Pluto is a planet, Eris is too.
Here are Eris and Dysnomia photographed in 2006, and we’re lucky to have this, because at the moment Eris is 96.3 AUs from the Sun.
Here’s the same sort of orbital diagram I’ve showed for the others…but note in this one Neptune’s orbit is quite small.
MakeMake
Makemake (MAH-ke-MAH-ke) is comparable in size to Saturn’s moon Iapetus, or 60% the diameter of Pluto. From what little of it we see, it may actually have geothermal activity, even though it’s one of the coldest bodies in the solar system at 40K. (When you see the words “possibly nitrogen ices” in a wikipoo article, you know the place is colder than Hitlary Klinton’s lap.) It’s named after a creator god in the Rapa Nui mythology of Easter Island. Again, Michael Brown is on the list of discoverers. And again we have a fuzzy image from Hubble Space Telescope.
And yet again, we have a moon, one that hasn’t been named yet.
Makemake is bright enough–brighter than any TNO other than Pluto–that perhaps it should have been discovered much sooner (maybe even by Clyde Tombaugh). There are even claims that Tombaugh in fact should have seen it, but it was buried right in the Milky Way and with all those stars around it, it would have been hard to spot. However, it hasn’t been spotted in any of his photographs, so it’s not that he photographed it and didn’t notice. It turns out the earliest precovery date is 1955 and Tombaugh stopped looking for additional objects in 1943.
Here’s another one of those graphics of the orbits, as usual the ecliptic in white, Pluto in red. Haumea is in green and MakeMake is on the blue line. The closest and farthest approaches to the sun (the perihelia and aphelia are given. The spheres are correctly sized, the correct colors and the correct albedos.
Gonggong
Discovered by Megan Schwamb, Michael Brown and David Rabinowitz on 17 July 2007, again as part of that Palomar Distant Solar System Survey. Megan Schwamb actually was the first to spot it with the blinking technique that Tombaugh used to discover Pluto. Gonggong is a water god in Chinese mythology, usually depicted as having a copper and iron human head on a serpent’s body. Gonggong is often accompanied by Xiangliu, his minister, a nine-headed poisonous snake. Both are associated with flooding catastrophes.
But enough about the Deep State.
Gonggong is 1230 km across (give or take 50 km), about half the width of Pluto, and a fairly dark body. Here is another Hubble Space telescope image:
And yes, there’s a moon, named Xiangliu, of course.
Gonggong is very red, so almost certainly covered in tholins. There is some water ice, so maybe there was some cryovulcanism in the distant past.
It’s a lot like Eris in having a large orbit, as seen in this polar view (view from above) in which both it and Eris are shown:
And the same thing, seen from the side:
Gonggong and Eris seem to have similarly-extreme orbits (but not nearly the same orbit). Right now Gonggong is 88 AUs distant. Based on color and brightness it’s likely made of the same stuff as Quaoar.
Sedna
And now to go back to Sedna. Sedna is just…different from the rest. It’s red, it’s far, far away, and it’s going to get a lot farther away, eventually. It’s also the only one of these nine with no known moon. It’s very roughly 1000 km across. And because it has no moon whose orbit we can measure and time, we have only the vaguest notion of its mass. And now for a smashingly spectacular picture from Hubble Space Telescope:
Although I was flippant when I said that, if you think about it, it’s a huge acheivement to be able to take even this picture. Sedna is presently 83.55 AUs or 12.5 billion kilometers away. Right now Eris and Gonggong are further away, but that won’t remain true forever, since Sedna’s aphelion is 937 AU, not only busting into triple digits for the first time, but nearly reaching four digits.
Sedna is not the furthest though. There is a smaller object with and even more extreme orbit, 541132 Leleakohonua, perihelion 65.16 AU and aphelion…are you sitting down? of 2106 AU, with an orbital period of 35,760 years. However, this object is maybe 110 km across and in no way a dwarf planet. Right now it’s about 78 AUs out, getting closer to perihelion in 2078. (As a bonus the eccentricity actually busts the 0.900 mark at 0.93997.)
Neither of these objects would ever have been found if they didn’t happen to be at the near part of their orbits. Given that objects like this spend a lot less time near the sun than they do further away, there are probably a lot of them out there, simply too far away for us to detect.
Objects like this are so extreme, there’s now a new class of objects, “Sednoids” including these two plus one other (a bit less extreme than Sedna). Some have suggested that they’re really members of the inner Oort Cloud. (I haven’t talked about the Oort cloud…yet.)
There is also speculation that these crazy orbits are caused by encounters with a full planet out there somewhere, perhaps 400AU out. The fact that a lot of aphelions seem to be in very roughly the same place lends credence to this. Here are the three “Sednoid” objects (2015 TG387 is Leleakohonua’s provisional number):
Pluto (Finally)
An Ode to New Horizons
Until the Hubble space telescope, a typical photo of Pluto showed a bunch of white dots on a black background, and an arrow pointing to one of them. Pluto was only distinguishable from stars by its motion, which took days to become obvious.
Then Hubble Space Telescope took a look in 2003, and what it gave us, was used to make this animation, as Pluto did a full rotation in 6.4 days…retrograde, apparently:
Then suddenly in 2015…you could buy a fricking globe of Pluto. I saw one for sale in the observatory store at Griffith Park playing tourist one evening while on a business trip and there was no way it wasn’t coming home with me. That simple metal sphere encapsulated everything about our planetary space program…from a dot on a page to a real world, within my lifetime.
So what happened?
THIS happened:
The New Horizons probe went to Pluto.
We first had to get permission. According to Wikipedia:
In 1992 JPL scientist Robert Staehle called Clyde Tombaugh, requesting permission to visit his planet. “I told him he was welcome to it,” Tombaugh later remembered, “though he’s got to go one long, cold trip.”
