1.
Eris (dwarf planet)
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Eris is the most massive and second-largest dwarf planet known in the Solar System. It is also the known body directly orbiting the Sun. It is measured to be 2,326 ±12 kilometers in diameter, Eris is 27% more massive than dwarf planet Pluto, though Pluto is slightly larger by volume. Eris mass is about 0. 27% of the Earths mass, Eris was discovered in January 2005 by a Palomar Observatory-based team led by Mike Brown, and its identity was verified later that year. It is an object and a member of a high-eccentricity population known as the scattered disk. It has one moon, Dysnomia. As of February 2016, its distance from the Sun is 96.3 astronomical units, because Eris appeared to be larger than Pluto, NASA initially described it as the Solar Systems tenth planet. This, along with the prospect of other objects of similar size being discovered in the future, motivated the International Astronomical Union to define the term planet for the first time. Observations of an occultation by Eris in 2010 showed that its diameter was 2,326 ±12 kilometers, very slightly less than Pluto. Eris was discovered by the team of Mike Brown, Chad Trujillo, the discovery was announced on July 29,2005, the same day as Makemake and two days after Haumea, due in part to events that would later lead to controversy about Haumea. Routine observations were taken by the team on October 21,2003, in January 2005, the re-analysis revealed Eriss slow motion against the background stars. Follow-up observations were carried out to make a preliminary determination of Eriss orbit. More observations released in October 2005 revealed that Eris has a moon, observations of Dysnomias orbit permitted scientists to determine the mass of Eris, which in June 2007 they calculated to be ×1022 kg, 27%±2% greater than Plutos. Eris is named after the Greek goddess Eris, a personification of strife, the regular adjectival form of Eris is Eridian. As a result, for a time the object known to the wider public as Xena. Xena was a name used internally by the discovery team. It was inspired by the character of the television series Xena. The discovery team had saved the nickname Xena for the first body they discovered that was larger than Pluto
2.
Dysnomia (moon)
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Dysnomia —officially Eris I Dysnomia—is the only known moon of the dwarf planet Eris. Observations taken on 10 September revealed a moon in orbit around Eris, in keeping with the Xena nickname that was already in use for Eris, the moon was nicknamed Gabrielle by its discoverers, after Xenas sidekick. It is 60 times fainter than Eris in the K band and 480 times fainter in the V band, which means a very different, and quite redder, spectrum, indicating a significantly darker surface. Assuming its albedo is five times lower than Eriss, its diameter would be 685±50 km, of the Solar Systems dwarf planet and minor planet moons, only Charon is definitely larger than Dysnomia. Combining Keck and Hubble observations, the satellite was used to determine the mass of Eris and its orbital period is calculated to be 15. 774±0.002 d. These observations indicate that Dysnomia has an orbit around Eris. This shows that the mass of Eris is 1.27 times that of Pluto, astronomers now know that the four brightest Kuiper belt objects have satellites. Among the fainter members of the only about 10% are known to have satellites. This is thought to imply that collisions between large KBOs have been frequent in the past, impacts between bodies of the order of 1000 km across would throw off large amounts of material that would coalesce into a moon. A similar mechanism is thought to have led to the formation of the Moon when Earth was struck by a giant impactor early in the history of the Solar System. Mike Brown, the discoverer, chose the name Dysnomia due to a number of associations it had for him. Dysnomia, the daughter of Eris, fits the general historically established pattern of naming moons after lesser gods associated with the primary god, also, the English translation of Dysnomia, lawlessness, echoes Lucy Lawless, the actress famous for starring in Xena, Warrior Princess on television. Before receiving their names, Eris and Dysnomia were nicknamed Xena and Gabrielle. James Christy, who discovered Charon, followed the principle established with Pluto by choosing a name which shared its first four letters with his wifes name, Charlene. Dysnomia, similarly, has the same first letter as Browns wife, Diane, and Brown uses the nickname Dy /ˈdaɪ/ for the moon, because of this, Brown pronounces the full name /daɪsˈnoʊmiə/, with a long y. Media related to Dysnomia at Wikimedia Commons
3.
Centaur (minor planet)
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Centaurs are minor planets with a semi-major axis between those of the outer planets. They have unstable orbits that cross or have crossed the orbits of one or more of the giant planets, Centaurs typically behave with characteristics of both asteroids and comets. They are named after the centaurs that were a mixture of horse. It has been estimated there are around 44,000 centaurs in the Solar System with diameters larger than 1 km. The first centaur to be discovered, under the definition of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, however, they were not recognized as a distinct population until the discovery of 2060 Chiron in 1977. The largest confirmed centaur is 10199 Chariklo, which at 260 km in diameter is as big as a mid-sized main-belt asteroid, however, the lost centaur 1995 SN55 may be somewhat larger. No centaur has been photographed up close, although there is evidence that Saturns moon Phoebe, imaged by the Cassini probe in 2004, in addition, the Hubble Space Telescope has gleaned some information about the surface features of 8405 Asbolus. As of 2008, three centaurs have been found to display comet-like comas, Chiron,60558 Echeclus, and 166P/NEAT, Chiron and Echeclus are therefore classified as both asteroids and comets. Other centaurs, such as 52872 Okyrhoe and 2012 CG, are suspected of having shown comas, any centaur that is perturbed close enough to the Sun is expected to become a comet. The generic definition of a centaur is a body that orbits the Sun between Jupiter and Neptune and crosses the orbits of one or more of the giant planets. Though nowadays the MPC often lists centaurs and scattered disc objects together as a single group, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory similarly defines centaurs as having a semi-major axis, a, between those of Jupiter and Neptune. In contrast, the Deep Ecliptic Survey defines centaurs using a classification scheme. These classifications are based on the change in behavior of the present orbit when extended over 10 million years. The DES defines centaurs as non-resonant objects whose instantaneous perihelia are less than the osculating semi-major axis of Neptune at any time during the simulation and this definition is intended to be synonymous with planet-crossing orbits and to suggest comparatively short lifetimes in the current orbit. The collection The Solar System Beyond Neptune defines objects with an axis between those of Jupiter and Neptune and a Jupiter – Tisserands parameter above 3. The JPL Small-Body Database lists 324 centaurs, there are an additional 65 trans-Neptunian objects with a perihelion closer than the orbit of Uranus. The Committee on Small Body Nomenclature of the International Astronomical Union has not formally weighed in on either side of the debate, thus far, only the binary objects Ceto and Phorcys and Typhon and Echidna have been named according to the new policy. Other objects caught between these differences in classification methods include 944 Hidalgo which was discovered in 1920 and is listed as a centaur in the JPL Small-Body Database
4.
Neptune trojan
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Neptune trojans are bodies in orbit around the Sun that orbit near one of the stable Lagrangian points of Neptune. They therefore have approximately the same period as Neptune and follow roughly the same orbital path. Seventeen Neptune trojans are known, of which thirteen orbit near the Sun–Neptune L4 Lagrangian point 60° ahead of Neptune. The Neptune trojans are termed trojans by analogy with the Jupiter trojans and it is suspected that large Neptune trojans could outnumber Jupiter trojans by an order of magnitude. In 2010, the discovery of the first known L5 Neptune trojan,2008 LC18, was announced, Neptunes trailing L5 region is currently very difficult to observe because it is along the line-of-sight to the center of the Milky Way, an area of the sky crowded with stars. However, New Horizons may not have had sufficient downlink bandwidth, in 2001, the first Neptune trojan was discovered,2001 QR322, near Neptunes L4 region, and with it the fifth known populated stable reservoir of small bodies in the Solar System. In 2005, the discovery of the high-inclination trojan 2005 TN53 has indicated that the Neptune trojans populate thick clouds, on August 12,2010, the first L5 trojan,2008 LC18, was announced. It was discovered by a survey that scanned regions where the light from the stars near the Galactic Center is obscured by dust clouds. This suggests that large L5 trojans are as common as large L4 trojans, to within uncertainty and it would have been possible for the New Horizons spacecraft to investigate L5 Neptune trojans discovered by 2014, when it passed through this region of space en route to Pluto. Some of the patches where the light from the Galactic Center is obscured by dust clouds are along New Horizonss flight path, allowing detection of objects that the spacecraft could image. 2011 HM102, the highest-inclination Neptune trojan known, was just bright enough for New Horizons to observe it in end-2013 at a distance of 1.2 AU. However, New Horizons may not have had sufficient downlink bandwidth, the orbits of Neptune trojans are highly stable, Neptune may have retained up to 50% of the original post-migration trojan population over the age of the Solar System. Neptunes L5 can host stable trojans equally well as its L4, Neptune trojans can librate up to 30° from their associated Lagrangian points with a 10, 000-year period. Neptune trojans that escape enter orbits similar to centaurs, although Neptune cannot currently capture stable trojans, roughly 2. 8% of the centaurs within 34 AU are predicted to be Neptune co-orbitals. Of these, 54% would be in horseshoe orbits, 10% would be quasi-satellites, the unexpected high-inclination trojans are the key to understanding the origin and evolution of the population as a whole. The existence of high-inclination Neptune trojans points to a capture during planetary migration instead of in situ or collisional formation. The estimated equal number of large L5 and L4 trojans indicates that there was no gas drag during capture, the capture of Neptune trojans during a migration of the planets occurs via process similar to the chaotic capture of Jupiter trojans in the Nice model. When Uranus and Neptune are near but not in a mean-motion resonance the period at which the locations where Uranus passes Neptune circulate can resonate with the periods of Neptune trojans
5.
