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.

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

Spot Prices.

Kitco Ask. Last week:

Gold $2,650.10
Silver $30.69
Platinum $954.00
Palladium $1002.00
Rhodium $4,850.00
FRNSI* 127.199-
Gold:Silver 86.351-

This week, markets closed as of 3PM MT.

Gold $2,634.20
Silver $31.11
Platinum $936.00
Palladium $982.00
Rhodium $4,850.00
FRNSI* 126.429+
Gold:Silver 84.674-

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.

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.

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!