Tombaugh passed away in 1997. A small portion of his ashes were on the New Horizons spacecraft. He got to go along for the ride. On the container is inscribed, “Interred herein are remains of American Clyde W. Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto and the Solar System’s ‘third zone’ Adelle and Muron’s boy, Patricia’s husband, Annette and Alden’s father, astronomer, teacher, punster and friend: Clyde W. Tombaugh (1906-1997)”.
Could he have possibly imagined back in 1930 that in a very real sense, he’d get to go there?
By the time New Horizons launched in 2006, mere months before Pluto got “demoted” to dwarf planet, we had known (since 1978) that Pluto had a large moon, Charon, one large enough to qualify Pluto as a double planet. And we had found two others, Nix and Hydra, though they are much smaller. At the time, Pluto + Charon was the only known case of a moon that was so large in comparison to its primary that the barycenter (center of gravity) of the system was outside of the primary. As such both the planet and moon orbit a point out in space. Here is a series of pictures taken by New Horizons quite some time before closest approach.
New Horizons did something that back in the 1970s was deemed nearly impossible, a direct trip to Pluto. Back then Jupiter was just barely reachable by a probe of useful size; we could (and did: Pioneer 11, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2) get to Saturn, Uranus and Neptune by first going to Jupiter and getting a gravitational assist (a/k/a slingshot) from it.
But this time we went directly to Pluto. Actually, we did use a gravitational assist from Jupiter, but we didn’t have to. We’d have got there without it, albeit after three more years.
This involved launching the probe directly into a solar escape trajectory. How fast is that? At Earth’s distance from the Sun, it’s a bit over 42 kilometers per second. We had to break free of Earth’s gravity and then still be doing 42 km/sec with respect to the Sun, at which point, it doesn’t matter which direction you’re going, you’re never coming back to the Solar System. Of course in this case the direction did matter, we wanted to go to Pluto in particular. And also, we got 30 km/second of that 42 km/second from Earth’s speed around the sun, by launching in exactly the direction Earth was moving.
And to do this we made the probe as small as possible (the size of a desk) and put it on the biggest effing rocket we had, including special upper stages to push the thing harder once in space. It was the fastest thing we ever launched.
And now for the NASA animations. No audio in the first one (and note Pluto doesn’t look right–the animation was produced before the mission):
The second one is more “loaded” technically showing what the instruments are doing every moment, as well as spacecraft orientation. (It also has a music track.)
As you can see, Pluto’s moons were in orbits that made it look like a big target, but the object is to not hit the bullseye. New Horizons had to spend the entire time on July 14, 2015 looking at Pluto and its moons, without stopping to transmit to Earth (it would have to turn around to do that, pointing the big dish antenna basically towards the Sun and losing absolutely irreplaceable time). Only after collecting 6GB of data and with Pluto, Charon, and the other four moons in the rear view mirror, could the spacecraft contact Earth…and then spend the next eighteen months transmitting all of that data.
You can imagine the people at mission control bit their nails clean off, waiting. But then New Horizons phoned home. It had come through just fine and it had goodies to send us.
So what did we get?
1. This:
2. And this:
3. And this:
4. And this:
5. And this:
6. And this:
7. And this (ice volcanos highlighted in blue:
8. And finally (but not really, I could keep going on) this:
And that’s Pluto, yet more pictures and data were taken of its largest moon Charon:
And the other four moons; it’s probably easiest to just throw a composite image at you:
So needless to say we know a lot more about Pluto than we do about all of the other TNOs I’ve talked about, put together.
NASA does engage in CGI sometimes (in spite of the fact that the Flerfers claim it does–they’re generally completely wrong but not in this case) and they produced this video of what a flyby would look like, based on what New Horizons returned:
Pluto Itself
So…here we go.
Pluto was named after the Roman god of the Underworld, the corresponding Greek god was Hades. It’s 2,376.6 km across, give or take 1.6 km. And 0.2 percent as massive as the Earth or 17.7 percent as massive as the Moon. It orbits the Sun in 248 years, rotates once on its axis in 6.38680 days…but with an axial tilt of 122.53 degrees, it’s considered a retrograde rotation. (These numbers are awfully precise, on account of New Horizons.) At this particular time Pluto’s northern hemisphere is pointed towards the Sun, and New Horizons thus was unable to get the very southernmost part of Pluto, it was in darkness during the entire time of the encounter.
Pluto’s rotation is the same as Charon’s orbital period, which means that not only does Charon always show the same face to Pluto (as is true with every other major moon in the Solar System), but Pluto always shows the same face to Charon. Scientists will invent coordinate systems at the drop of a hat, and the line directly facing Charon is the 0 degree longitude line on any map of Pluto.
Geology and Geography
Oh, that reminds me:
Composite “Mercator” image of Pluto (it’s not really a Mercator projection when the latitude lines are equally spaced). Note that a lot of regions are named after spacecraft (Venera, Voyager, Pioneer, Viking) or astronomers (Lowell gets a Regio too). But also notice that a lot of the names come from fantasy and science fiction, like Balrogs and of all things, Cthulhu–though that one was often called “the whale” too. (Bad news on that last, it got renamed Belton Regio.)
Pluto has mountains and plains, and the first picture plainly shows the “Heart of Pluto” which simply had to be named Tombaugh Regio after Clyde Tombaugh. Tombaugh Regio is a plain, and by the way, is on the side of Pluto that faces away from Charon. The plains are mostly nitrogen ice (brrrr), with some methane and carbon monoxide, all in solid form of course.