Trans-Neptunian object
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A trans-Neptunian object is any minor planet in the Solar System that orbits the Sun at a greater average distance than Neptune,30 astronomical units. Twelve minor planets with a semi-major axis greater than 150 AU and perihelion greater than 30 AU are known, the first trans-Neptunian object to be discovered was Pluto in 1930. It took until 1992 to discover a second trans-Neptunian object orbiting the Sun directly,1992 QB1, as of February 2017 over 2,300 trans-Neptunian objects appear on the Minor Planet Centers List of Transneptunian Objects. Of these TNOs,2,000 have a perihelion farther out than Neptune, as of November 2016,242 of these have their orbits well-enough determined that they have been given a permanent minor planet designation. The largest known object is Pluto, followed by Eris,2007 OR10, Makemake. The Kuiper belt, scattered disk, and Oort cloud are three divisions of this volume of space, though treatments vary and a few objects such as Sedna do not fit easily into any division. The orbit of each of the planets is slightly affected by the influences of the other planets. Discrepancies in the early 1900s between the observed and expected orbits of Uranus and Neptune suggested that there were one or more additional planets beyond Neptune, the search for these led to the discovery of Pluto in February 1930, which was too small to explain the discrepancies. Revised estimates of Neptunes mass from the Voyager 2 flyby in 1989 showed that the problem was spurious, Pluto was easiest to find because it has the highest apparent magnitude of all known trans-Neptunian objects. It also has an inclination to the ecliptic than most other large TNOs. After Plutos discovery, American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh continued searching for years for similar objects. For a long time, no one searched for other TNOs as it was believed that Pluto. Only after the 1992 discovery of a second TNO,1992 QB1, a broad strip of the sky around the ecliptic was photographed and digitally evaluated for slowly moving objects. Hundreds of TNOs were found, with diameters in the range of 50 to 2,500 kilometers, Pluto and Eris were eventually classified as dwarf planets by the International Astronomical Union. Kuiper belt objects are classified into the following two groups, Resonant objects are locked in an orbital resonance with Neptune. Objects with a 1,2 resonance are called twotinos, and objects with a 2,3 resonance are called plutinos, after their most prominent member, classical Kuiper belt objects have no such resonance, moving on almost circular orbits, unperturbed by Neptune. Examples are 1992 QB1,50000 Quaoar and Makemake, the scattered disc contains objects farther from the Sun, usually with very irregular orbits. A typical example is the most massive known TNO, Eris, scattered-extended —Scattered-extended objects have a Tisserand parameter greater than 3 and have a time-averaged eccentricity greater than 0
6.
Kuiper belt
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It is similar to the asteroid belt, but it is far larger—20 times as wide and 20 to 200 times as massive. Like the asteroid belt, it consists mainly of small bodies, although many asteroids are composed primarily of rock and metal, most Kuiper belt objects are composed largely of frozen volatiles, such as methane, ammonia and water. The Kuiper belt is home to three officially recognized dwarf planets, Pluto, Haumea, and Makemake, some of the Solar Systems moons, such as Neptunes Triton and Saturns Phoebe, are also thought to have originated in the region. The Kuiper belt was named after Dutch-American astronomer Gerard Kuiper, though he did not actually predict its existence, in 1992,1992 QB1 was discovered, the first Kuiper belt object since Pluto. Since its discovery, the number of known KBOs has increased to over a thousand, the Kuiper belt should not be confused with the theorized Oort cloud, which is a thousand times more distant and is mostly spherical. The objects within the Kuiper belt, together with the members of the scattered disc, Pluto is the largest and most-massive member of the Kuiper belt and the largest and the second-most-massive known TNO, surpassed only by Eris in the scattered disc. Originally considered a planet, Plutos status as part of the Kuiper belt caused it to be reclassified as a planet in 2006. It is compositionally similar to other objects of the Kuiper belt, and its orbital period is characteristic of a class of KBOs, known as plutinos. After the discovery of Pluto in 1930, many speculated that it not be alone. The region now called the Kuiper belt was hypothesized in various forms for decades and it was only in 1992 that the first direct evidence for its existence was found. The number and variety of speculations on the nature of the Kuiper belt have led to continued uncertainty as to who deserves credit for first proposing it. The first astronomer to suggest the existence of a population was Frederick C. That same year, astronomer Armin O. Leuschner suggested that Pluto may be one of many long-period planetary objects yet to be discovered. Kuiper was operating on the common in his time that Pluto was the size of Earth and had therefore scattered these bodies out toward the Oort cloud or out of the Solar System. Were Kuipers hypothesis correct, there would not be a Kuiper belt today, the hypothesis took many other forms in the following decades. Cameron postulated the existence of a mass of small material on the outskirts of the solar system. Observation, however, ruled out this hypothesis, in 1977, Charles Kowal discovered 2060 Chiron, an icy planetoid with an orbit between Saturn and Uranus. He used a blink comparator, the device that had allowed Clyde Tombaugh to discover Pluto nearly 50 years before
7.
Classical Kuiper belt object
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A classical Kuiper belt object, also called a cubewano, is a low-eccentricity Kuiper belt object that orbits beyond Neptune and is not controlled by an orbital resonance with Neptune. Cubewanos have orbits with semi-major axes in the 40–50 AU range and, unlike Pluto and that is, they have low-eccentricity and sometimes low-inclination orbits like the classical planets. The name cubewano derives from the first trans-Neptunian object found after Pluto, similar objects found later were often called QB1-os, or cubewanos, after this object, though the term classical is much more frequently used in the scientific literature. Most cubewanos are found between the 2,3 orbital resonance with Neptune and the 1,2 resonance,50000 Quaoar, for example, has a near-circular orbit close to the ecliptic. Plutinos, on the hand, have more eccentric orbits bringing some of them closer to the Sun than Neptune. The majority of objects, have low inclinations and near-circular orbits, a smaller population is characterised by highly inclined, more eccentric orbits. The Deep Ecliptic Survey reports the distributions of the two populations, one with the inclination centered at 4. 6° and another with inclinations extending beyond 30°, the vast majority of KBOs have inclinations of less than 5° and eccentricities of less than 0.1. The hot and cold populations are different, more than 30% of all cubewanos are in low inclination. The parameters of the orbits are more evenly distributed, with a local maximum in moderate eccentricities in 0. 15–0.2 range. See also the comparison with scattered disk objects, when orbital inclinations are compared, hot cubewanos can be easily distinguished by their higher inclinations, as the plutinos typically keep orbits below 20°. In addition to the orbital characteristics, the two populations display different physical characteristics. The difference in colour between the red cold population and more heterogeneous hot population was observed as early as in 2002, another difference between the low-inclination and high-inclination classical objects is the observed number of binary objects. Binaries are quite common on low-inclination orbits and are typically similar-brightness systems, binaries are less common on high-inclination orbits and their components typically differ in brightness. There is no definition of cubewano or classical KBO. However, the terms are used to refer to objects free from significant perturbation from Neptune. The Minor Planet Center and the Deep Ecliptic Survey do not list cubewanos using the same criteria, many TNOs classified as cubewanos by the MPC are classified as ScatNear by the DES. Dwarf planet Makemake is such a borderline classical cubewano/scatnear object,2002 KX14 may be an inner cubewano near the plutinos. Furthermore, there is evidence that the Kuiper belt has an edge, in that an apparent lack of objects beyond 47–49 AU was suspected as early as 1998
8.
