[HN Gopher] Possible new dwarf planet found in our solar system
___________________________________________________________________
Possible new dwarf planet found in our solar system
Author : ddahlen
Score : 148 points
Date : 2025-05-21 18:32 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.minorplanetcenter.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.minorplanetcenter.net)
| ddahlen wrote:
| The minor planet center is the clearing house of observations of
| objects in our solar system. They have announced a new dwarf
| planet today.
|
| This object appears to be in a very eccentric orbit (0.948), and
| with an H magnitude of 3.55, so it is likely hundreds of km in
| diameter. Ceres for reference has a H magnitude of 3.33 (smaller
| H is bigger diameter).
|
| If you want to know what H means:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_magnitude#Solar_Syste...
| gus_massa wrote:
| > _hundreds of km_
|
| How big is that compared with other dwarf planets/ Moons? If
| you sort all dwarf planets by size, which position does this
| take (approximately)?
|
| Pluto -> 2300 Km
|
| Ceres -> 950 Km
|
| Fobos(Mars) -> 25 Km
| ddahlen wrote:
| Depends on the albedo, if the H magnitude is a good
| measurement, then it is probably between 300-700km. These are
| rough bounds, its highly dependent on how reflective it's
| surface is (albedo).
|
| With an orbit somewhere around 28k years, it reached
| perihelion in about 1931, at 45 au from the Sun.
| kbelder wrote:
| So it's roughly in the closest 200-year period out of
| 28,000 years. That means it spends 99.3% of it's orbit
| further away than now, and thus harder to find.
|
| Simplistic odds would seem to imply that there's over a
| hundred more dwarf planets just like this but further away,
| so we just haven't seen them.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| I really hope we can get some more sensitive and wider
| telescopes to look deeper into the Oort cloud. At those
| distances, sunlight is comparable to a full moon or less,
| surface temperatures are only tens of kelvin. And yet
| they're still less than 1% of the distance to the next
| star.
| gus_massa wrote:
| [I'm lost with all the recent discoveries.]
|
| Assuming 500Km, is in in the top 10 by size/mass[1][2]? Top
| 100? Top 1000? Top 1000000?
|
| [1] Yes I know it's not the same. Whatever criteria is
| easier to measure.
|
| [2] I guess not top 10, but I have no idea about the
| current knowledge of the long tail. Fake Edit: I took a
| look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_possible_dwar
| f_planets So between 20 and 30???
| liamwire wrote:
| Your comment was the one that really made all of this sink
| in, thanks. Wow.
| hinkley wrote:
| This thread is making me realize that The Expanse has me
| pronouncing planetoids in Belter.
| temp0826 wrote:
| Beltalowda!
| bediger4000 wrote:
| Does the 0.984 eccentricity orbit imply anything? That's close
| to eccentricity of 1, which is a parabolic path, not
| gravitationally bound to the sun.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| Going off the SMA and eccentricity, part of its orbit is
| "relatively" close to the sun, ~ 45 AU, about 1.5x the
| distance to Neptune (~ 30 AU), and the other half of its
| orbit is very, very far away, ~ 1700 AU, over 50 times the
| distance to Neptune, but still less than 1% of the distance
| to the next star.
|
| When it's in the faraway part of its orbit, it is moving very
| slowly, probably only tens of meters per second, but it's
| still close enough to the sun to eventually fall back in for
| another loop.
|
| However, if something else dense enough got close enough out
| there, it would be easily perturbed and have its whole orbit
| altered, or even be ejected.
|
| But interstellar space is pretty void of wandering solid
| bodies, so it keeps falling back towards the sun.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| > But interstellar space is pretty void of wandering solid
| bodies, so it keeps falling back towards the sun.
|
| As far as we know ... we don't know how many rogue planets
| are out there ... mayb be as numerous as the number of
| stars or even greater
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| After I posted that, I did some more research to see how
| typical it is, over longer time periods, that our nearest
| star is about 4 ly away. That seems to be about average
| spacing for our part of the galaxy, but it turns out in a
| little over a million years, a star about half the size
| of the sun will pass around 0.15 ly away or 10,000 AU,
| which is far outside the kuiper belt, but solidly though
| the middle of the inner oort cloud, and will leave a wake
| of scattered comets and asteroids, some of which will
| rain down on Earth.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_710
| bediger4000 wrote:
| Nice! I was hoping for a nearly parabolic orbit to mean
| this was an interstellar object captured by the sun's
| gravity.