The western and more distinct lobe of the “Heart” is Sputnik Planitia, a 1000 km wide basin of frozen ice, but as the second image shows it’s divided into polygonal cells, almost certainly convection cells that carry floating blocks of water ice crust and sublimation pits at the margins. There are signs of glacial flows both into and out of the basin. Furthermore, not one single crater was spotted, which indicates that Sputnik Planitia’s surface is less than ten million years old; in fact the latest work claims 140,000-270,000 years. There are also transverse dunes in Sputnik Planitia, which are formed by wind-blown particles, in this case of frozen methane.
What are the mountains made of? Water ice. When you order something “on the rocks” here, you mean it literally. The color ranges from charcoal black to dark orange and white; Pluto has as much contrast as Iapetus.
The fifth “This” above shows lots of 500 m high mountains from Tartarus Dorsa, the spacing reminds people of scales or tree bark. This doesn’t appear anywhere else we know of, except maybe on the unseen side of Triton…or perhaps in the Atacama desert. These are likely penitentes, icy spires that form in deserts, so named because they resemble large numbers of people at prayer.
Cutting through Tartarus Dorsa and Pluto’s heavily cratered northern terrain (and therefore younger than either) are a set of six canyons radiating from a single point; the longest is Sleipnir Fossa which is at least 580 km long.
And cryovolcanos. We’ve identified two possible cryovolcanos, Wright Mons and Piccard Mons. Piccard Mons is not named after Star Trek’s Jean Luc Picard but rather the French ballooning pioneer (two C’s, see?).
Pluto, in short shows an absolutely stunning variety of geology. Glaciological, surface-atmosphere (the dunes), impact (craters), tectonic, likely cryovolcanic, and mass-wasting (rocks falling down hill), it’s all there. This world turns out to be much more interesting than I expected back then.
Internal Structure
We know Pluto’s size. We know its mass. That means we know its average density; divide the mass by the volume. And we get 1.853 g/cm3. That means it’s a mix of rocks (things we think of as rocks) and ice, and it’s roughly 70/30 rock/ice. So we believe Pluto has a silicate (rock) core, surmounted by a mostly-water ice mantle and crust. It may even have a subsurface ocean like Europa and Enceladus. Though some think it may now be frozen, it’s just barely possible it was inhabited at one point. (This is one place where Wikipedia is a bit frustrating. The text makes it sound like no one believes there’s still liquid water down there, but the diagram indicates otherwise.)
Atmosphere
Pluto has an atmosphere as is quite evident in pictures 3 and 8 above. In fact getting New Horizons out there quickly rather than waiting a few more decades was partially motivated by this; Pluto is fairly close to the Sun right now, and that, we thought, would make the atmosphere more active. As Pluto got further from the Sun, its atmosphere might freeze out.
The atmosphere is made up of nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide, all sublimated from the surface ices, and in equilibrium with them (if any of them “snow” out of the atmosphere, then ices elsewhere on Pluto will sublimate to restore them). The pressure is anywhere from 1 millionth to 1/100,000th that of Earth.
Since New Horizons was launched, however, we’ve determined the atmosphere might actually thicken as it gets colder.
In any case, New Horizons‘s parting shot at Pluto was a backlit shot, used to image the atmosphere. Scientists have learned to take a “backlit shot” opportunity when it presents itself.
Moons
Pluto has five moons. And all of them are regular, orbiting in the plane of Pluto’s equator. Here’s a scale diagram…full scale, distances and diameters shown accurately (you rarely see those in astronomy!).
First up is Charon. Orbiting at 19,595.764 km from Pluto (give or take 7 or 8 meters!) and at 1212 km across, it’s a medium size moon according to the terminology I’ve been using, so now we have nine: Rhea, Iapetus, Dione and Tethys at Saturn, Ariel, Umbriel, Oberon and Titania at Uranus, and now Charon.
Pluto is 2376.6 km across. Compared to it Charon is huge. No, wait, yuge. It’s bigger than Ceres.
Charon was discovered in 1978, and named after the ferryman of the underworld in Greek mythology. (You had to pay him a coin to get ferried across. No word on what people who died in the Trojan war (centuries before coinage) had to do.) But that brings up a question. How do you pronounce “Charon”? The Greeks spell it Χάρων, and that X is like the ch in Bach. But no one in English-speaking countries says that, it’s either “Sharon” or “Karon.” The discoverer, James W. Christy (born 1938), maintains that he named it after both Χάρων and his wife Charlene, who was nichnamed “Char” (pronounced Shar), so he goes with “Sharon.” (I’m just insane enough I’d probably try to pronounce it with the ch in Bach if I ever had the chance to talk to someone about it. Y’all are both doing it wrong!)
Christy saw a bulge on the side of blobs taken of Pluto from the Naval observatory at Flagstaff. It would disappear and reappear regularly, indicating something in orbit about Pluto. In the image below (which is a photographic negative) there’s a bulge at the top on the left hand side, and no bulge on the right hand side. And so here’s an example of what Pluto looked like before HST looked at it.
Needless to say we have better pictures now.
A few years after Charon’s discovery, its orbit was edge on to us here on Earth and we could study the light curve and prove an object was transiting in front of Pluto, then behind it, even if we couldn’t resolve it as a separate fuzzy blob.
Charon is yuge compared to Pluto, and it’s the first case of a moon large enough that the center of gravity of the system is outside of the primary. Back before Pluto got demoted from planet status, many proposed that Pluto and Charon be considered a binary or double planet. And if Alan Stern succeeds in convincing people he was right, it might become one again.
In the following animation, you can see Pluto actually swinging around an imaginary point just outside of itself (and as seen above New Horizons confirmed this). There’s a black dot marking the barycenter, you’ll see it in front of Pluto when the moon is at the bottom of the image (the dot is apparently visible through Pluto in the animation). Note that Charon is closest to the viewer when it is at the top of the image. I was momentarily confused by this.