Resonant trans-Neptunian object
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In astronomy, a resonant trans-Neptunian object is a trans-Neptunian object in mean-motion orbital resonance with Neptune. The orbital periods of the resonant objects are in a simple integer relations with the period of Neptune e. g.1,2,2,3 etc, resonant TNOs can be either part of the main Kuiper belt population, or the more distant scattered disc population. The diagram illustrates the distribution of the known trans-Neptunian objects, resonant objects are plotted in red. The designation 2,3 or 3,2 both refer to the resonance for TNOs. There is no ambiguity, because TNOs have, by definition, the usage depends on the author and the field of research. Detailed analytical and numerical studies of Neptune’s resonances have shown that the objects must have a precise range of energies. If the objects semi-major axis is outside these ranges, the orbit becomes chaotic. As TNOs were discovered, more than 10% were found to be in 2,3 resonances and it is now believed that the objects have been collected from wider distances by sweeping resonances during the migration of Neptune. During this relatively short period of time, Neptunes resonances would be sweeping the space, the 2,3 resonance at 39.4 AU is by far the dominant category among the resonant objects, with 92 confirmed and 104 possible member bodies. The objects following orbits in this resonance are named plutinos after Pluto, the objects are rather small and most of them follow orbits close to the ecliptic. Twotinos have inclinations less than 15 degrees and generally moderate eccentricities, there are far fewer objects in this resonance than plutinos. Consequently, it might be that twotinos were originally as numerous as plutinos and these Neptune trojans, termed by analogy to the Trojan asteroids, are in 1,1 resonance with Neptune. One of the concerns is that weak resonances may exist and would be difficult to due to the current lack of accuracy in the orbits of these distant objects. Many objects have orbital periods of more than 300 years and most have only observed over a short observation arc of a couple years. A true resonance will smoothly oscillate while a coincidental near resonance will circulate, simulations by Emel’yanenko and Kiseleva in 2007 show that 2001 XT254 is librating in a 3,7 resonance with Neptune. This libration can be stable for less than 100 million to billions of years, Emel’yanenko and Kiseleva also show that 1995 TL8 appears to have less than a 1% probability of being in a 3,7 resonance with Neptune, but it does execute circulations near this resonance. The classes of TNO have no universally agreed definitions, the boundaries are often unclear. The Deep Ecliptic Survey introduced formally defined dynamical classes based on long-term forward integration of orbits under the combined perturbations from all four giant planets
9.
Plutino
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In astronomy, a plutino is a trans-Neptunian object in 2,3 mean-motion resonance with Neptune. For every 2 orbits that a plutino makes, Neptune orbits 3 times, the term plutino derived from the dwarf planet Pluto, the largest and the first plutino discovered. The term does not imply common physical characteristics, Plutinos are named after mythological creatures associated with the underworld. Plutinos form the part of the Kuiper belt and represent about a quarter of the known Kuiper belt objects. Plutinos are the largest class of the resonant trans-Neptunian objects, aside from Pluto itself, the first plutino,1993 RO, was discovered on September 16,1993. It is thought that objects that are currently in mean orbital resonances with Neptune initially followed independent heliocentric paths. As Neptune migrated outward early in the Solar Systems history, the bodies it approached would have been scattered, during this process, the 3,2 resonance is the strongest and most stable among all resonances. This is the reason it contains the largest number of bodies. The orbital periods of plutinos cluster around 247.3 years, the gravitational influence of Pluto is usually neglected given its small mass. However, the width is very narrow and only a few times larger than Pluto’s Hill sphere. Consequently, depending on the eccentricity, some plutinos will be driven out of the resonance by interactions with Pluto. Numerical simulations suggest that the orbits of plutinos with an eccentricity 10%–30% smaller or larger than that of Pluto are not stable over Ga timescales, the plutinos brighter than HV=6 include, David Jewitt on Plutinos Minor Planet Center, List of TNOs MPC List of Distant Minor Planets
10.
Detached object
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Detached objects are a dynamical class of minor planets in the outer reaches of the Solar System and belong to the broader family of trans-Neptunian objects. This reflects the dynamical gradation that can exist between the parameters of the scattered disk and the detached population. At least nine such bodies have been identified, of which the largest, most distant. Those with perihelia greater than 75 AU are termed sednoids, as of 2016, there are two known sednoids, Sedna and 2012 VP113. Detached objects have much larger than Neptunes aphelion. They often have highly elliptical, very large orbits with semi-major axes of up to a few hundred astronomical units, such orbits cannot have been created by gravitational scattering by the giant planets. Instead, a number of explanations have been put forward, including an encounter with a star or a distant planet-sized object. The classification suggested by the Deep Ecliptic Survey team introduces a distinction between scattered-near objects and scattered-extended objects using a Tisserands parameter value of 3. Detached objects are one of five distinct classes of TNO, the other four classes are classical Kuiper-belt objects, resonant objects, scattered-disc objects. Detached objects generally have a distance greater than 40 AU, deterring strong interactions with Neptune. However, there are no boundaries between the scattered and detached regions, since both can coexist as TNOs in an intermediate region with perihelion distance between 37 and 40 AU. One such intermediate body with a well determined orbit is 2003 FY128, although Sedna is officially considered a scattered-disc object by the MPC, its discoverer Michael E. This classification of Sedna as an object is accepted in recent publications. They have orbital periods of more than 300 years and most have only observed over a short observation arc of a couple years. Further improvement in the orbit and potential resonance of objects will help to understand the migration of the giant planets. For example, simulations by Emel’yanenko and Kiseleva in 2007 show that many distant objects could be in resonance with Neptune. They show a 10% likelihood that 2000 CR105 is in a 20,1 resonance, a 38% likelihood that 2003 QK91 is in a 10,3 resonance, and an 84% likelihood that 2000 YW134 is in an 8,3 resonance. The likely dwarf planet 2005 TB190 appears to have less than a 1% likelihood of being in a 4,1 resonance
11.
Sednoid
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A sednoid is a trans-Neptunian object with a perihelion greater than 50 AU and a semi-major axis greater than 150 AU. Only two objects are known from this population,90377 Sedna and 2012 VP113, both of which have greater than 75 AU, but it is suspected that there are many more. These objects lie outside an apparently nearly empty gap in the Solar System starting at about 50 AU and they are usually grouped with the detached objects. The sednoids orbits cannot be explained by perturbations from the giant planets and their orbits could have been disrupted by an as-yet-unknown planet-sized body beyond the Kuiper belt such as the hypothesized Planet Nine. They could have captured from around passing stars, most likely in the Suns birth cluster. The two sednoids, like all of the more extreme detached objects, have an orientation of ≈ 0°.5 Gyr for Sedna. This suggests that one or more undiscovered massive perturbers may exist in the outer Solar System, a super-Earth at 250 AU would cause these objects to librate around ω = 0°±60° for billions of years. There are multiple possible configurations and a low-albedo super-Earth at that distance would have an apparent magnitude below the current all-sky-survey detection limits and this hypothetical super-Earth has been dubbed Telisto and Planet Nine. Larger, more-distant perturbers would also be too faint to be detected, fourteen known objects have a semi-major axis greater than 150 AU, a perihelion beyond Neptune, an argument of perihelion of 340°±55°, and an observation arc of more than 1 year. Each of the mechanisms for Sednas extreme orbit would leave a distinct mark on the structure. If a trans-Neptunian planet was responsible, all such objects would share roughly the same perihelion, if it rotated in the opposite direction, then two populations would form, one with low and one with high inclinations. The perturbations from passing stars would produce a variety of perihelia and inclinations, each dependent on the number. Acquiring a larger sample of objects would therefore help in determining which scenario is most likely. I call Sedna a fossil record of the earliest Solar System, eventually, when other fossil records are found, Sedna will help tell us how the Sun formed and the number of stars that were close to the Sun when it formed. A 2007–2008 survey by Brown, Rabinowitz and Schwamb attempted to locate another member of Sednas hypothetical population, although the survey was sensitive to movement out to 1,000 AU and discovered the likely dwarf planet 2007 OR10, it detected no new sednoids. Subsequent simulations incorporating the new data suggested about 40 Sedna-sized objects probably exist in this region, new icy body hints at planet lurking beyond Pluto
12.
Oort cloud
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The Oort cloud, sometimes called the Öpik–Oort cloud, is a theoretical cloud of predominantly icy planetesimals believed to surround the Sun to as far as somewhere between 50,000 and 200,000 AU. It is divided into two regions, a disc-shaped inner Oort cloud and a spherical outer Oort cloud, both regions lie beyond the heliosphere and in interstellar space. The Kuiper belt and the disc, the other two reservoirs of trans-Neptunian objects, are less than one thousandth as far from the Sun as the Oort cloud. The outer limit of the Oort cloud defines the boundary of the Solar System. The outer Oort cloud is only bound to the Solar System. These forces occasionally dislodge comets from their orbits within the cloud, based on their orbits, most of the short-period comets may come from the scattered disc, but some may still have originated from the Oort cloud. In 1932, the Estonian astronomer Ernst Öpik postulated that long-period comets originated in a cloud at the outermost edge of the Solar System. The idea was revived by Dutch astronomer Jan Oort as a means to resolve a paradox. Thus, Oort reasoned, a comet could not have formed while in its current orbit, there are two main classes of comet, short-period comets and long-period comets. Ecliptic comets have relatively small orbits, below 10 AU, and follow the ecliptic plane, all long-period comets have very large orbits, on the order of thousands of AU, and appear from every direction in the sky. Oort noted that there was a peak in numbers of comets with aphelia of roughly 20,000 AU. The Oort cloud is thought to occupy a vast space from somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 AU to as far as 50,000 AU from the Sun, some estimates place the outer edge at between 100,000 and 200,000 AU. The region can be subdivided into a spherical outer Oort cloud of 20, 000–50,000 AU, the outer cloud is only weakly bound to the Sun and supplies the long-period comets to inside the orbit of Neptune. The inner Oort cloud is known as the Hills cloud, named after Jack G. Hills. The Hills cloud explains the existence of the Oort cloud after billions of years. The outer Oort cloud may have trillions of objects larger than 1 km, earlier it was thought to be more massive, but improved knowledge of the size distribution of long-period comets led to lower estimates. The mass of the inner Oort cloud has not been characterized, if analyses of comets are representative of the whole, the vast majority of Oort-cloud objects consist of ices such as water, methane, ethane, carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide. The Oort cloud is thought to be a remnant of the protoplanetary disc that formed around the Sun approximately 4.6 billion years ago
13.
