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.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

Spot (i.e., paper) Prices

Last week:

Gold $2,563.30
Silver $30.30
Platinum $947.00
Palladium $974.00
Rhodium $4,950.00
FRNSI* 123.000-
Gold:Silver 84.597+

This week, 3PM Mountain Time, Kitco “ask” prices. Markets have closed for the weekend.

Gold $2,716.90
Silver $31.41
Platinum $973.00
Palladium $1,034.00
Rhodium $4,950.00
FRNSI* 130.430+
Gold:Silver 86.498-

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 gigantic 506 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

1. The local population is the collection of objects that cross or closely approach the orbit of the body in consideration.
2. This generally applies to objects with sizes above several hundred kilometers, depending on the material strength.
3. This criterion allows the distinction between gas giant planets and brown dwarfs or stars.
4. This class currently includes most of the Solar System asteroids, Near-Earth objects (NEOs), Mars-, Jupiter- and Neptune-Trojan asteroids, most Centaurs, most Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), and comets.^[32]

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“.

Footnotes:

[1] The eight planets are: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
[2] An IAU process will be established to assign borderline objects into either dwarf planet and other categories.

[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:

1. 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.
2. 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.”
3. 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.)

What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?

OK Let’s Have Some Fun

Let’s nominate people from this site for positions in the 47 administration!

E.g., Scott for Press Secretary (assuming they don’t go with Kayleigh again). Imagine the YSM Jurinalists getting the Scott treatment!

Our Turn

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.

—Ayn Rand Lexicon (aynrandlexicon.com)

Justice Must Be Done.

Trump, it is supposed, had some documents.

Biden and company stole the country.

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.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

Spot Prices

Last week:

Gold $2,736.50
Silver $32.51
Platinum $1,002.00
Palladium $1,124.00
Rhodium $4,950.00
FRNSI* 131.378+
Gold:Silver 84.174+

This week, at Friday close:

Gold $2,684.50
Silver $31.35
Platinum $979.00
Palladium $1,014.00
Rhodium $5,025.00
FRNSI* 128.863-
Gold:Silver 85.630-

No whitewashing it, the precious metals took as big a beating as the Democrats did. Gold dropped over $75 on Wednesday and though it partially recovered Thursday, it dropped again on Friday. It’s possible the bull market is over…let’s see what happens next week.

Notably, silver did even worse than gold; the ratio is now 85.6 to 1.

For someone who took a substantial loss in net worth this week, I sure seem to be in a cheerful mood. I wonder why?

*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 Grand Tour

Meet Gary Flandro (1934- ):

He’s an aerospace engineer, who is currently the professor for the Boling Chair of Excellence at the University of Tennessee Space Institute. He is also the Vice President and Chief Engineer for Gloyer-Taylor Laboratories (GTL).

He has an interesting academic “ancestry”–he studied under Frank E. Marble, who studied under Hans Wolfgangg Liepmann, who studied under Bar, who studied under Emil Hilb, who studied under Karl Louis Ferdinand von Lindemann (who proved in 1882 that pi is a transcendental number), who studied under Felix Christian Klein, who studied under Rudolf Otto Sigismund Lipschitz, who studied under Johann Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet, who studied under Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier (yes, that Fourier), who studied under Joseph-Louis Lagrange (yes, that Lagrange), who studied under Leonhard Euler (yes, that Euler). Academics sometimes like to play “academic genealogy” (as do musicians; some can show that Beethoven or Haydn taught someone who taught someone who…(eventually)…taught them). Every one of these people has a Wikipedia page, with the exception of Bar, many are famous to mathematicians.

That’s cool. But it’s not the reason I chose to mention Flandro.

Flandro is the reason we have closeup pictures of Uranus and Neptune.

In 1964, he came to the realization that we were coming up on a very rare alignment of the outer planets. No, they weren’t going to be in a tidy straight line, but it would be possible to send a spacecraft past Jupiter, get a gravity assist from Jupiter to go to Saturn, then a gravity assist from Saturn to go to Uranus, and so on, on to Neptune and Pluto (still considered a planet back then).

Or, if one sends two spacecraft, get all of that done in less time, by sending one, launched in 1977 to Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto, and the other, launched in 1979, to Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune. This concept (with one modification) was dubbed the Grand Tour program, and was proposed in 1969. That modification was to send two pairs of spacecraft.

Total cost, $1 billion or so in real money, but cheaper than sending separate spacecraft. The biggest issue was that sending a probe of any useful size past Jupiter without any assistance is difficult; it still is. (All of these fancy Jupiter and Saturn orbiters needed gravitational assists to get there with enough fuel to do an orbital insertion burn and still have enough left over to make small maneuvers for many years.) This way, if you could get to Jupiter, you could automatically get to the other planets.

What’s not to like? The money.