| evil-olive wrote:
| > This object appears to be in a very eccentric orbit (0.948)
|
| from [0]:
|
| > Before its demotion from planet status in 2006, Pluto was
| considered to be the planet with the most eccentric orbit (e =
| 0.248). Other Trans-Neptunian objects have significant
| eccentricity, notably the dwarf planet Eris (0.44). Even
| further out, Sedna has an extremely-high eccentricity of 0.855
| due to its estimated aphelion of 937 AU and perihelion of about
| 76 AU
|
| > ...
|
| > Comets have very different values of eccentricities. Periodic
| comets have eccentricities mostly between 0.2 and 0.7, but some
| of them have highly eccentric elliptical orbits with
| eccentricities just below 1; for example, Halley's Comet has a
| value of 0.967
|
| so possibly an ignorant question, as someone who's interested
| in astronomy but doesn't follow it very closely - when this is
| categorized as a dwarf planet, does that include "it might be a
| comet" as a possibility? or have they already ruled it out as a
| possible comet through other observations?
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_eccentricity#Examples
| mandevil wrote:
| Dwarf planet versus comet/asteroid hinges on mass, basically
| its "enough mass to be roughly round" (technically it's
| called "hydrostatic equilibrium").
|
| Back from the 1810's to the 1870's or so, most people
| considered Ceres, Vesta, and things like that to be planets-
| they were bodies that wandered around the solar system, that
| meant they were planets. When the numbers started to get into
| the 20's, everyone decided to create a new category,
| "asteroid" (Greek for 'star-like') and put all of the smaller
| things in that. So when Pluto was discovered in 1930 it was
| slotted right into the planet category. Pluto was discovered
| mostly by accident, because Clyde Tombaugh was amazing at
| working the blink comparator, and finding the one dot that
| moved in between the two pictures of the night sky a few days
| apart.
|
| However, by the 1990's and 2000's you had computers and
| digital cameras, which are even better than Clyde at finding
| things that move, and quickly the number of planets started
| to go up- and it was clear that once we had thoroughly mapped
| the ~~Oort Cloud~~ (meant Kuiper Belt, see below) etc. we
| would have dozens of planets. And so once again astronomers
| decided to create a new category, just like they had with
| asteroids a century earlier. This time they drew the line in
| such a way that Ceres got moved from asteroid to dwarf
| planet- it has enough mass to be roughly round, so after over
| a century of being an asteroid it became a dwarf planet.
|
| This is how things always work in science: we discover
| something, then we discover more of them, and re-categorize
| everything based on the new discoveries. It's just more
| noticeable with Pluto because reciting the planets is done by
| every schoolkid in a way that they don't for subatomic
| particles or for species of voles or whatever.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| Very informative, thank you!
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| > thoroughly mapped the Oort Cloud
|
| So it's interesting that the Oort Cloud is often mentioned
| as a real thing. Surely there are plenty of bodies
| discovered which are orthogonal to its existence, but
| Oort's "Cloud" itself still enjoys only the status of
| hypothesis and not reality.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud
|
| Sadly, even Wikipedia editors seem unable to distinguish
| between the formal definitions of "hypothesis" vs. "theory"
| when delivering such a scientific article.
| codethief wrote:
| Oh wow, looks like I'm one of today's lucky 10,000!
| Thanks so much!
| mandevil wrote:
| You are correct, I meant to say Kuiper Belt, not Oort
| Cloud, pulled the wrong thing out of my memory. Unlike
| the Oort Cloud, we are doing a good job of mapping KBO's
| as we speak.
| throwaway2k255 wrote:
| If the furthest objects of the Oort Cloud are over 3
| light years away, it is relatively close to Alpha
| Centauri.
|
| Is there a chance that Alpha Centauri also has its own
| cloud that overlaps with it?
|
| Would AC influence the cloud and adjust the orbit of
| smaller comets?