Dwarf planet
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A dwarf planet is a planetary-mass object that is neither a planet nor a natural satellite. The International Astronomical Union currently recognizes five dwarf planets, Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, another hundred or so known objects in the Solar System are suspected to be dwarf planets. Individual astronomers recognize several of these, and in August 2011 Mike Brown published a list of 390 candidate objects, Stern states that there are more than a dozen known dwarf planets. Only two of these bodies, Ceres and Pluto, have observed in enough detail to demonstrate that they actually fit the IAUs definition. The IAU accepted Eris as a dwarf planet because it is more massive than Pluto and they subsequently decided that unnamed trans-Neptunian objects with an absolute magnitude brighter than +1 are to be named under the assumption that they are dwarf planets. The classification of bodies in other systems with the characteristics of dwarf planets has not been addressed. Starting in 1801, astronomers discovered Ceres and other bodies between Mars and Jupiter which were for some decades considered to be planets. Between then and around 1851, when the number of planets had reached 23, astronomers started using the asteroid for the smaller bodies. With the discovery of Pluto in 1930, most astronomers considered the Solar System to have nine planets and it was roughly one-twentieth the mass of Mercury, which made Pluto by far the smallest planet. Although it was more than ten times as massive as the largest object in the asteroid belt, Ceres. In the 1990s, astronomers began to find objects in the region of space as Pluto. Many of these shared several of Plutos key orbital characteristics, and Pluto started being seen as the largest member of a new class of objects and this led some astronomers to stop referring to Pluto as a planet. Several terms, including subplanet and planetoid, started to be used for the now known as dwarf planets. By 2005, three trans-Neptunian objects comparable in size to Pluto had been reported and it became clear that either they would also have to be classified as planets, or Pluto would have to be reclassified. Astronomers were also confident that more objects as large as Pluto would be discovered, Eris was discovered in January 2005, it was thought to be slightly larger than Pluto, and some reports informally referred to it as the tenth planet. As a consequence, the became a matter of intense debate during the IAU General Assembly in August 2006. The IAUs initial draft proposal included Charon, Eris, and Ceres in the list of planets, dropping Charon from the list, the new proposal also removed Pluto, Ceres, and Eris, because they have not cleared their orbits. The IAUs final Resolution 5A preserved this three-category system for the bodies orbiting the Sun
14.
Plutoid
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A plutoid or ice dwarf is a trans-Neptunian dwarf planet, i. e. a body orbiting beyond Neptune that is massive enough to be rounded in shape. The term plutoid was adopted by the International Astronomical Union working group Committee on Small Bodies Nomenclature, the term plutoid is not widely used by astronomers, though ice dwarf is not uncommon. There are thought to be thousands of plutoids in the Solar System, the IAU developed this category of astronomical objects as a consequence of its 2006 resolution defining the word planet. Satellites of plutoids are not plutoids themselves, on 24 August 2006, the IAU decided to reclassify Pluto as a dwarf planet, requiring that a planet must clear the neighbourhood around its orbit. The General Assembly of the IAU further resolved, Pluto is recognized as the prototype of a new category of Trans-Neptunian Objects and this new category had been proposed under the name pluton or a plutonian object earlier in the General Assembly. The former was rejected, in part because pluton is a geological term, the definition of the category also fluctuated during its early stages. Ultimately, the final resolution left the definition, like the name. The term was announced after the Executive Committee meeting, along with a simplified definition. However, due to an error, the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature was not consulted. As of 2009, the term had not been accepted by the scientific community. Prior to the emergence of the term plutoid as an IAU-sanctioned categorization, the term ice dwarf saw some adoption as a near-synonym to the eventual term plutoid. There are large numbers of objects in the Oort cloud. However, it is not clear whether all so-categorized ice dwarfs are actually icier than icy asteroids such as Ceres, nonetheless, Ceres is sometimes called a terrestrial dwarf to distinguish it from Pluto and Eris. This conception foreshadowed the reclassification of Pluto to dwarf planet and plutoid after the discovery of Eris, with the creation of the term dwarf planet, some ambiguity was created as to which of two IAU bodies would be responsible for naming dwarf planets. Eris had been named through the IAU Committee on Small Body Nomenclature, along with announcing the name plutoid, the IAU decision of 11 June 2008 institutionalized this cooperative process involving the two bodies in the naming of new plutoids. In keeping with minor planet naming guidelines, priority will be given to names proposed by the discovery teams, and plutoids may not share a name with a small Solar System body. When the definition of planet was instated at the IAU General Assembly of 2006, Ceres, Pluto. However, precise regulations as to how hydrostatic equilibrium would be measured were left undefined for the time being, without an official procedure for calculating the lower bound of size to be a dwarf planet, no further bodies could be formally recognized as either dwarf planets or plutoids
15.
Circumstellar disc
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A circumstellar disc is a torus, pancake or ring-shaped accumulation of matter composed of gas, dust, planetesimals, asteroids or collision fragments in orbit around a star. Around the youngest stars, they are the reservoirs of material out of which planets may form, around mature stars, they indicate that planetesimal formation has taken place and around white dwarfs, they indicate that planetary material survived the whole of stellar evolution. Such a disc can manifest itself in various ways, the infalling material possesses some amount of angular momentum, which results in the formation of a gaseous protoplanetary disc around the young, rotating star. The former is a circumstellar disc of dense gas and dust that continues to feed the central star. It may contain a few percent of the mass of the central star, the main accretion phase lasts a few million years, with accretion rates typically between 10−7 and 10−9 solar masses per year. The disc gradually cools in what is known as the T Tauri star stage, within this disc, the formation of small dust grains made of rocks and ices can occur, and these can coagulate into planetesimals. If the disc is sufficiently massive, the runaway accretions begin, the formation of planetary systems is thought to be a natural result of star formation. A sun-like star usually takes around 100 million years to form, asteroid belt is a reservoir of small bodies in the Solar System located between the orbit of Mars and Jupiter. It is a source of interplanetary dust, edgeworth-Kuiper belt, beyond the orbit of Neptune Scattered disc, beyond the orbit of Neptune Hills cloud, only the inner Oort cloud has a toroid-like shape. The outer Oort cloud is more spherical in shape, making it a circumstellar envelope, the infall of gas onto a binary system allows the formation of circumstellar and circumbinary discs. The formation of such a disc will occur for any system in which infalling gas which contains some degree of angular momentum. A general progression of disc formation is observed with increasing levels of angular momentum and this type of disc will form through accretion if any angular momentum is present in the infalling gas. Circumsecondary disc is one which orbits around the star of the binary star system. This type of disc will form when a high enough level of angular momentum is present within the infalling gas. The amount of angular momentum required is dependent on the mass ratio. Circumbinary disc is one which orbits about both the primary and secondary stars, such a disc will form at a later time than the circumprimary and circumsecondary discs, with an inner radius much larger than the orbital radius of the binary system. An example of a disc may be seen around the star system GG Tauri. Once a circumstellar disc has formed, spiral density waves are created within the material via a differential torque due to the binarys gravity
16.
Solar System
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The Solar System is the gravitationally bound system comprising the Sun and the objects that orbit it, either directly or indirectly. Of those objects that orbit the Sun directly, the largest eight are the planets, with the remainder being significantly smaller objects, such as dwarf planets, of the objects that orbit the Sun indirectly, the moons, two are larger than the smallest planet, Mercury. The Solar System formed 4.6 billion years ago from the collapse of a giant interstellar molecular cloud. The vast majority of the mass is in the Sun. The four smaller inner planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, are terrestrial planets, being composed of rock. The four outer planets are giant planets, being more massive than the terrestrials. All planets have almost circular orbits that lie within a flat disc called the ecliptic. The Solar System also contains smaller objects, the asteroid belt, which lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, mostly contains objects composed, like the terrestrial planets, of rock and metal. Beyond Neptunes orbit lie the Kuiper belt and scattered disc, which are populations of trans-Neptunian objects composed mostly of ices, within these populations are several dozen to possibly tens of thousands of objects large enough that they have been rounded by their own gravity. Such objects are categorized as dwarf planets, identified dwarf planets include the asteroid Ceres and the trans-Neptunian objects Pluto and Eris. In addition to two regions, various other small-body populations, including comets, centaurs and interplanetary dust clouds. Six of the planets, at least four of the dwarf planets, each of the outer planets is encircled by planetary rings of dust and other small objects. The solar wind, a stream of charged particles flowing outwards from the Sun, the heliopause is the point at which pressure from the solar wind is equal to the opposing pressure of the interstellar medium, it extends out to the edge of the scattered disc. The Oort cloud, which is thought to be the source for long-period comets, the Solar System is located in the Orion Arm,26,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way. For most of history, humanity did not recognize or understand the concept of the Solar System, the invention of the telescope led to the discovery of further planets and moons. The principal component of the Solar System is the Sun, a G2 main-sequence star that contains 99. 86% of the known mass. The Suns four largest orbiting bodies, the giant planets, account for 99% of the mass, with Jupiter. The remaining objects of the Solar System together comprise less than 0. 002% of the Solar Systems total mass, most large objects in orbit around the Sun lie near the plane of Earths orbit, known as the ecliptic
17.