Instead of four spacecraft, we’d send two Mariner-type probes. And we’d blow off Uranus, Neptune and Pluto…well, sort of. Now the project was called Mariner Jupiter-Saturn, which was approved in 1972, for $360 million apiece.

Both probes would visit Jupiter, Saturn, and Titan. (Titan was included because even then it was known to have an atmosphere, which made it unusual for a moon.)

That is what was advertised, to keep cost estimates down. Here’s what actually happened. The first probe was launched on a flight plan called JST: Jupiter Saturn Titan. The second was launched on a flight plan called JSX. JSX would visit Jupiter and Saturn, but if the first mission failed either at Titan or earlier, it could be diverted to visit Titan…and that would be it. If not diverted, however, it would not do a close flyby of Titan, but instead go on to Uranus and Neptune. The reason this wasn’t advertised is that controlling those spacecraft for the additional nine years would be expensive.

These would have been Mariner 11 and Mariner 12. The earlier Mariner probes had largely explored Mars; this would have been a continuation of that legacy. But these spacecraft had a lot of new features, and so in March, 1977 NASA held a competition to rename the project. And so, just months before launch they became Voyager 1 and 2. Voyager 1 would visit Jupiter and Saturn with a close flyby of Titan. Voyager 2 would visit Jupiter and Saturn, then Uranus and Neptune, but could be diverted if Voyager 1 failed either before or during the Titan flyby, since Voyager 2 would reach Saturn nine months after Voyager 1. (There was even an option to divert Voyager 1 away from Titan and send it to Pluto, but Titan was considered the more interesting target after Pioneer 11 saw just how thick its atmosphere was.)

Voyager 2 was launched first, on August 20, 1977, then Voyager 1 on September 5th, on a faster trajectory. It would actually overtake Voyager 2 and reach Jupiter on March 5, 1979 (barely a year and a half after launch!). Voyager 2 flew by on July 9, then both were off to Saturn. Voyager 1 reached Saturn on November 12, 1980 (shortly after the election), and flew by Titan later that day. The Titan encounter actually flung it out of the plane of the ecliptic, meaning Voyager wouldn’t be visiting any more planets. Voyager 2 was not diverted, and reached Saturn on August 26, 1981. And then Uranus on January 24, 1986, and Neptune on August 25, 1989, one day shy of eight years after the Saturn flyby.

So far Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to ever fly by Uranus and Neptune.

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are still ticking, believe it or not, and Voyager 1 is now in interstellar space having passed outside of the Sun’s magnetic field. It’s returning data on the almost total vacuum of interstellar space. But, in the next two years (likely next year in fact) their RTG units will have degraded enough that they will no longer be able to power any of the scientific instruments. And ultimately they will be unable to maintain radio contact with Earth sometime in the 2030s; they will be out of range of our receivers.

(The RTGs on the Voyagers are slugs of plutonium oxide; the plutonium is isotope 238 (not the 239 used in bombs) which has an 87.7 year half life. The heat generated is converted to electrical power via thermocouples using the Seebeck effect. When new they generated 160 watts electrical, 2400 watts heat.)

Old Voyagers never die, they just fade away.

Voyager 1 is still moving at 16.9 km/sec relative to the sun; it crosses 3.57 AUs per year…almost the distance between Earth and Jupiter at its closest. Voyager 2 is moving at 15.2 km/sec. Their distances are 162 and 137 AUs, or 24.5 and and 20.5 billion kilometers.

And again, it is thanks to these stalwarts that we have any closeup pictures and data for Uranus and Neptune and their moons. Hubble and JWST can take occasional ganders, but there’s no substitute for being there, however briefly; and for now, this is what we’ve got.

Uranus

Uranus was spotted by John Flamsteed in 1690 as he created his star catalog. If you’ve ever seen a star with a name something like “61 Cygni” (a number and then a Latin genitive of a constellation name), that’s a Flamsteed designation. There are 84 of his designations that are today considered to have been mistakes; in particular “34 Tauri” was actually the planet Uranus.

Uranus was identified as a planet for the first time by William Herschel in 1781, his first thought was to name it after the King…As it happens, King George III; yes, that asshole. Good taste prevailed; we couldn’t get away from assholes apparently but at least it’s more egalitarian: It’s named after everyone’s asshole.

OK, more seriously it’s named after the Greek sky god, Ouranos (Οὐρανός). Ouranos was one of the primordial deities, along with Gaia (Earth), he was the father of the Titans…in particular Kronos (Saturn). Saturn in turn was the father of Zeus (Jupiter). So it’s a neat progression, one generation back every planet out from the Sun. (But with this we’re out of generations; nothing preceded Ouranos.

The usual pronunciation is “YER-in-us” rather than “your anus” but I don’t even care for that one (as it means “full of urine”) and would like to go with OO-rahn-ose which is closer to the Greek pronunciation. Not a battle I’m likely to win.