Which means that when I gave you Charon’s distance from Pluto, that was actually not the appropriate number. Its average distance from the barycenter, and thus the true size of its orbit (semimajor axis) is 17,181.0 km. It’s actually moving at a comparatively sedate 210 meters per second, and the orbit is almost perfectly circular. (The difference between the minimum and maximum distance from Pluto (not the barycenter) is a mere 6.31 kilometers.)
Charon’s density is known, 1.7 g/cm3, making it 55% rock to 45% ice (give or take 5 percent). We’re pretty sure the moon is differentiated (i.e., it has a distinct core) and may have once had a subsurface ocean. Here we have two distinct models of what Charon might look like on the inside:
…and…
And…we have a map.
Informal names given to the various canyons included Nostromo, Serenity, Argo, and so on, named after fictional ships including recent ones like from Alien and Firefly. The northern dark area was originally named Mordor. It appears to be formed from gases that escaped Pluto’s atmosphere and blew over to Charon, carried by the solar wind. The temperature here can get as low as 15K during winter, and some tholins will form. When it gets warmer, a balmy 60K, anything that’s still an ice will boil away, leaving the pole dark.
The Other Moons
The other moons, Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra, all named after creatures and features of the Underworld in Greek mythology, all have nice tidy circular orbits in Pluto’s equatorial plane. So they’re regular moons. All are less than 51 km across. The innermost, Styx, orbits 48,694 km out…considerably further from Charon. But this makes sense. It would have to be far away from the binary object Pluto/Charon or Charon would perturb Styx’s orbit as it swept by Styx on closest approach.
One more “Moon” is Pluto itself. Since it orbits the barycenter at a distance of 2035 kilometers, which puts the barycenter outside of Pluto’s 1188 km radius, Pluto, not Charon, is actually the closest orbiting body of the whole system.
Arrokoth
New Horizons was able to visit one more object beyond Pluto (blue), shown in green.
It’s 486958 Arrokoth (formerly nicknamed Ultima Thule). We didn’t know about it when New Horizons launched, but the pace of discovery of TNOs was so great we figured something would be out there we could visit with some expenditure of propellant, and Arrokoth (discovered in 2014, a bit over a year before the Pluto encounter) was chosen.
As a result, the second best known Kuiper Belt object is none of the ones I’ve mentioned so far, it’s this otherwise insignificant bit of ice and rock.
It appears to be made out of two smaller bodies, planetesimals that never became part of a planet, touching each other. The two small bodies are roughly 21 and 15 km across, for a total of 36 km along the long axis. Arrokoth orbits the Sun in 298 years. So we have our first high resolution picture of a small TNO.
We got enough data to create a geologic map:
It largely consists of a mix, a solid mix of amorphous water ice and rocky material. (It is not, unlike some objects of similar size, simply a clustering of gravel that is barely stuck together.)
58 days, 11 hours, 59 minutes until our Once and Future President, the Rightful President of the United States, is restored to his proper office.
Not that I’m counting, mind you.
[Assumes 0001 publication time. Wordpiss will be wordpiss and it’s unlikely to happen at that time.]
What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?
Speaker Johnson: A Reminder.
And MTG is there to help make it stick.
January 6 tapes. A good start…but then nothing.
Were you just hoping we’d be distracted by the first set and not notice?
Are you THAT kind of “Republican”?
Are you Kevin McCarthy lite?
What are you waiting for?
I have a personal interest in this issue.
And if you aren’t…what the hell is wrong with you?
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
The attention is on gold. It has recovered over $150 of the losses it took right after the election, just since last Friday. Alas, silver has not kept up, and the gold:silver ratio has gone up almost two points. Platinum still struggles to climb out of the gutter, while palladium seems more dynamic. Rhodium did move around a bit, but ended up where it was last Friday.
*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.
Reminder: Most Flat Earther Influencers are Liars
Most Flat Earther influencers like Flat Earth Dave and Eric Dubay have said for years that they want to go to Antarctica during southern summer and watch the Sun set…which would prove the globe model isn’t right. The globe model not only predicts the Sun will not set in Antarctica at and around the solstice, it predicts the Sun’s path through the sky will circle the observer over the course of a 24 hour day, going from north to west to south to east of the observer. (At the south pole itself, some of those directions are meaningless since every direction is north; but just move a millimeter from the pole and they mean something.)
They’ve been given the chance to go to Antarctica for free and now all of the sudden refuse to do it; they are even ostracizing the few among their number who have agreed to take the trip, accusing them of having sold out and being shills in advance of them coming back and reporting what they have seen,
That should be enough to tell any reasonable observer that they already know what the travelers to Antarctica will see…and it won’t be good for Flat Earth. Which is why I am not calling them ignorant or deluded; I am calling them liars. They know the Earth is not flat, yet they make a shitload of money claiming it is.
Lying. Sacks. Of. Shit.
However, I don’t call all of them liars. I give some praise to those few who are going; they apparently do actually believe it (which is not good on them)–negating the “liar” aspect–but more importantly they have the intellectual courage to test their beliefs, even in the face of ostracism from the knowing con-men on their side.
Beyond Neptune
Of course everyone knows what’s after Neptune.
Pluto.
But that’s not all of the story by any means.
The Discovery of Pluto
I told the story last time of the discovery of Neptune. But as astronomers observed and tracked Neptune in the last half of the 19th century, it appeared that Neptune didn’t account for all of Uranus’s unexpected motions.
The first thought, of course, is that there’s yet another planet out there. Percival Lowell decided to try to do something about it beyond thinking.