Small Solar System body
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A Small Solar System Body is an object in the Solar System that is neither a planet, nor a dwarf planet, nor a natural satellite. The term was first defined in 2006 by the International Astronomical Union, all other objects, except satellites, orbiting the Sun shall be referred to collectively as Small Solar System Bodies. These currently include most of the Solar System asteroids, most Trans-Neptunian Objects, comets and this encompasses all comets and all minor planets other than those that are dwarf planets. Except for the largest, which are in equilibrium, natural satellites differ from small Solar System bodies not in size. The orbits of satellites are not centered on the Sun, but around other Solar System objects such as planets, dwarf planets. Some of the larger small Solar System bodies may be reclassified in future as dwarf planets, the orbits of the vast majority of small Solar System bodies are located in two distinct areas, namely the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt. These two belts possess some internal structure related to perturbations by the planets, and have fairly loosely defined boundaries. Other areas of the Solar System also encompass small bodies in smaller concentrations and these include the near-Earth asteroids, centaurs, comets, and scattered disc objects
18.
Orbital eccentricity
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The orbital eccentricity of an astronomical object is a parameter that determines the amount by which its orbit around another body deviates from a perfect circle. A value of 0 is an orbit, values between 0 and 1 form an elliptical orbit,1 is a parabolic escape orbit. The term derives its name from the parameters of conic sections and it is normally used for the isolated two-body problem, but extensions exist for objects following a rosette orbit through the galaxy. In a two-body problem with inverse-square-law force, every orbit is a Kepler orbit, the eccentricity of this Kepler orbit is a non-negative number that defines its shape. The limit case between an ellipse and a hyperbola, when e equals 1, is parabola, radial trajectories are classified as elliptic, parabolic, or hyperbolic based on the energy of the orbit, not the eccentricity. Radial orbits have zero angular momentum and hence eccentricity equal to one, keeping the energy constant and reducing the angular momentum, elliptic, parabolic, and hyperbolic orbits each tend to the corresponding type of radial trajectory while e tends to 1. For a repulsive force only the trajectory, including the radial version, is applicable. For elliptical orbits, a simple proof shows that arcsin yields the projection angle of a circle to an ellipse of eccentricity e. For example, to view the eccentricity of the planet Mercury, next, tilt any circular object by that angle and the apparent ellipse projected to your eye will be of that same eccentricity. From Medieval Latin eccentricus, derived from Greek ἔκκεντρος ekkentros out of the center, from ἐκ- ek-, eccentric first appeared in English in 1551, with the definition a circle in which the earth, sun. Five years later, in 1556, a form of the word was added. The eccentricity of an orbit can be calculated from the state vectors as the magnitude of the eccentricity vector, e = | e | where. For elliptical orbits it can also be calculated from the periapsis and apoapsis since rp = a and ra = a, where a is the semimajor axis. E = r a − r p r a + r p =1 −2 r a r p +1 where, rp is the radius at periapsis. For Earths annual orbit path, ra/rp ratio = longest_radius / shortest_radius ≈1.034 relative to center point of path, the eccentricity of the Earths orbit is currently about 0.0167, the Earths orbit is nearly circular. Venus and Neptune have even lower eccentricity, over hundreds of thousands of years, the eccentricity of the Earths orbit varies from nearly 0.0034 to almost 0.058 as a result of gravitational attractions among the planets. The table lists the values for all planets and dwarf planets, Mercury has the greatest orbital eccentricity of any planet in the Solar System. Such eccentricity is sufficient for Mercury to receive twice as much solar irradiation at perihelion compared to aphelion, before its demotion from planet status in 2006, Pluto was considered to be the planet with the most eccentric orbit
19.
Orbital inclination
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Orbital inclination measures the tilt of an objects orbit around a celestial body. It is expressed as the angle between a plane and the orbital plane or axis of direction of the orbiting object. For a satellite orbiting the Earth directly above the equator, the plane of the orbit is the same as the Earths equatorial plane. The general case is that the orbit is tilted, it spends half an orbit over the northern hemisphere. If the orbit swung between 20° north latitude and 20° south latitude, then its orbital inclination would be 20°, the inclination is one of the six orbital elements describing the shape and orientation of a celestial orbit. It is the angle between the plane and the plane of reference, normally stated in degrees. For a satellite orbiting a planet, the plane of reference is usually the plane containing the planets equator, for planets in the Solar System, the plane of reference is usually the ecliptic, the plane in which the Earth orbits the Sun. This reference plane is most practical for Earth-based observers, therefore, Earths inclination is, by definition, zero. Inclination could instead be measured with respect to another plane, such as the Suns equator or the invariable plane, the inclination of orbits of natural or artificial satellites is measured relative to the equatorial plane of the body they orbit, if they orbit sufficiently closely. The equatorial plane is the perpendicular to the axis of rotation of the central body. An inclination of 30° could also be described using an angle of 150°, the convention is that the normal orbit is prograde, an orbit in the same direction as the planet rotates. Inclinations greater than 90° describe retrograde orbits, thus, An inclination of 0° means the orbiting body has a prograde orbit in the planets equatorial plane. An inclination greater than 0° and less than 90° also describe prograde orbits, an inclination of 63. 4° is often called a critical inclination, when describing artificial satellites orbiting the Earth, because they have zero apogee drift. An inclination of exactly 90° is an orbit, in which the spacecraft passes over the north and south poles of the planet. An inclination greater than 90° and less than 180° is a retrograde orbit, an inclination of exactly 180° is a retrograde equatorial orbit. For gas giants, the orbits of moons tend to be aligned with the giant planets equator, the inclination of exoplanets or members of multiple stars is the angle of the plane of the orbit relative to the plane perpendicular to the line-of-sight from Earth to the object. An inclination of 0° is an orbit, meaning the plane of its orbit is parallel to the sky. An inclination of 90° is an orbit, meaning the plane of its orbit is perpendicular to the sky
20.
Perihelia
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An apsis is an extreme point in an objects orbit. The word comes via Latin from Greek and is cognate with apse, for elliptic orbits about a larger body, there are two apsides, named with the prefixes peri- and ap-, or apo- added to a reference to the thing being orbited. For a body orbiting the Sun, the point of least distance is the perihelion, the terms become periastron and apastron when discussing orbits around other stars. For any satellite of Earth including the Moon the point of least distance is the perigee, for objects in Lunar orbit, the point of least distance is the pericynthion and the greatest distance the apocynthion. For any orbits around a center of mass, there are the terms pericenter and apocenter, periapsis and apoapsis are equivalent alternatives. A straight line connecting the pericenter and apocenter is the line of apsides and this is the major axis of the ellipse, its greatest diameter. For a two-body system the center of mass of the lies on this line at one of the two foci of the ellipse. When one body is larger than the other it may be taken to be at this focus. Historically, in systems, apsides were measured from the center of the Earth. In orbital mechanics, the apsis technically refers to the distance measured between the centers of mass of the central and orbiting body. However, in the case of spacecraft, the family of terms are used to refer to the orbital altitude of the spacecraft from the surface of the central body. The arithmetic mean of the two limiting distances is the length of the axis a. The geometric mean of the two distances is the length of the semi-minor axis b, the geometric mean of the two limiting speeds is −2 ε = μ a which is the speed of a body in a circular orbit whose radius is a. The words pericenter and apocenter are often seen, although periapsis/apoapsis are preferred in technical usage, various related terms are used for other celestial objects. The -gee, -helion and -astron and -galacticon forms are used in the astronomical literature when referring to the Earth, Sun, stars. The suffix -jove is occasionally used for Jupiter, while -saturnium has very rarely used in the last 50 years for Saturn. The -gee form is used as a generic closest approach to planet term instead of specifically applying to the Earth. During the Apollo program, the terms pericynthion and apocynthion were used when referring to the Moon, regarding black holes, the term peri/apomelasma was used by physicist Geoffrey A. Landis in 1998 before peri/aponigricon appeared in the scientific literature in 2002
21.