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| There's a chance, but no one knows for sure.
|
| Oort Clouds are mostly empty space, so there wouldn't be
| much direct interaction. But there would certainly be
| gravitational effects.
|
| My guess (FWIW) is there's more out there than we
| suspect, likely including plenty of rogue/wandering
| planets between systems.
| hinkley wrote:
| And that, boys and girls, is how Neil deGrass Tyson got
| Pluto demoted. (I kid).
| naikrovek wrote:
| I still think he did it because he wanted to have his
| name on something significant. He's a science
| communicator, not a researcher, and he's not going to be
| making any discoveries. So he's gotta change something
| that already exists to have his name on something that
| everyone knows. He had the power to change its status, so
| he did. I think that's all it was. I hope I'm wrong but
| I've never heard a really GOOD reason to undo something
| that was so commonly known and taught. The definition for
| "planet" could change and Pluto could have been left
| alone, grandfathered in, in a way. There's a reason it
| was discovered first. It's huge compared to other dwarf
| planets.
|
| There's no reason that Pluto couldn't have remained a
| proper planet. It's big enough to be round _and_ its
| largest moon is big enough to be round. Mars doesn't have
| _any round moons._ Mars is still a planet.
| XorNot wrote:
| Isn't that kind of the issue though? Pluto's moon isn't
| just round it's about half the size of Pluto itself such
| that the Pluto-Charon system orbits around a point in
| space between the two bodies.
| naikrovek wrote:
| Jupiter and the sun orbit a barycenter, too. Jupiter is a
| planet.
| XorNot wrote:
| And the sun is a star. The point is the category exists
| to be useful: if Pluto is a planet then a ton of other
| stuff is technically a planet.
| naikrovek wrote:
| and in cases where the star is binary with a huge rocky
| planet? what are the large satellites in that star
| system? are they planets of the star, or moons of the
| huge rocky planet?
| calmbell wrote:
| Eris is essentially the same size as Pluto and has a
| larger mass.
| naikrovek wrote:
| Then ADD Eros. Don't remove Pluto.
| p_j_w wrote:
| Why?
| naikrovek wrote:
| > Why?
|
| Why remove Pluto?
|
| The definition of a Planet could be whatever we want. It
| could be "these named entities are planets, other things
| are not planets" if we wanted. That makes a hell of a lot
| more sense to me than anything else, because eventually
| we are going to find planets which really blur the
| boundaries we have currently. Until we observe the entire
| universe, any set of rules we come up with are going to
| appear to be wrong in some situations.
| p_j_w wrote:
| "It's not perfect so we should just do it arbitrarily
| instead" is a pretty silly scientific proposition.
| kuschku wrote:
| Congrats, the solar system would then contain these
| planets:
|
| Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Vesta,
| Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Eris, Makemake
|
| (Plus some more).
| jajko wrote:
| So what? Is 10 some mental limit of names for most
| population? If I can memorize 8 I can handle 12 or 15, or
| neither. Making up sub-categories is such a typical
| bureaucrat's approach to problems.
|
| Why should giant planets be in same category as normal
| ones? Why mixing ringed with non-ringed? Why mixing
| moonless with moon-enabled? Gas/liquid ones and solids? I
| could go on for a long time.
| kuschku wrote:
| > If I can memorize 8 I can handle 12 or 15, or neither.
|
| Current estimates expect about 200 Pluto-sized objects in
| the Kuiper belt and about 10'000 in the surrounding
| region.
|
| Compared with 4 rocky planets, 2 gas giants and 2 ice
| giants.
| xp84 wrote:
| > The definition for "planet" could change and Pluto
| could have been left alone, grandfathered in, in a way
|
| This doesn't sound like a science way of doing things.
| The definition of planet would have to be literally
| changed to add "Or has to have been discovered before
| 19XX" in order to keep Pluto without becoming an
| unbounded set. If you're annoyed at all the pedants
| correcting kids or anyone else talking about the nine
| planets, I'd take it up with them for uselessly debating
| such a fine distinction, like a chemist arguing about the
| word "Sodium" on a Nutrition Facts label.