Percival Lowell had founded the Lowell observatory near Flagstaff, AZ in 1894, largely to observe Mars, but in 1906 he started searching for Planet Nine. He kept on looking with the help of William H. Pickering, using calculations by Elizabeth Williams. Nothing was found and Lowell passed away in 1916. (As it turns out his photographic plates did have “hits” on Pluto for March 19 and April 7th, 1915, but they were faint and didn’t get noticed. Planet Nine was expected to be big. There are fourteen other known instances of Pluto showing up, unrecognized, on observatories’ photographic plates from 1909 on; these are called “precovery” photographs.)
Percival Lowell’s widow, Constance, got into a ten year legal battle with the observatory, so the search stopped. But once the legal cloud had cleared, the director, Vesto Melvin Slipher (the first to see redshifts in galaxies) gave 23 year old Clyde Tombaugh the job of resuming the search. Tombaugh’s method consisted of taking photographs of the same area of the night sky a few days apart and putting the photographs (which were on glass plates) in a blink comparator, which would project one plate, then the other, and repeat. Any object that had moved in the meantime would seem to jump back and forth.
On February 18, 1930, Tombaugh spotted something on plates from the 23rd and 29th of January.
As you can see, the photographs were often not exposed to the same brightness, so anyone using a blink comparator would have to deal with the image getting brighter and dimmer, brighter and dimmer…while looking for the one object that was completely not there (not just dimmer) in one photograph or the other. (And it seems as though many things in the left photograph are not visible in the right hand photobraph. So perhaps Tombaugh simply looked for something that showed in the faint photo on the right, but not the brighter one on the left.)
A lower quality photo from the 21st helped confirm that Tombaugh wasn’t just seeing spots in front of his eyes. The observatory took more photos over the next few weeks to really nail the case down. Finally, on March 13, they telegraphed Harvard Observatory with the news.
The new planet orbits the Sun in 247.94 years, in an inclined and eccentric orbit. That period puts it into a 2:3 resonance with Neptune; it orbits twice in the amount of time it takes Neptune to orbit three times.
What to name it? They got thousands of suggestions, including Minerva, Pluto, and Cronus. Minerva had been used for an asteroid already, Cronus was being pushed by someone who was both unpopular and egocentric…so Pluto it was. (Cronus is also the Greek name for the titan who fathered Zeus and other Olympian gods…in other words it’s the Greek counterpart of the Roman Saturn.) Pluto/Hades was the god of the underworld. As a bonus, the first two letters are Percival Lowell’s initials. The name was approved by both the American Astronomical Society and the Royal Astonomical Society and the name became fixed on May 1. No jacking around with the name as had happened with Uranus for decades.
But right off the bat something didn’t add up.
One estimate from 1915 was that Planet Nine would have to be seven times as massive as the Earth. But a very early estimate after Pluto had been found, in 1931, had its mass as low as Earth’s (so, too low by a factor of 7). As more and more estimates were made over the years, Pluto’s estimated mass kept dropping; in 1948 Kuiper estimated it at 0.1 Earth masses, in 1976 it was lowered again to 0.01 Earth masses. But these were guesses based on Pluto’s size, which was estimated from how bright it was. It was never more than a dot of light on a photographic plate or film.
In 1978, we discovered Pluto had a moon, Charon…and with a moon we could determine the mass quite solidly, so the estimate dropped to 0.0015 Earth masses. And the latest number from 2006 is 0.00218 Earth masses. (I actually remember this happening. And now Pluto has five known moons.)
Charon, by the way, is the last of the medium-sized moons. Saturn has four, Uranus has four…and Pluto has one.
And we finally nailed down Pluto’s size, 2377 km in diameter. Our own moon is 3475 km across, and there are other moons larger than it. Mercury is also far larger than Pluto.
This is just way too tiny to be the planet we were looking for.
Furthermore, Voyager 2 in 1989 caused the estimates for Neptune’s mass to be dropped 0.5% and the “remaining discrepancy” in Uranus’s orbit now disappeared; Neptune accounted for it all.
So Pluto’s discovery was ultimately a stroke of luck. We were groping around in a dark room with a blindfold on, looking for a cat that wasn’t there…but we had found the mouse that was.
But now, just about everything about Pluto (and not just its size) made many wonder if it really should be considered a planet. Pluto is in a very un-planetery orbit. The other eight planets had reasonably circular orbits (Mercury being a bit of an outlier) all in nearly the same plane: the ecliptic (which is defined by the plane of Earth’s orbit). Pluto’s orbit is inclined 17 degrees to the ecliptic; no other planet came anywhere close to that. Furthermore, its orbit was very eccentric, not circular (e=.2488). In fact, with a semi-major axis of 39.482, that meant Pluto’s closest approach to the Sun was 29.658 AU.
That’s closer than Neptune. Pluto was actually at that point on September 5, 1989. For the entire twenty year period from 1979-1999 Pluto wasn’t the outermost planet, Neptune was.
[DIGRESSION: There is, by the way, little to no danger of a collision between Neptune and Pluto. If you look at the two orbits in 3D it becomes apparent that Pluto crosses the plane of Neptune’s orbit pretty far away from the actual orbit of Neptune. Here’s an animation of one Plutonian year from an oblique angle. The vertical white lines show how far below or above the plane Pluto is at any given time.
You can watch the animation and note that Neptune is at about 4 o’clock in the diagram at the start of the animation, and that’s where Pluto is furthest from the Sun. At the end of the animation, Neptune is at 10 o’clock; in other words it has orbited 1 1/2 times while Pluto orbited once (that’s a 3:2 resonance). At no point will the two planets come near each other, and since this pattern repeats, they won’t ever unless something causes an orbit to change.]