Astronomical unit
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The astronomical unit is a unit of length, roughly the distance from Earth to the Sun. However, that varies as Earth orbits the Sun, from a maximum to a minimum. Originally conceived as the average of Earths aphelion and perihelion, it is now defined as exactly 149597870700 metres, the astronomical unit is used primarily as a convenient yardstick for measuring distances within the Solar System or around other stars. However, it is also a component in the definition of another unit of astronomical length. A variety of symbols and abbreviations have been in use for the astronomical unit. In a 1976 resolution, the International Astronomical Union used the symbol A for the astronomical unit, in 2006, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures recommended ua as the symbol for the unit. In 2012, the IAU, noting that various symbols are presently in use for the astronomical unit, in the 2014 revision of the SI Brochure, the BIPM used the unit symbol au. In ISO 80000-3, the symbol of the unit is ua. Earths orbit around the Sun is an ellipse, the semi-major axis of this ellipse is defined to be half of the straight line segment that joins the aphelion and perihelion. The centre of the sun lies on this line segment. In addition, it mapped out exactly the largest straight-line distance that Earth traverses over the course of a year, knowing Earths shift and a stars shift enabled the stars distance to be calculated. But all measurements are subject to some degree of error or uncertainty, improvements in precision have always been a key to improving astronomical understanding. Improving measurements were continually checked and cross-checked by means of our understanding of the laws of celestial mechanics, the expected positions and distances of objects at an established time are calculated from these laws, and assembled into a collection of data called an ephemeris. NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory provides one of several ephemeris computation services, in 1976, in order to establish a yet more precise measure for the astronomical unit, the IAU formally adopted a new definition. Equivalently, by definition, one AU is the radius of an unperturbed circular Newtonian orbit about the sun of a particle having infinitesimal mass. As with all measurements, these rely on measuring the time taken for photons to be reflected from an object. However, for precision the calculations require adjustment for such as the motions of the probe. In addition, the measurement of the time itself must be translated to a scale that accounts for relativistic time dilation
22.
Gas giant
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A gas giant is a giant planet composed mainly of hydrogen and helium. Jupiter and Saturn are the gas giants of the Solar System, for this reason, Uranus and Neptune are now often classified in the separate category of ice giants. Jupiter and Saturn consist mostly of hydrogen and helium, with heavier elements making up between 3 and 13 percent of the mass and they are thought to consist of an outer layer of molecular hydrogen surrounding a layer of liquid metallic hydrogen, with probably a molten rocky core. The outermost portion of their hydrogen atmosphere is characterized by layers of visible clouds that are mostly composed of water. The layer of metallic hydrogen makes up the bulk of each planet, the gas giants cores are thought to consist of heavier elements at such high temperatures and pressures that their properties are poorly understood. The defining differences between a very low-mass brown dwarf and a gas giant are debated, one school of thought is based on formation, the other, on the physics of the interior. Part of the debate concerns whether brown dwarfs must, by definition, have experienced nuclear fusion at some point in their history, the term gas giant was coined in 1952 by the science fiction writer James Blish and was originally used to refer to all giant planets. Arguably it is something of a misnomer, because throughout most of the volume of all giant planets the pressure is so high that matter is not in gaseous form. Other than solids in the core and the layers of the atmosphere, all matter is above the critical point. In the outer Solar System, hydrogen and helium are referred to as gases, water, methane, and ammonia as ices, and silicates and metals as rock. Because Uranus and Neptune are primarily composed of, in this terminology, ices, not gas, they are referred to as ice giants. Jupiter and Saturn are both class I, hot Jupiters are class IV or V. A cold hydrogen-rich gas giant more massive than Jupiter but less than about 500 M⊕ will only be larger in volume than Jupiter. For masses above 500 M⊕, gravity will cause the planet to shrink, kelvin–Helmholtz heating can cause a gas giant to radiate more energy than it receives from its host star. Although the words gas and giant are often combined, hydrogen planets need not be as large as the gas giants from the Solar System. However, smaller gas planets and planets closer to their star will lose atmospheric mass more quickly via hydrodynamic escape than larger planets and planets farther out. The smallest known extrasolar planet that is likely a gas planet is Kepler-138d, a low-mass gas planet can still have a radius resembling that of a gas giant if it has the right temperature. List of gravitationally rounded objects of the Solar System List of planet types
23.
Perturbation (astronomy)
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In astronomy, perturbation is the complex motion of a massive body subject to forces other than the gravitational attraction of a single other massive body. The other forces can include a body, resistance, as from an atmosphere. The study of perturbations began with the first attempts to predict planetary motions in the sky, in ancient times the causes were a mystery. Newton, at the time he formulated his laws of motion and of gravitation, applied them to the first analysis of perturbations, the complex motions of gravitational perturbations can be broken down. The hypothetical motion that the body follows under the effect of one other body only is typically a conic section. This is called a problem, or an unperturbed Keplerian orbit. The differences between that and the motion of the body are perturbations due to the additional gravitational effects of the remaining body or bodies. If there is one other significant body then the perturbed motion is a three-body problem. A general analytical solution exists for the problem, when more than two bodies are considered analytic solutions exist only for special cases. Even the two-body problem becomes insoluble if one of the bodies is irregular in shape, most systems that involve multiple gravitational attractions present one primary body which is dominant in its effects. The gravitational effects of the bodies can be treated as perturbations of the hypothetical unperturbed motion of the planet or satellite around its primary body. In methods of general perturbations, general differential equations, either of motion or of change in the elements, are solved analytically, usually by series expansions. The result is expressed in terms of algebraic and trigonometric functions of the orbital elements of the body in question. This can be applied generally to many different sets of conditions, historically, general perturbations were investigated first. The classical methods are known as variation of the elements, variation of parameters or variation of the constants of integration, in these methods, it is considered that the body is always moving in a conic section, however the conic section is constantly changing due to the perturbations. General perturbations is applicable if the perturbing forces are about one order of magnitude smaller, or less. In the Solar System, this is usually the case, Jupiter, general perturbation methods are preferred for some types of problems, as the source of certain observed motions are readily found. In effect, the positions and velocities are perturbed directly, special perturbations can be applied to any problem in celestial mechanics, as it is not limited to cases where the perturbing forces are small
24.
Neptune
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Neptune is the eighth and farthest known planet from the Sun in the Solar System. In the Solar System, it is the fourth-largest planet by diameter, the planet. Neptune is 17 times the mass of Earth and is more massive than its near-twin Uranus. Neptune orbits the Sun once every 164.8 years at a distance of 30.1 astronomical units. It is named after the Roman god of the sea and has the astronomical symbol ♆, Neptune is not visible to the unaided eye and is the only planet in the Solar System found by mathematical prediction rather than by empirical observation. Unexpected changes in the orbit of Uranus led Alexis Bouvard to deduce that its orbit was subject to perturbation by an unknown planet. Neptune was subsequently observed with a telescope on 23 September 1846 by Johann Galle within a degree of the predicted by Urbain Le Verrier. Its largest moon, Triton, was discovered shortly thereafter, though none of the remaining known 14 moons were located telescopically until the 20th century. The planets distance from Earth gives it a small apparent size. Neptune was visited by Voyager 2, when it flew by the planet on 25 August 1989, the advent of the Hubble Space Telescope and large ground-based telescopes with adaptive optics has recently allowed for additional detailed observations from afar. Neptunes composition can be compared and contrasted with the Solar Systems other giant planets, however, its interior, like that of Uranus, is primarily composed of ices and rock, which is why Uranus and Neptune are normally considered ice giants to emphasise this distinction. Traces of methane in the outermost regions in part account for the blue appearance. In contrast to the hazy, relatively featureless atmosphere of Uranus, Neptunes atmosphere has active, for example, at the time of the Voyager 2 flyby in 1989, the planets southern hemisphere had a Great Dark Spot comparable to the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. These weather patterns are driven by the strongest sustained winds of any planet in the Solar System, because of its great distance from the Sun, Neptunes outer atmosphere is one of the coldest places in the Solar System, with temperatures at its cloud tops approaching 55 K. Temperatures at the centre are approximately 5,400 K. Neptune has a faint and fragmented ring system. On both occasions, Galileo seems to have mistaken Neptune for a star when it appeared close—in conjunction—to Jupiter in the night sky, hence. At his first observation in December 1612, Neptune was almost stationary in the sky because it had just turned retrograde that day and this apparent backward motion is created when Earths orbit takes it past an outer planet. Because Neptune was only beginning its yearly cycle, the motion of the planet was far too slight to be detected with Galileos small telescope
25.