|
| I would argue the colloquial definition has indeed been
| changed in the above way, in that most people would say
| that what Mars, Venus, and Pluto have in common is
| they're all planets, and only a few would remember the
| odd factoid that the dwarf planet designation was
| created.
|
| It's okay for the colloquial definition to be different
| than the scientific one. There isn't any use case where
| that will harm anyone. It's not like we're chartering
| flights to "All Planets" where space tourists are going
| to be ripped off, limited to 8 planets by the
| technicality and missing out.
| naikrovek wrote:
| You're probably right, but I still think there's room for
| things like this.
|
| What's a "moon" versus a "planet"? Earth is a moon of
| Sol, is it not? Why is having a lot of planets a problem
| in the first place? Why do we have to restrict the
| definition at all? If 2-3 stars are at the center of a
| star system, are the planets in that star system planets,
| or something else? What if they're small?
|
| This whole scene is ripe for people who want to put their
| stamp of opinion on something to go nuts arbitrarily.
| rantallion wrote:
| > What's a "moon" versus a "planet"? Earth is a moon of
| Sol, is it not?
|
| Planets orbit stars. Moons orbit planets. That's a clear
| and easy distinction. Planet vs dwarf planet isn't so
| clear to most.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Don't planets and moons both orbit their center of mass?
| The distinction only seems to make sense if the masses of
| the two bodies are far apart. If they have similar mass,
| which is the moon and which the planet?
| naikrovek wrote:
| What's a moon that orbits a moon? Doesn't that make the
| orbited moon a planet? Pluto has moons. But it's not a
| planet? ???
|
| If a super massive planet and two stars orbit each other
| in the center of a star system, all the planets that
| orbit those stars are moons then technically, right?
|
| This is all super fuzzy and completely arbitrary. These
| concepts are constructs. Humans could make them better.
| Instead, everyone decided to make it all worse.
| x______________ wrote:
| Don't forgot about moonlets!
| gamblor956 wrote:
| No. A star is not a planet. The bodies orbiting the stars
| are planets, or dwarf planets, asteroids or comets.
| Bodies orbiting them are moons. Bodies orbiting the moons
| don't have a name.
| jajko wrote:
| > Bodies orbiting the moons don't have a name.
|
| Satellites? Natural or manmade, small or big, doesn't
| matter.
| skissane wrote:
| A natural moon of a moon is called a subsatellite:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsatellite
|
| At present, purely theoretical: we don't know of any.
| They are probably quite rare, but we don't really know -
| maybe, in centuries to come, we'll know of dozens of
| examples; maybe, there are none to find in this entire
| galaxy
| xp84 wrote:
| What's a "moon" versus a "planet"? Earth is a moon of
| Sol, is it not?
|
| We already have the word "satellite" for "things that go
| around other things" right? I think "moon" is just
| "satellite of a planet" for convenience in discussing
| that subset.
|
| > Why is having a lot of planets a problem in the first
| place?
|
| I think keeping the number manageable is explicitly
| something we keep around to help kids grasp the main
| entities in the solar system. If we just said "there are
| 235 planets" it would be silly to try to teach them all,
| so we'd probably just settle for "The top 10 biggest
| planets" or something. Having a definition instead of a
| number to bound the set isn't much less arbitrary than
| teaching the "top 10," but since the long tail clearly
| starts after #8, "Top 8" would be the only guaranteed
| stable set to give special treatment to, which is what
| we've arrived at with the official definition.
| MyPasswordSucks wrote:
| > Earth is a moon of Sol, is it not?
|
| No. The sun is a star, so it doesn't get to have moons.
| It has planets. If Jupiter started generating heat from
| nuclear fusion reactions, we'd call Io a planet right
| before we boiled to death, and with our dying breath we'd
| add "and also, it's no longer a moon".
|
| Putting a leash on a cat doesn't make it a dog, and both
| of those creatures have four legs even if you call the
| tails of each a leg. A planet revolves around a star, a
| moon revolves around a planet (revolving around a star).