END OF DIGRESSION and back to the main thread: So Pluto didn’t look like any other planet. Nor did it act like any other planet. But if Pluto were all there was out there, most people would go ahead and consider it a planet.
But as it happens. there’s quite a lot “out there.”
The Centaurs
In 1977, Charles Kowal discovered Chiron, an asteroid, roughly 200 km across…but one with a difference. It was nowhere near the asteroid belt; it was well outside of it. That was a first, and barely a hint of things to come. Chiron is named after a centaur; and we would discover more such bodies. There’s a whole class of them now and that class is called the “centaurs.” It turned out there were “precovery” images of Chiron going clear back to 1895. And it turns out to have a ring!
There is a registry of so-called minor planets. When there is an initial observation, they’re given a “provisional designation.” (The scheme is a bit complicated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_designation_in_astronomy#Minor_planets but the first part is obviously the year of the first observation). Sometimes it gets an unofficial nickname, if it’s particularly interesting. Once we have enough data to establish an orbit, the object is given a number in the order they are discovered–and sometimes it gets a name too. (There are hundreds of thousands of objects that never got past the provisional designation stage.) Minor planets are simply numbered in order: Ceres is formally “1 Ceres”, then there is 2 Pallas, 3 Vesta, 4 Juno, and so on. It used to be just asteroids, but as we will see a lot more different kinds of things are on the list. These objects have the following in common: they orbit the sun directly, but aren’t planets, and aren’t comets.
[WARNING: Have a barf bucket handy for this one: Believe it or not there’s an object nicknamed (but not permanently named) “Biden,” provisional number 2012 VP113. And it got that name because Biden was the VP that year. However it’s been 12 years and they weren’t able to verify it so it might not be a real minor planet, in much the same way that Biden today isn’t a real president.]
When Chiron was first discovered, it got the provisional designation “1977 UB.” Once its orbit was established, it was regarded as the 2060th “minor planet” to be discovered, and now it’s formally known as 2060 Chiron. There are now over 44,000 known centaurs. And it’s speculated that Saturn’s way-out-there ninth moon, Phoebe, is a captured centaur. In general centaurs are far too likely to encounter one of the outer planets and so their orbits are not considered stable in the long term.
Buried in Planets?
Fifteen years later, things started to get crazy. We started finding more and more stuff way out there. The first was 15760 Albion (provisional designation 1992 QB1).
Here is 15760 Albion’s orbit (it’s a very slo-mo gif, so you’re not seeing things, it does move). It is in a roughly 291 year orbit. Shown in red are the orbits of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
It actually looks like a planet’s orbit; it’s even spaced about right. Unfortunately, it was only a bit over 100km across, not even remotely big enough to have forced itself into a round shape. Not a planet.
A concerted effort was made to scan the entire ecliptic for very slow moving dots of light, to see if there were other things out there.
And there sure were. Lots of small stuff. But then we started finding big ones too, ones big enough to be rounded, and many, if not most, of these objects have moons!
In 2002, we found 50000 Quaoar (named after a deity worshiped by an Indian tribe that lived in what is now the LA area), orbiting between 41.9 and 45.5 AUs, in 289 years. Its diameter is 1,090 km. OK, that’s sizeable enough to get one’s attention! And it has a moon.
Then we found 90377 Sedna, discovered in 2003, which has a gigantic506 AU (that is not a typo, yes five hundred and six astronomical units) orbit (that is 76 billion kilometers). That’s the semi-major axis (half way across the long way). This one is a highly eccentric orbit, so it’s not that far away from us at the moment; if it was we’d never be able to see it. Right now Sedna is 83.5 AU away (still twice as far as Pluto), near its nearest approach to the Sun at 76 AU. Its furthest distance is 937 AU! But be prepared to wait a while for it to get there. Its year is 11,400 of ours, and you’ll have to wait about half that long for it to get halfway around its orbit. So far as we know, Sedna does not have a moon. We can see no detail at that ridiculous distance, but it is colored distinctly red (my guess: tholins). And Sedna is very roughly 900 km across, which is again sizeable, not dismissable as a piece of rubble. Sedna does not have a moon that we can see, which as you will see is unusual.
In 2004 we found 90482 Orcus, 900 km or so in diameter, 30.3 to 48.1 AUs out orbiting in 245.1 years (almost exactly the same as Pluto). Also, it has a moon.
OK, this is starting to get ridiculous. But we’re just getting started!
Also in 2004, there is 136108 Haumea, announced a year later and its status not fully settled even then because…well because it’s 2000km across! That’s getting close to Pluto’s size. (As a side note, Haumea is distinctly rugby-ball shaped. We think. Again we don’t see much more than blobs in our images.) And (wait for it), it has two moons.
But the absolute, oh-shit-we-have-a-problem-here discovery was announced the very next year, 2005, based on observations from late 2003 and later. 2003 UB313 was more massive than Pluto, though it appears to have a smaller diameter. The new object was “nicknamed” Xena (as in the Warrior Princess), and it took a while to settle on a permanent name. It turns out to have a moon, nicknamed Gabrielle after Xena’s sidekick. “Xena” orbits between 38.3 and 97.5 AUs, in 559 years. This object was actually announced by some YSM outlets as the tenth planet! Well, why not? If Pluto is a planet, this object certainly should be!
Because some people argued that indeed it was a planet, it took a while to get a permanent name and number. Why give it a number and have it turn out to not belong on the minor planet list? So “Xena” had to wait, for we were fully embroiled in discord.
And just for icing on the cake, on the same day that “Xena” was announced, the discovery of what would eventually be called 136472 Makemake was announced…and that was just two days after Haumea was announced. 136472 Makemake orbits between 38.1 and 52.8 AUs in 306 years.