Torus
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In geometry, a torus is a surface of revolution generated by revolving a circle in three-dimensional space about an axis coplanar with the circle. If the axis of revolution does not touch the circle, the surface has a shape and is called a torus of revolution. Real-world examples of objects include inner tubes, swim rings, and the surface of a doughnut. A torus should not be confused with a solid torus, which is formed by rotating a disc, rather than a circle, a solid torus is a torus plus the volume inside the torus. Real-world approximations include doughnuts, vadai or vada, many lifebuoys, in topology, a ring torus is homeomorphic to the Cartesian product of two circles, S1 × S1, and the latter is taken to be the definition in that context. It is a compact 2-manifold of genus 1, the ring torus is one way to embed this space into three-dimensional Euclidean space, but another way to do this is the Cartesian product of the embedding of S1 in the plane. This produces an object called the Clifford torus, a surface in 4-space. In the field of topology, a torus is any space that is topologically equivalent to a torus. R is known as the radius and r is known as the minor radius. The ratio R divided by r is known as the aspect ratio, a doughnut has an aspect ratio of about 2 to 3. An implicit equation in Cartesian coordinates for a torus radially symmetric about the z-axis is 2 + z 2 = r 2, or the solution of f =0, algebraically eliminating the square root gives a quartic equation,2 =4 R2. The three different classes of standard tori correspond to the three aspect ratios between R and r, When R > r, the surface will be the familiar ring torus. R = r corresponds to the torus, which in effect is a torus with no hole. R < r describes the self-intersecting spindle torus, when R =0, the torus degenerates to the sphere. When R ≥ r, the interior 2 + z 2 < r 2 of this torus is diffeomorphic to a product of an Euclidean open disc, the losses in surface area and volume on the inner side of the tube exactly cancel out the gains on the outer side. In traditional spherical coordinates there are three measures, R, the distance from the center of the system, and θ and φ. As a torus has, effectively, two points, the centerpoints of the angles are moved, φ measures the same angle as it does in the spherical system. The center point of θ is moved to the center of r and these terms were first used in a discussion of the Earths magnetic field, where poloidal was used to denote the direction toward the poles
26.
Ecliptic
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The ecliptic is the apparent path of the Sun on the celestial sphere, and is the basis for the ecliptic coordinate system. It also refers to the plane of this path, which is coplanar with the orbit of Earth around the Sun, the motions as described above are simplifications. Due to the movement of Earth around the Earth–Moon center of mass, due to further perturbations by the other planets of the Solar System, the Earth–Moon barycenter wobbles slightly around a mean position in a complex fashion. The ecliptic is actually the apparent path of the Sun throughout the course of a year, because Earth takes one year to orbit the Sun, the apparent position of the Sun also takes the same length of time to make a complete circuit of the ecliptic. With slightly more than 365 days in one year, the Sun moves a little less than 1° eastward every day, again, this is a simplification, based on a hypothetical Earth that orbits at uniform speed around the Sun. The actual speed with which Earth orbits the Sun varies slightly during the year, for example, the Sun is north of the celestial equator for about 185 days of each year, and south of it for about 180 days. The variation of orbital speed accounts for part of the equation of time, if the equator is projected outward to the celestial sphere, forming the celestial equator, it crosses the ecliptic at two points known as the equinoxes. The Sun, in its apparent motion along the ecliptic, crosses the equator at these points, one from south to north. The crossing from south to north is known as the equinox, also known as the first point of Aries. The crossing from north to south is the equinox or descending node. Likewise, the ecliptic itself is not fixed, the gravitational perturbations of the other bodies of the Solar System cause a much smaller motion of the plane of Earths orbit, and hence of the ecliptic, known as planetary precession. The combined action of two motions is called general precession, and changes the position of the equinoxes by about 50 arc seconds per year. Once again, this is a simplification, periodic motions of the Moon and apparent periodic motions of the Sun cause short-term small-amplitude periodic oscillations of Earths axis, and hence the celestial equator, known as nutation. Obliquity of the ecliptic is the used by astronomers for the inclination of Earths equator with respect to the ecliptic. It is about 23. 4° and is currently decreasing 0.013 degrees per hundred years due to planetary perturbations, the angular value of the obliquity is found by observation of the motions of Earth and other planets over many years. From 1984, the Jet Propulsion Laboratorys DE series of computer-generated ephemerides took over as the ephemeris of the Astronomical Almanac. Obliquity based on DE200, which analyzed observations from 1911 to 1979, was calculated, jPLs fundamental ephemerides have been continually updated. J. Laskar computed an expression to order T10 good to 0″. 04/1000 years over 10,000 years, all of these expressions are for the mean obliquity, that is, without the nutation of the equator included
27.
Periodic comet
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Periodic comets are comets having orbital periods of less than 200 years or that have been observed during more than a single perihelion passage. Periodic comet is sometimes used to mean any comet with a periodic orbit. Periodic comets receive a permanent number prefix usually after the perihelion passage. In nearly all cases, comets are named after their discoverer, even so, quite a few comets were lost because their orbits are also affected by non-gravitational effects such as the release of gas and other material that forms the comets coma and tail. Unlike a long-period comet, the perihelion passage of a numbered periodic comet can be predicted with a high degree of accuracy. Periodic comets sometimes bear the same name repeatedly, the IAU system distinguishes between them either through the prefix or by the full designation. In the literature, a numbering system is applied to periodic comets, thus 181P and 192P are known as Comet Shoemaker–Levy 6 and Comet Shoemaker–Levy 1. Non-periodic Shoemaker–Levy comets are interleaved in this sequence, C/1991 B1 between 2 and 3, C/1991 T2 between 5 and 6, C/1993 K1 and C/1994 E2 after Shoemaker–Levy 9. In comet nomenclature, the letter before the / is either C, P, D, X, or A for an object that was identified as a comet. Some lists retain the C prefix for comets of periods larger than about 30 years until their return is confirmed
28.
90377 Sedna
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90377 Sedna is a large minor planet in the outer reaches of the Solar System that was, as of 2015, at a distance of about 86 astronomical units from the Sun, about three times as far as Neptune. Spectroscopy has revealed that Sednas surface composition is similar to that of some other objects, being largely a mixture of water, methane. Its surface is one of the reddest among Solar System objects and it is most likely a dwarf planet. Sedna has a long and elongated orbit, taking approximately 11,400 years to complete. These facts have led to speculation about its origin. The Minor Planet Center currently places Sedna in the scattered disc, others speculate that it might have been tugged into its current orbit by a passing star, perhaps one within the Suns birth cluster, or even that it was captured from another star system. Another hypothesis suggests that its orbit may be evidence for a planet beyond the orbit of Neptune. Astronomer Michael E. Sedna was discovered by Michael Brown, Chad Trujillo, the discovery formed part of a survey begun in 2001 with the Samuel Oschin telescope at Palomar Observatory near San Diego, California using Yales 160 megapixel Palomar Quest camera. On that day, an object was observed to move by 4.6 arcseconds over 3.1 hours relative to stars, later, the object was precovered on older images made by the Samuel Oschin telescope as well as on images from the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking consortium. These previous positions expanded its known orbital arc and allowed a precise calculation of its orbit. The team made the name Sedna public before the object had been officially numbered, brian Marsden, the head of the Minor Planet Center, said that such an action was a violation of protocol, and that some members of the IAU might vote against it. However, no objection was raised to the name, and no competing names were suggested, Sedna has the longest orbital period of any known object in the Solar System of comparable size or larger, calculated at around 11,400 years. Its orbit is eccentric, with an aphelion estimated at 937 AU. This perihelion was the largest of that of any known Solar System object until the discovery of 2012 VP113, at its aphelion, Sedna orbits the Sun at a mere 4% of Earths orbital speed. When Sedna was discovered it was 89.6 AU from the Sun approaching perihelion, Eris was later detected by the same survey near aphelion at 97 AU. Only the orbits of some long-period comets extend farther than that of Sedna, when first discovered, Sedna was thought to have an unusually long rotational period. It was initially speculated that Sednas rotation was slowed by the pull of a large binary companion. Sedna has a V-band absolute magnitude of about 1.8, at the time of its discovery it was the intrinsically brightest object found in the Solar System since Pluto in 1930
29.
Blink comparator
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A blink comparator was a viewing apparatus used by astronomers to find differences between two photographs of the night sky. It permitted rapidly switching from viewing one photograph to viewing the other, blinking back and this allowed the user to more easily spot objects in the night sky that changed position. It was also known as a blink microscope. It was invented by physicist Carl Pulfrich at Carl Zeiss AG, then constituted as Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung, photographs taken at longer intervals could be used to detect stars with large proper motion, or variable stars, or to distinguish binary stars from optical doubles. The most notable body to be using this technique was Pluto. The Projection Blink Comparator, invented by amateur astronomer Ben Mayer, was a low-cost version of the professional tool and it consisted of two slide projectors with a rotating occluding disk that alternatingly blocked the images from the projectors. This tool allowed amateur astronomers to contribute to some phases of serious research, in modern times, CCDs have largely replaced photographic plates and astronomical images are stored digitally on computer. The blinking technique can easily be performed on a screen rather than with a physical blink comparator apparatus as before. The blinking technique is used today because image differencing algorithms detect moving objects more effectively than human eyes can. This is particularly effective in cases where the object is very faint
30.