| There's further elements which make Ceres and Ed White's
| lost glove not a planet or a moon, respectively, but
| planets and moons are distinct and non-overlapping
| categories.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Why would we be boiling to death in this situation?
| Jupiter is much further from Earth than the sun is and
| Jupiter is also much smaller. Heat would increase, but
| probably not that much.
| jajko wrote:
| I would rather expect Earth to not have a stable orbit.
| Either ripped apart from fluctuating tidal forces, flung
| away or in one of suns (thus boiling would happen,
| briefly) or just generally a much more extreme place
| compared to now.
| dandelany wrote:
| He didn't "do it", he was one voice among many
| astronomers who have been calling for a reclassification
| for years, the IAU voted and made the decision. It's a
| little silly calling him out for "doing it" for ego
| reasons when you are the one implicitly giving him credit
| for it... He didn't write the definition, he didn't chair
| the committee, he wasn't even on the committee. All he
| did was leave it off the list of planets at the Hayden
| Planetarium, where he was director.
| simondotau wrote:
| Stop agonising over metadata. Pluto is still there and
| it's not going anywhere.
| metalman wrote:
| I prefer to think that Pluto got denounced, and may yet
| be rehabilitated.MPAPA
| elpres wrote:
| The scientist who demoted Pluto was, in fact, Mike Brown
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_E._Brown), and he
| wrote a really nice book about it called "How I Killed
| Pluto and Why It Had It Coming".
| hinkley wrote:
| That wiki page needs some work. The section you linked to
| describes the eccentricity as a ratio, however the top of the
| page describes 0 as perfectly circular and 1 as an escape
| trajectory.
|
| If it were a ratio then 0 would be escape and 1 would be
| circular.
| zamadatix wrote:
| The "Examples" section doesn't seem to talk about ratios,
| do you mean the end of the prior "Calculation" section? If
| so part is just saying you can calculate the ratio of r_a
| to r_p given you know e and run it through the equation,
| not that e itself = r_a / r_p (the formula to calculate e
| from r_a and r_p is higher up in the section).
|
| If not that section, apologies for missing what you're
| trying to point out - I'm just trying to see what needs to
| be cleaned up so I can make an edit if needed.
| ddahlen wrote:
| If you want to view the orbit:
|
| https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html#/?sstr=2017%...
| araes wrote:
| Thanks, it helps quite a bit to be able to visualize what
| they're talking about.
|
| Out at 90 AU, and by the year 3000 is out at 500 AU, and
| that's still not anywhere near maximum distance. Looked like
| it was going to be 10,000+ years orbits or longer, and
| probably out at several 1000 AU at maximum.
|
| Little skeptical it would even orbit normally with how
| heavily eccentric it is, and the extreme distance at maximum.
| Way... out beyond the heliopause / heliosheath / termination
| shock.
| zamadatix wrote:
| The fun part is the ~1700 AU aphelion is still not far
| enough out to be part of the Oort cloud.
| https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/oort-cloud/facts/
| jessriedel wrote:
| Well, the preprint announcing the discovery describes its
| orbit as extending to "the inner Oort cloud" even though
| aphelion is 1630 au.
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15806
| jessriedel wrote:
| > and probably out at several 1000 AU at maximum.
|
| The preprint announcing the discovery lists the semi-major
| axis as 838 au, so the major axis is 1676 au and aphelion
| is about 1630 au.
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15806
| mwaitjmp wrote:
| Does anyone know if this has its PE in alignment with the
| other Sedna type objects found?
|
| I think there is a tendency for them to have their PE out to
| one side and the AP out to the other giving a fairly obvious
| pattern indicating another larger object is shepherding the
| others into their orbits.
| d_silin wrote:
| Most likely a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detached_object
| java-man wrote:
| Sorry for a stupid question: could it be "the planet X", or is it
| too light / in a wrong orbit?
| porkbrain wrote:
| No, according to Wikipedia Planet Nine is expected to have
| about 5 earth masses.
| dotancohen wrote:
| This is not planet X. This is smaller than other, closer,
| bodies that we already know of.