Well. What a mess. Are they planets? We’d better figure this out because we’re getting buried here.
Rounding Up the Trans Neptunian Objects
I’m going to jump ahead here, a tiny bit. I’ll get back to the planet question soon.
I’m going to discuss the classification system we use today for these objects so (non-spoiler spoiler alert) Pluto will here be treated as one of these objects, not as a planet.
These objects all live beyond Neptune. But astronomers like to group things (you saw that with the moons of the gas and ice giants) and these objects, plus the zillions of much smaller ones in similar places that I haven’t mentioned, ultimately got “bucketed” into categories.
The Big Bucket is “trans-Neptunian object” Other than the centaurs, all of the objects I’ve discussed this time are trans-Neptunian objects (generally abbreviated “TNOs”), because they’re minor bodies outside of the orbit of Neptune.
But then we have sub-categories. The “Kuiper Belt” is those objects between 30 and 55 AUs from the Sun (as a reminder, Neptune is at roughly 30 AU). There are thousands of known Kuiper Belt objects, and the best estimate is that there are over a hundred thousand objects here over 100km in diameter. In fact there is far more “stuff” out there than in the asteroid belt. However, asteroid belt objects are typically rocks or metals, while the Kuiper Belt is mostly volatiles–iceballs, with some rocks in them.
The Kuiper Belt in turn has three classes of objects. The “classical” Kuiper Belt objects (cubewanos) are in reasonably circular, “regular” orbits, like Albion. There are a bunch in 2:3 resonance with Neptune (like Pluto), called plutinos, and others in a 1:2 resonance with Neptune, called twotinos. Orcus, Pluto, Haumea, Quaoar and Makemake are all Kuiper Belt objects. Orcus and Pluto are plutinos, the others are cubewanos.
This leaves Sedna and “Xena” unaccounted for. The other major category besides Kuiper Belt Objects is the “Scattered Disk Objects”, irregular-orbiting objects well beyond the Kuiper belt. “Xena” and Sedna fit here.
Here’s a handy-dandy chart. Or a confusing one, depending on your point of view, showing these categories, as well as the centaurs. In red across the top you will note designations like 2|3 and 1|2 for resonances with Neptune. And, oh by the way, Sedna is such an outlier it’s off the right hand edge of the diagram.
Gerard Peter Kuiper
Gerard Peter Kuiper, 1905-1973 (photo from 1964), was a Dutch-American astronomer. Americans trying to pronounce his name butcher it as “KAI-per,” rhyming with “piper.” The original Dutch pronunciation is indescribable to us except with the international phonetic alphabet: ˈɣɛrɪt ˈpitər ˈkœypər. He was the doctoral adviser for Carl Sagan, discovered Miranda (smallest moon of Uranus) and Nereid (third largest moon of Neptune), carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Mars, and Titan’s atmosphere. He speculated that a large disk of of ices had condensed into smaller bodies, but would long since have been disrupted by Pluto (which was thought at the time to be massive). Well, he was half right; because Pluto is puny the objects are still there and the belt containing them is now named the Kuiper belt in his honor.
Discord
OK, back to “Are these planets?” The year is 2006. New Horizons launched on its mission to Pluto on 19 January of that year, and now it was time to evaluate the matter of whether it was on its way to a planet or not.
There was no formal definition of a planet. We knew them when we saw them. Except now we didn’t. Or rather everyone knew, but not the same as other people.
Alan Stern was (and still is) a principal investigator of the New Horizons probe (i.e., he is in charge of one of the instruments on that probe). Stern’s resume in the space program is as long as my arm. Time magazine even named him one of the 100 most influential people in 2007.
Stern was, and still is, an adamant defender of Pluto as a planet…and yes, he knows that means all these other objects, plus more to be discovered in the future, would be planets too.
His proposal: Divide planets into three subcategories. First, the classical planets, Mercury through Neptune, eight total. Then dwarf planets; that would include all of these big TNOs including Pluto, and Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt. The third category, though, is the “satellite planet.” These are the round moons orbiting other objects: our Moon, the four Galilean satellites of Jupiter, the seven round moons of Saturn, the five round moons of Uranus, Triton orbiting Neptune, and Charon orbiting Pluto.
These would all be planets, because they are massive enough for their gravity to have forced them into round shapes. (And this is one reason I’ve made a big deal about round versus not round.)
Including the moons seems a bit odd. But Stern’s position is very straightforward. He cares about the intrinsic properties of the object (it’s size and shape) first and its extrinsic circumstances, i.e. what orbit it’s in, second. If the object is round, it’s a planet, whether it dominates its orbit, or even if it orbits something else. Once it’s settled as a planet, then you decide whether it’s also a satellite, or big enough to “own” its orbit, and put it in the appropriate sub-buckets.
The IAU Makes Sausage
When the International Astronomical Union met in August of 2006 this matter was on the agenda and…well, we know the story. Alan Stern lost.
There is an aphorism that, like sausages, those that love law should not watch it being made. And that’s apparently true here as well.
The first proposal was: “A planet is a celestial body that (a) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (b) is in orbit around a star, and is neither a star nor a satellite of a planet.”
In addition to the then-nine objects recognized as planets, this would have added Ceres, “Xena,” and Charon, the moon of Pluto. So we would immediately have twelve planets. In addition to this there were twelve candidate objects (including three asteroid-belt objects) that would likely fit once we knew more about them (including many of the ones I’ve talked about). Indeed there were claims (by Mike Brown who discovered Sedna and “Xena”) that we could have fifty three additional planets added almost immediately to this list of 12, and likely many more, perhaps 200, once we looked for more objects.
