Theos-Talk Archives (July 2005 Message tt00231)

July 1 2005


Kathy 

For the moment I can't find it either.

I recall HPB writing of an infra Mercurial planet occasionally seen and
tentatively named VULCAN.

I'll look further and let you know.


FOUND  

See TRANSACTIONS of the BLAVATSKY LODGE (p. 48 in U L T Edn)   

[Blavatsky: COLLECTED WORKS -- Vol. 10, before p 246 -- see answer to
3rd question in SECTION IV Stanza 1]

She mentions another planet with a retrograde motion. ?  

I listen in the past 3 days to a fresh discovery of an ultra-Plutonian
planet ? being discovered.

Best wishes, 

Dallas

==============================
 
-----Original Message-----
From: theos-talk@yahoogroups.com [mailto:theos-talk@yahoogroups.com] On
Behalf Of Cass Silva
Sent: Saturday, July 30, 2005 7:41 PM
To: theos-talk@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: Theos-World RE: Pluto

Dallas,
Didn't HPB say something about an as yet undiscovered planet? I have
searched for the quote but cannot find it.
Cass
 
Puny Pluto gets big brother
It's a planet!

By Jeremy Manier
Tribune staff reporter
Published July 30, 2005

Larger than Pluto and far beyond its orbit, shining so brightly an amateur
stargazer could have spotted it years ago, there is a 10th planet,
astronomers announced late Friday.

Calling the still-unnamed world a planet likely will stir intense debate
among some astronomers who argue that even tiny Pluto would not be called a
planet were it discovered today.

But if Pluto counts as a planet with a width of about 1,400 miles, the new
world--which may be up to twice as big--also belongs on the list, said Mike
Brown, leader of the team that made the discovery.

"Get your pens; start rewriting the textbooks today," said Brown, a
professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology who
has hunted for such an object for more than five years.

For now the would-be planet goes by the unwieldy designation of 2003UB313.
Brown said his team has proposed a more melodious name to the Paris-based
International Astronomical Union and is waiting for approval before making
it public.

The planet is now 9 billion miles from the sun--more than twice as distant
as Pluto at its farthest point--and takes 560 years to make one orbit. It
would be the first planet discovered in our solar system since astronomer
Clyde Tombaugh found Pluto in 1930.

Larry Lebofsky, a senior research scientist at the University of Arizona's
Lunar and Planetary Laboratory who was not involved in the finding, agreed
with Brown that the object deserves planetary status.

"I like the idea that somewhere along the line humans defined Pluto as the
limit of what we call a planet," Lebofsky said. "If you find something
larger, there's no reason why that shouldn't count too."

Brown made a rushed announcement late Friday at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in California, after his team realized someone had hacked into
their Web site and accessed the crucial data, apparently with the goal of
making it public. It was "someone with more cleverness than scruples," Brown
said. "It's not the way we'd prefer to do it, but that's the way it
happened."

Because the team had not finished analyzing the planet, they still do not
know precisely how large it is. Astronomers gauge the size of such distant
objects by measuring their brightness; if a distant object is still very
bright, it must also be large. Brown said 2003UB313 is so bright and so far
away that even if its surface were extremely reflective, the world would
have to be larger than Pluto. At most, it may be twice Pluto's size.

"We expect it's about 1 1/2 times larger," Brown said.

Brown's team had known about the object since Jan. 8, when they detected it
using the relatively small 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope at Mt. Palomar in
California. The telescope uses a 180-megapixel digital camera with the
widest field of view of any astronomical camera, which lets the team survey
huge swaths of sky at once.

Like Pluto, the new object orbits the sun at a strange angle--in the case of
the new world, about 44 degrees off the plane where the other planets move.
It also follows a highly irregular orbit, swinging in almost to the circuit
of Neptune at its closest point. Brown said an amateur could see the object
with a 14-inch telescope; in North America it is now visible almost directly
overhead at dawn.

The team had used its telescope for years to search for objects in the
Kuiper Belt, a broad disk of icy bodies in the expanses of space beyond
Pluto. Last year Brown's group found Sedna, an object about three-fourths
the size of Pluto and whose irregular orbit extends far beyond that of
2003UB313.

On Thursday, astronomers in Spain announced the discovery of another large
Kuiper Belt object, which Brown's group had tracked as well. Brown said
Friday that his team's observations indicate that world is about the same
size as Sedna

The presence of so many Pluto-like worlds at the outer expanses of the solar
system has prompted some astronomers to argue that Pluto--less than half the
size of the next smallest planet, Mercury--is an unremarkable hunk of ice
that doesn't belong with either the rocky planets close to the sun or the
gas giants beyond.

In 2000 the American Museum of Natural History demoted Pluto by leaving it
out of a display of the planets, though other museums have not taken such
drastic steps. The International Astronomical Union still classifies Pluto
as a planet.

Brown confessed he used to be among those who thought Pluto never deserved
planetary clout. But he said he has come to believe that on this question,
what ordinary people think is as important as the technical judgment of
astronomers.

"People love Pluto," Brown said. "Calling Pluto not a planet is never going
to be a popular decision. It seems reasonable if that Pluto is a planet and
you've got something bigger and farther, you'd better call that a planet
too."

By that standard, the new world's acceptance as a planet may hinge on
whether the public warms up to it.

"Maybe it depends on what name they came up with," Lebofsky said.

----------

jmanier@tribune.com 





		
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