| squidsoup wrote:
| And I just put the kettle on for the Anunnaki, what a pity.
| mandevil wrote:
| This is a good question to ask. It can't be, for the reasons
| you guessed.
|
| This is not the first time this sort of thing has happened.
| When Pluto was found by Clyde Tombaugh he was looking for
| Planet Nine, which Percival Lowell had calculated must be
| present based on the orbits of the outer planets. But it was
| quickly realized that Pluto was too small and in the wrong
| orbit for it be Lowell's deduced planet. (And even then they
| worked with a too high estimate of Pluto's mass, it wasn't
| until the 1978 discovery of Charon that we got a good estimate
| of Pluto's mass. It is hard to get a good mass estimate without
| something else in orbit around it.)
|
| The Pioneer and Voyager missions gave us much better estimates
| of the masses of the gas giants, and my understanding is that
| if you go back and redo Lowell's calculations with those
| correct masses, his planet disappears. That's my best guess as
| to Planet X, that our constants are wrong in some way, but
| we'll see.
| hinkley wrote:
| One of the other theories for Planet X I believe has been
| debunked as absense of evidence. There are gaps in the
| _documented_ bodies orbiting the sun that could imply an
| object clearing orbits, but they were dismissed instead as
| sampling errors - there are parts of the sky that are easier
| to catalog than others, and so of course we have cataloged
| the easy parts more thoroughly. We need observation stations
| in a sun orbit to see the parts we can't see easily from an
| earth orbit.
| atlgator wrote:
| It is a very odd orbit. Obviously it doesn't match the expected
| mass, but the orbit makes you wonder what else might be out
| there. As someone else posted:
|
| https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html#/?sstr=2017%...
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| "That's no moon" :-). But more seriously, just another giant lump
| of stuff swinging around the solar system. I am not an
| astronomer, so I'm not sure about some of the things I'm reading
| in that report but to me, it seems to be in the solar ecliptic.
| But its far enough away even at perigee that the only thing of
| note it might interact with would be Pluto.
|
| I suppose that flying through the Oort cloud it might
| periodically launch ice balls into the inner solar system.
| brudgers wrote:
| _only thing of note it might interact with would be Pluto_
|
| Is Pluto a planet again, or not? Honest question because I
| don't keep up on these things because they have no practical
| effect other than drama...and I try to avoid drama.
| kulahan wrote:
| No. It's smaller than other moons in our solar system. It's
| never going to be a planet again, but a planetoid, dwarf
| planet, or even asteroid is appropriate.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| Just to be pedantic, Mercury is also "smaller than other
| moons in our solar system"
|
| And never is a long time, especially for something as
| fickle as human classification.
| kulahan wrote:
| You're right, it's about gravitational domination.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| My (uninformed) guess is they will eventually reclassify
| all non-moon objects in hydrostatic equilibrium (anything
| round) as planets, which will make Pluto a planet again
| and bring in a half-dozen new objects.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| It boggles my mind when I look up at the Moon, that in fact
| it's a massive rock travelling at something like 2,000 mph,
| always trying to fall onto the Earth, and missing it all the
| time.
| mgiampapa wrote:
| If my goal was to fall into the earth and kept missing I
| would be depressed too. Each try it misses by slightly more
| and it's orbital distance increases. How sad is that?
|
| Also, I like to anthropomorphize inanimate objects because
| secretly they hate it.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| its getting further away, if it helps your understanding of
| the situation better
|
| "falling into" was never part of the equation
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Earth is also constantly failing at falling into the Moon.
|
| Why did we have to evolve in such a loser system??
| dabluecaboose wrote:
| > But its far enough away even at perigee
|
| Minor astrodynamics nit: "perigee" is a term specific to Earth.
