Some scientists have long theorized that a brown dwarf or other large, dark object is way out there, orbiting our sun and slightly effecting the orbits of everything else (including comets). The new findings lend more credibility to the theory, although it’ll be really tough to prove!
We’ve only been observing our universe through instrumentation for a couple hundred years - a VERY brief time. There are objects which may orbit our sun once every 15,000 years or more - we need a bit more time to even begin to understand our tiny corner of the galaxy.
The major problems here are that when Pluto was discovered:
A) They didn’t know about Kuiper Belt Objects.
B) They thought that Pluto was much larger than it turned out to be. They thought that it was bigger than Mercury for a long time.
What is clearly needed here is a major overhaul of the definition of “planet”. From what I’ve read, there are probably thousands of KBOs out there, and some of them are bound to be larger than Pluto. Therefore, scratch Pluto from the list of planets.
Now, asteroids. Mercury has no atmosphere, has a highly elliptical orbit, and has no satellites. A prime candidate for asteroidhood if I ever saw one. The only problem is, it’s much larger than the average asteroid. That shouldn’t be a problem, though. It lives up to the other definitions- but wait! Mercury has a large molten core! Can other asteroids say that? I don’t know, but I really doubt it. So that can be our criterion: molten cores. If any of the asteroids turn out to contain molten cores, we’ll just call them planets. Mercury stays.
Turning our attention to brown dwarves, we see, as Polycarp stated, that Jupiter fulfills the criteria, except for scale. It’s much smaller than any other brown dwarves we know of. That’s because the other brown dwarves are far enough away that Jupiter-sized objects would go undetected. And there’s the rub. The other brown dwarves are so far away that we don’t really know much about them, other than that they exist, and that they radiate. They may turn out to share some other property that Jupiter may lack. So, we’ll just say that the jury’s out on Jupiter until we get more data.
And, in conclusion, I’d just like to add that if the existence of that brown dwarf on the outskirts of the Solar System is verified, then I say that NASA should throw a bunch of probes at that bad boy posthaste. It would need a name, too. I vote for “Eris”.
That’s a little weird. First I refer to our mysterious friend as a “bad boy”, then I propose naming it after the Goddess of Discord. Gender confusion is running rampant in neuro-trash land today…
Modest? You bet I’m modest! I am the queen of modesty!
I believe that “Nemesis” has already been tentatively assigned by the IAU, from the prediction a few years ago that there was such an object. Although Arthur C. Clarke is holding out for “Siva.”
We have a transexual planet on our hands? Then let’s throw out all the suggestions to date and call it by one of the only two possible names:
[ul][]Teiresias, or [}Hermaphroditus[/ul]
We have a transexual planet on our hands? Then let’s throw out all the suggestions to date and call it by one of the only two possible names:
[ul][]Teiresias, or []Hermaphroditus[/ul]
Nope…we have to maintain the traditional naming sequence. The next planet will be Goofy.
This maintains the tradition of naming planets after classic mythical characters while, at the same time, not discounting RuPaul or RichardSimmons who, in any event, already have their own separate orbits.