OK, some basic facts since this bit is a recap of the Hugh Janus post from several months ago.

First a picture, with Blue Marble Earth (with a non-fubared Red Sea) photoshopped in for a size comparison. This is a natural-color image of Uranus taken by Voyager 2:

Well, that’s fascinating. We could probably argue over whether that’s more green than blue, or vice versa. It’s about as detailed as any true color image of Venus. Or Titan. More can be learned from false color images.

Uranus is 19.1 AU from the Sun, on average–about twice as far out as Saturn–and takes 84.02 Earth years to make one orbit around the Sun. It rotates once (relative to the Sun) in 17 hours, 14 minutes. However, here’s the thing: its axis of rotation is tipped 98 degrees from being perpendicular to its orbit (compare to our 23.5 degrees). Since axial tilts cause seasons, and this is almost as extreme as they get, Uranus has extreme seasons; at one point in its orbit almost the entire northern hemisphere has a midnight sun while the southern hemisphere gets no sun at all. And the poles get 42 years of continuous sunlight followed by 42 years of darkness (analogous to our poles getting six months of each). Because of these extreme seasons, Uranus has the lowest minimum temperature of any planet in the Solar System coming in at 49K.

This next graphic is a simulation of what Uranus looks like from Earth (hence just about what it looks like from the Sun) from 1985 to 2030, just a bit over half a Uranian year. The rings are included to provide a reference:

Uranus’s equatorial radius is 25,559 (give or take 4) km, compare to Earth’s 6,378. It has a mass 14.5 times that of Earth.

Uranus has multiple magnetic poles, and this likely has something to do with the fact that it is an “ice giant”

We’ve not dealt with ice giants before; these are gas giants (like Jupiter and Saturn) but with a heavier concentration of the molecules that planetary scientists call “ices” (even when they’re not frozen), water, ammonia, methane, sulfur dioxide, etc; generally hydrogen combined with some fairly small atom. Deep inside the planet all sorts of interesting forms of these compounds appear. In particular, water ice has many different polymorphs (different ways of crystalizing) under great pressure. Some of these even break the water molecules apart leaving oxygen crystallized and the hydrogen ions free to move through the lattice, others under greater pressure trap the hydrogen. It is thought that Uranus (and Neptune) have layers of the conducting ice deep inside and this is where the magnetic fields originate. Since the locations are relatively thin shells, it’s likely that multiple magnetic poles would form.

In some ways Uranus and Neptune resemble what you’d get if you removed the (mostly hydrogen and helium) outer layers from Jupiter and Saturn.

Uranus has rings; these were discovered in 1977. The discoverers were planning to watch Uranus pass in front of a star to hopefully learn something about Uranus’s atmosphere. They were surprised to see the star blink out five times before and afterwards, in symmetric patterns, which is what you’d see if an otherwise invisible ring was dimming the light. Later on they detected four more rings. The rings are made out of very dark objects about the size of a basketball (similar in size to Saturn’s rings’ constituents) and thus they couldn’t be seen directly. They’re named with Greek letters, sometimes numbers, and the names are not in any kind of logical order since they were assigned in discovery order.

Moons

Uranus has 28 known moons. The naming scheme is based on characters from Shakepeare and Alexander Pope.

We’ll start with an image taken by JWST; the big ones are bright blue, nine inner moons are also shown.

I learned Uranus had five moons in school, and these “original” five are four medium-sized major moons with one medium-small major moon.

Inner Moons

But we now know of 13 “inner moons” (small, non-round moons that orbit in nice circular orbits, closer than the major moons). That’s the most of any of the four giant planets. Working outward, we have Cordelia and Ophelia, which shepherd the ε (epsilon) ring. Then we have six at very similar distances forming a group: Bianca, Cressida, Desdemona, Juliet, Portia, and Rosalind. Then another close grouping of three: Cupid, Belinda, and Perdita. Finally there are Puck and Mab, Mab is likely the source of the μ (mu) ring.

We have a fuzzy picture with some detail for one of these moons, Puck:

All of these moons are involved with the ring system, which (unsurprisingly) is thought to have resulted from the fragmentation of other inner moons.

Major Moons

Then we come to the major moons; the five we heard about in school if you’re anything remotely my age. They are shown in this montage at the right relative sizes and brightness, in order of distance from Uranus.

They are: Miranda (471.6 km), Ariel (1157.8), Umbriel (1169.4), Titania (1577.8) and Oberon (1522.8). Titania at 1,577.8 km is just a bit bigger than Saturn’s Rhea, and is the largest “medium” moon. Titania and Oberon were discovered by Herschel in 1787, Ariel and Umbriel in 1851 by William Lassell, and Miranda by Gerard Kuiper in 1948. (And you will be seeing the name “Kuiper” a lot in the future.)