| The generic term for all bodies is "periapsis", and the term
| for the Sun is "perihelion"
|
| (Astrodynamics terms generally take from the Greek, rather than
| Latin)
| astroalex wrote:
| I found the preamble at the beginning of the announcement
| charmingly dated:
|
| > The Minor Planet Electronic Circulars contain information on
| unusual minor planets, routine data on comets and natural
| satellites, and occasional editorial announcements. They are
| published on behalf of Division F of the International
| Astronomical Union by the Minor Planet Center, Smithsonian
| Astrophysical Observatory, Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A. > >
| Prepared using the Tamkin Foundation Computer Network
|
| Looking up the Tamkin Foundation Computer Network:
| https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/Ack/TamkinFoundation.h...
|
| > The OpenVMS cluster consists of nine single-CPU workstations
| and one four-CPU server. All the machines are running the
| extremely robust and secure OpenVMS operating system. The twelve
| Alpha-based machines are arranged as an OpenVMS Cluster, allowing
| all machines to share disk storage, execution and batch queues
| and other resources, as well as simplifying system management.
|
| Assuming "Alpha-based machines" is referring to the DEC Alpha,
| these computers are ~30 years old.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Alpha
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Could they not get more juice out of a single, modern server? I
| get porting over to a new system and migrating is a huge time
| suck and a good enough reason not to do it if everything is
| working, just seems excessive for 14 cores.
| Macha wrote:
| > Could they not get more juice out of a single, modern
| server
|
| They could probably get more performance out of one core on a
| modern phone, never mind a single modern server. But you see
| some really old systems in a lot of equipment, not because
| the porting costs are expensive, but the certification of
| proving the new system works the same is more than the
| operational cost of the legacy equipment.
| api wrote:
| I've heard of consultants who will virtualize systems like
| this in place using qemu emulation of CPUs like Alpha and
| Sparc and run it on a single server or in the cloud.
| rubitxxx10 wrote:
| > Could they not get more juice out of a single, modern
| server?
|
| Maybe the software they use won't easily run on a modern
| server.
|
| You could ask them, but you might have to hook up your modem
| and try to call them. Maybe they have a BBS you could leave
| your question on.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Sure, but the capital and one-time cost of acquiring and
| shifting to the modern server would be non-zero, and it would
| entail some risk. (While OpenVMS is maintained and runs on
| newer systems, that doesn't mean the software that matters on
| the existing cluster would run without modification.)
|
| It probably would save operating costs, and probably over a
| reasonably short window, if it was done successfully, though.
| 404mm wrote:
| Maybe not as old. I deployed a few racks of HP Alpha DS25s in
| 2007-2008 before they were replaced with Itanium based Blades
| (running OpenVMS 8.4). I do not miss working with OpenVMS one
| bit. It was rock stable (basically an on/off appliance) but the
| user experience left me wanting (coming from Linux).
|
| I can see how they may be still stuck on Alphas because unless
| they can somehow simply recompile for x86-64 OpenVMS, it's a
| complete rewrite from scratch.
| ccgreg wrote:
| In 2020 I toured the machine room and those boxes were powered
| off.
| ddahlen wrote:
| I got a bit too excited with this one, this is may not be a full
| on dwarf planet, but it is a very large object. There are only a
| small number (about 10-20) objects in our solar system of this
| size. Its the first big one we have found in a number of years.
| calmbell wrote:
| By "small number (about 10-20) objects in our solar system of
| this size" you are referring to the class of objects of a
| similar size rather than the largest objects in the solar
| system?
| d_silin wrote:
| For the curious.
|
| Periapsis, au: 45.241
|
| Apoapsis, au: 1714.759
|
| Period, years: 26106.07
| d_silin wrote:
| It comes to Earth closer than Pluto, btw.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Specifically: when this object is at its closest and Pluto is
| at its farthest then this object can be the one closer to
| Earth. Pluto comes the closest of the two overall though.
| silverfrost wrote:
| 26000 year period and yet it has still been around the sun
| 2000+ times since the dinosaurs went extinct. Make me feel a
| bit insignificant and awed at the same time.
| buryat wrote:
| Humans probably can orbit the sun 2000+ times in a not
| significantly distant future
| tomcam wrote:
| They prefer to be called little planets
| calmbell wrote:
| Here is the arXiv preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15806
| jsnider3 wrote:
| Welcome to the neighborhood!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-05-22 23:02 UTC)