You may wonder why Charon would make the list, even though it’s fairly small as such things go. Why Charon and not Ganymede? That is because Charon and Pluto are close enough in size that the center of gravity of the Pluto-Charon system is actually outside of Pluto, unlike with every other moon in the solar system. That caused many to regard Pluto/Charon as a double planet…which of course would make Charon a planet.
Anything not spherical would be “bucketed” into Small Solar System Bodies (SSSBs). In addition, the “pluton” class (named for Pluto) would be used for things with highly eccentric or inclined objects. So this proposal drew one fairly clean line, if it’s round (and it’s not a star) it’s a planet, otherwise it’s an SSSB.
Although the relevant committee endorsed this, most of the IAU didn’t like this proposal; it was too ambiguous distinguishing between classical and dwarf planets. It failed a straw poll, 18-50 of a subgroup of the IAU.
So the second try, proposed by Gonzalo Tancredi and Julio Angel Fernandez:
(1) A planet is a celestial body that (a) is by far the largest object in its local population[1], (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape [2], and (c) does not produce energy by any nuclear fusion mechanism [3].
(2) According to point (1), the eight classical planets discovered before 1900, which move in nearly circular orbits close to the ecliptic plane, are the only planets of the Solar System. All the other objects in orbit around the Sun are smaller than Mercury. We recognize that there are objects that fulfill the criteria (b) and (c) but not criterion (a). Those objects are defined as “dwarf” planets. Ceres, as well as Pluto and several other large Trans-Neptunian objects, belongs to this category. In contrast to the planets, these objects typically have highly inclined orbits and/or large eccentricities.
(3) All the other natural objects orbiting the Sun that do not fulfill any of the previous criteria shall be referred to collectively as “Small Solar System Bodies“.[4]
Definitions and clarifications
The local population is the collection of objects that cross or closely approach the orbit of the body in consideration.
This generally applies to objects with sizes above several hundred kilometers, depending on the material strength.
This criterion allows the distinction between gas giant planets and brown dwarfs or stars.
This would have demoted Pluto to a “dwarf planet” which, despite the name including the word “planet,” was not a subcategory of planet; a difference between this and Stern’s proposal.
This went to open session, and the main point of contention was between the “static” and “dynamic” physics positions. The static position was similar to Stern’s; the emphasis would be on the intrinsic shape of the planet. “Dynamics” is a reference to the orbital properties.
There was one more draft, then the Plenary Session of the IAU met, and debated some more. And this is the result:
The IAU…resolves that planets and other bodies, except satellites, in the Solar System be defined into three distinct categories in the following way:
(1) A planet [1] is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.
(2) A “dwarf planet” is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape [2], (c) has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit, and (d) is not a satellite.
(3) All other objects [3], except satellites, orbiting the Sun shall be referred to collectively as “Small Solar System Bodies“.
[3] These currently include most of the Solar System asteroids, most Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), comets, and other small bodies.
And just to be clear, a “dwarf planet” was not, despite the name, a category of planet; they passed an additional resolution to make it clear.
[I have seen clips of the actual vote, hands raised in the auditorium. I can’t find one now, or I’d include it.]
So the planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
The dwarf planets (a subgroup of the Small Solar System Bodies), most likely includes: Ceres, Pluto, Quaoar, Sedna, Orcus, Haumea, “Xena”, Makemake…and one other, Gonggong. This is a fuzzy line and there are others already known that arguably belong on this list.
The Aftermath
And so that was it for Planet Pluto. To put the nail in it, within days Pluto was given a minor planet number just like any asteroid or Kuiper Belt object: 134340 Pluto. It’s now marked as a “Small Solar System Body.”
The reaction was intense. The public of course hated this and still does.
But it’s not just the public. Many planetary scientists (not just Alan Stern) also disagree.
This issue will be revisited some day. Personally I like Stern’s suggestion better than what we got. Or perhaps the best suggestion is to just drop the word “planet” entirely since it seems to have emotional ties. Should every round object that’s not a star be a “world”?
This is NOT the first time we’ve reassessed the concept of a planet, by the way. The other times that I know of are:
Any permanent wandering object in the sky was a planet; that included the Sun and the Moon, originally. Once it turned out the Moon orbited the Earth, and everything else orbited the Sun, that made the Sun “special” and the Moon a mere satellite of a planet, Earth.
With the discovery of moons around other planets (the Galilean moons of Jupiter in 1610, but also the satellites of Saturn and Uranus), we started seeing the term “Planetary Satellites” (which Stern re-used) used for them; that term continued to be in use well into the 1700s if not later. It’s now often used for the big seven moons (the Moon, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Titan and Triton); the ones I’ve been calling “large moons.”
The asteroids were considered planets at first: Ceres, then we had Vesta, Juno and Pallas. They were all small and in the same general location, though so they quickly got reclassified as “minor planets” or even “asteroids.”
If you relish irony, after that flurry of discoveries in the mid 00s, only one more solid dwarf planet candidate has been discovered, and that in 2007: 225088 Gonggong, which varies from 33.8 to 101.2 AUs from the Sun, orbiting in 554 years, with a diameter of about 1230 km (give or take 50 km). It has one known moon.
…And Back to “Xena”
As for “Xena”, that same meeting settled its status, and the permanent name 136199 Eris was chosen. Eris’s moon was named Dysnomia. Eris is round. Dysnomia might be.
Eris was a Greek goddess, the personification of strife and discord. Dysnomia means “lawlessness” which (interestingly) might be a reference to Lucy Lawless, who played Xena.
What perfect names for the objects that triggered such a furor!
(Next time, we’ll look at the TNOs themselves, most especially Pluto [it’s by far the best known] in more detail.)