At the time Voyager 2 flew by the southern hemisphere of Uranus and each of its moons was oriented to the Sun, and we only got 20-40% coverage in the pictures…and we still don’t know what’s on the other sides of these moons!

These moons are fairly dark, by contrast with the bright moons of Saturn.

Miranda is mostly ice, while the other four seem to have significant rocky content:

The big four seem to all have salt water layers, underlain by hydrated water, and perhaps in the case of Titania and Oberon, dry rocky cores. I get the impression that all of this is somewhat speculative.

Miranda

Miranda is likely the most interesting of these moons, with fault canyons 20 km deep, terraced layers, and a patchwork chaotic surface of different ages and features. (We can tell the different ages from the different amounts of meteor craters.) Look at that picture; it looks like a Frankenmoon. Note that the canyons and mountains are large enough to be obvious bumps and cuts in what ought to be a circular outline. There is some speculation that this moon was broken apart and reassembled at some time in the past.

Of course I cannot think of Miranda without remembering the scene from Red Heat, where Ahnuld plays a Soviet policeman in the US to arrest and bring back Georgian thugs (no, the other Georgia, the one where they really talk funny). After roughing up one suspect and then being told that here in the US there are Miranda rights, warnings, etc…

Ariel

The highest resolution image of Ariel from Voyager 2 is this one:

The broad channels to the lower right stand out, they’re called grabens and may be from liquid welling to the surface…sometime in the distance past.

Umbriel

Conveniently for those wanting to memorize names, Ariel and Umbriel rhyme which might help you remember they’re adjacent to each other in the list.

Umbriel is dark and heavily cratered, and as you can see the photo is a bit blurry. At the very top is the crater Wunda.

Titania

As mentioned before Titania is the largest “medium” sized moon, beating out Rhea by a slim margin. Water ice and a bit of carbon dioxide as dry ice have been detected. Again we have one not-very-high-res picture, and a slightly better one.

Oberon

Oberon has a lot of bright patches, these are largely craters with bright rays. The largest of these is Hamlet, almost dead center in the photograph. There is also an 11 km mountain at about 8 o’clock on the limb.

Irregular Moons

There are 10 irregular moons, ones that are lumpy and orbit in inclined or even retrograde orbits with high eccentricity. They are: Francisco, Caliban, Stephano, S/2023 U 1, Trinculo, Sycorax, Margaret, Prospero, Setebos, and Ferdinand. The largest of these irregular moons is Sycorax, a respectably-sized 120-200km. Many of these moons were discovered by the Hubble Space telescope. Caliban, Stephano and S/2023 U 1 all seem to be part of a group, six of the others are retrograde but with very dissimilar orbits, and Margaret is actually prograde at a 60 degree inclination.

Patterns

We’ve seen a definite pattern so far with giant planets’ moons. There are inner moons, small, irregularly shaped moons that nevertheless are in nice, tidy circular orbits that have almost no inclination relative to the planet’s equator. Then major moons; the trend there seems to be smaller and smaller moons on the whole, the further out you go from the Sun (Jupiter had four large moons and no medium moons, Saturn had one large moon and a bunch of medium and medium-small ones, Uranus has only medium and medium-small ones).

Since all of those moons are in nice circular orbits usually in the plane of the planet’s equator, it’s thought that the original lump of gas, volatiles, and solids that formed the planet also formed the moons. This nebular lump would collapse, spin faster (angular momentum being conserved) and form an accretion disk. The main central mass would become the planet and the rest would form the regular moons (inner and major). This is actually a miniature of the formation of the Solar System itself, where the disk around the proto-Sun would form planets, all in nearly the same orbital plane, all orbiting in the same “prograde” direction.

Outside of those major moons, we go directly to irregular moons, which come in groups suggesting some larger body was broken up. The irregular moons are never big enough to be round, and are called irregular largely because they have very eccentric, inclined orbits; most in fact are retrograde, orbiting the planet “backwards” from the normal counterclockwise as seen from over the north pole. This strongly suggests these objects did not form with the planets as the regular moons did, but rather got captured later.

Saturn is a slightly special case, some small moons are mixed in with the major moons, including four that are Trojans to a couple of the major moons, but this is an addition to the pattern, not a true breaking of it.

Onwards…

Unlike with Saturn I simply wasn’t able to bury you in pictures and information. Again, that’s a consequence of the fact that we’ve sent one spacecraft on a flyby, ever. Whereas at Saturn and Jupiter we’ve been able to park spacecraft there for years, completely map the major moons, get good reads on their masses, and so on.

So will we ever learn more? There has been some talk of sending orbiters to Uranus, and it was given a high priority during NASA’s last decadal plan, but nothing was done about it. China is talking about sending probes as well. But there’s nothing firm.

Next month, we take up Neptune!