Photographic film
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This article is mainly concerned with still photography film. For motion picture film, please see film stock, photographic film is a strip or sheet of transparent plastic film base coated on one side with a gelatin emulsion containing microscopically small light-sensitive silver halide crystals. The sizes and other characteristics of the crystals determine the sensitivity, contrast, the emulsion will gradually darken if left exposed to light, but the process is too slow and incomplete to be of any practical use. Instead, a short exposure to the image formed by a camera lens is used to produce only a very slight chemical change. This creates an invisible latent image in the emulsion, which can be developed into a visible photograph. In addition to light, all films are sensitive to ultraviolet, X-rays. Unmodified silver halide crystals are only to the blue part of the visible spectrum. This problem was overcome with the discovery that certain dyes, called sensitizing dyes, first orthochromatic and finally panchromatic films were developed. Panchromatic film renders all colors in shades of gray approximately matching their subjective brightness, by similar techniques special-purpose films can be made sensitive to the infrared region of the spectrum. In black-and-white photographic film there is one layer of silver halide crystals. When the exposed silver halide grains are developed, the silver halide crystals are converted to metallic silver, color film has at least three sensitive layers, incorporating different combinations of sensitizing dyes. Typically the blue-sensitive layer is on top, followed by a filter layer to stop any remaining blue light from affecting the layers below. Next come a green-and-blue sensitive layer, and a sensitive layer. During development, the silver halide crystals are converted to metallic silver. Because the by-products are created in direct proportion to the amount of exposure and development, following development, the silver is converted back to silver halide crystals in the bleach step. It is removed from the film during the process of fixing the image on the film with a solution of ammonium thiosulfate or sodium thiosulfate, fixing leaves behind only the formed color dyes, which combine to make up the colored visible image. Later color films, like Kodacolor II, have as many as 12 emulsion layers, the earliest practical photographic process, the daguerreotype, introduced in 1839, did not use film. The light-sensitive chemicals were formed on the surface of a copper sheet
31.
Charge-coupled device
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A charge-coupled device is a device for the movement of electrical charge, usually from within the device to an area where the charge can be manipulated, for example conversion into a digital value. This is achieved by shifting the signals between stages within the one at a time. CCDs move charge between capacitive bins in the device, with the shift allowing for the transfer of charge between bins, in recent years CCD has become a major technology for digital imaging. In a CCD image sensor, pixels are represented by p-doped metal-oxide-semiconductors capacitors, the charge-coupled device was invented in 1969 at AT&T Bell Labs by Willard Boyle and George E. Smith. The lab was working on bubble memory when Boyle and Smith conceived of the design of what they termed, in their notebook. The device could be used as a shift register, the essence of the design was the ability to transfer charge along the surface of a semiconductor from one storage capacitor to the next. The concept was similar in principle to the device, which was developed at Philips Research Labs during the late 1960s. The first patent on the application of CCDs to imaging was assigned to Michael Tompsett, the initial paper describing the concept listed possible uses as a memory, a delay line, and an imaging device. The first experimental device demonstrating the principle was a row of closely spaced metal squares on a silicon surface electrically accessed by wire bonds. The first working CCD made with integrated circuit technology was a simple 8-bit shift register and this device had input and output circuits and was used to demonstrate its use as a shift register and as a crude eight pixel linear imaging device. Development of the device progressed at a rapid rate, by 1971, Bell researchers led by Michael Tompsett were able to capture images with simple linear devices. Several companies, including Fairchild Semiconductor, RCA and Texas Instruments, picked up on the invention, fairchilds effort, led by ex-Bell researcher Gil Amelio, was the first with commercial devices, and by 1974 had a linear 500-element device and a 2-D100 x 100 pixel device. Steven Sasson, an engineer working for Kodak, invented the first digital still camera using a Fairchild 100 x 100 CCD in 1975. The first KH-11 KENNAN reconnaissance satellite equipped with charge-coupled device array technology for imaging was launched in December 1976, under the leadership of Kazuo Iwama, Sony also started a large development effort on CCDs involving a significant investment. Eventually, Sony managed to mass-produce CCDs for their camcorders, before this happened, Iwama died in August 1982, subsequently, a CCD chip was placed on his tombstone to acknowledge his contribution. He was also awarded the 2012 IEEE Edison Medal For pioneering contributions to imaging devices including CCD Imagers, cameras, in a CCD for capturing images, there is a photoactive region, and a transmission region made out of a shift register. An image is projected through a lens onto the capacitor array, once the array has been exposed to the image, a control circuit causes each capacitor to transfer its contents to its neighbor. The last capacitor in the array dumps its charge into a charge amplifier, by repeating this process, the controlling circuit converts the entire contents of the array in the semiconductor to a sequence of voltages
32.
Telescope
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A telescope is an optical instrument that aids in the observation of remote objects by collecting electromagnetic radiation. The first known practical telescopes were invented in the Netherlands at the beginning of the 1600s and they found use in both terrestrial applications and astronomy. Within a few decades, the telescope was invented, which used mirrors to collect. In the 20th century many new types of telescopes were invented, including radio telescopes in the 1930s, the word telescope now refers to a wide range of instruments capable of detecting different regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, and in some cases other types of detectors. The word telescope was coined in 1611 by the Greek mathematician Giovanni Demisiani for one of Galileo Galileis instruments presented at a banquet at the Accademia dei Lincei, in the Starry Messenger, Galileo had used the term perspicillum. The earliest recorded working telescopes were the telescopes that appeared in the Netherlands in 1608. Their development is credited to three individuals, Hans Lippershey and Zacharias Janssen, who were spectacle makers in Middelburg, Galileo heard about the Dutch telescope in June 1609, built his own within a month, and improved upon the design in the following year. Also in 1609, Thomas Harriot became the first person known to point a telescope skyward in order to make observations of a celestial object. The idea that the objective, or light-gathering element, could be a mirror instead of a lens was being investigated soon after the invention of the refracting telescope. The potential advantages of using parabolic mirrors—reduction of spherical aberration and no chromatic aberration—led to many proposed designs, in 1668, Isaac Newton built the first practical reflecting telescope, of a design which now bears his name, the Newtonian reflector. The invention of the lens in 1733 partially corrected color aberrations present in the simple lens and enabled the construction of shorter. The largest reflecting telescopes currently have objectives larger than 10 m, the 20th century also saw the development of telescopes that worked in a wide range of wavelengths from radio to gamma-rays. The first purpose built radio telescope went into operation in 1937, since then, a tremendous variety of complex astronomical instruments have been developed. The name telescope covers a range of instruments. Most detect electromagnetic radiation, but there are differences in how astronomers must go about collecting light in different frequency bands. The near-infrared can be collected much like light, however in the far-infrared and submillimetre range. For example, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope observes from wavelengths from 3 μm to 2000 μm, on the other hand, the Spitzer Space Telescope, observing from about 3 μm to 180 μm uses a mirror. Also using reflecting optics, the Hubble Space Telescope with Wide Field Camera 3 can observe in the range from about 0.2 μm to 1.7 μm
33.
Digitization
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Digitizing or digitization is the representation of an object, image, sound, document or signal by generating a series of numbers that describe a discrete set of its points or samples. The result is called digital representation or, more specifically, an image, for the object. Unlike analog data, which typically suffers some loss of quality each time it is copied or transmitted, digital data can, in theory and this is why it is a favored way of preserving information for many organisations around the world. The term digitization is often used when diverse forms of information, such as text, sound, Digital information exists as one of two digits, either 0 or 1. These are known as bits and the sequences of 0s and 1s that constitute information are called bytes. Analog signals are continuously variable, both in the number of values of the signal at a given time, as well as in the number of points in the signal in a given period of time. Digitization occurs in two parts, Discretization The reading of an analog signal A, and, at time intervals. Each such reading is called a sample and may be considered to have infinite precision at this stage, Quantization Samples are rounded to a set of numbers. In general, these can occur at the time, though they are conceptually distinct. A series of integers can be transformed into an analog output that approximates the original analog signal. Such a transformation is called a DA conversion, the sampling rate and the number of bits used to represent the integers combine to determine how close such an approximation to the analog signal a digitization will be. The term is used to describe the scanning of analog sources into computers for editing. In this last case, as in normal photos, sampling rate refers to the resolution of the image, Digitization is also used to describe the process of populating databases with files or data. Digitizing may also used in the field of apparel, where an image may be recreated with the help of embroidery digitizing software tools and this machine code is fed into an embroidery machine and applied to the fabric. The most supported format is DST file, apparel companies also digitize clothing patterns Analog signals are continuous electrical signals, digital signals are non-continuous. Analog signal can be converted to digital signal by ADC, nearly all recorded music has been digitized. About 12 percent of the 500, 000+ movies listed on the Internet Movie Database are digitized on DVD, handling of analog signal becomes easy when it is digitized because the signal is digitized before modulation and transmission. The conversion process of analog to digital consists of two processes, sampling and quantizing, Digitization of personal multimedia such as home movies, slides, and photographs is a popular method of preserving and sharing older repositories
34.
Astronomy
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Astronomy is a natural science that studies celestial objects and phenomena. It applies mathematics, physics, and chemistry, in an effort to explain the origin of those objects and phenomena and their evolution. Objects of interest include planets, moons, stars, galaxies, and comets, while the phenomena include supernovae explosions, gamma ray bursts, more generally, all astronomical phenomena that originate outside Earths atmosphere are within the purview of astronomy. A related but distinct subject, physical cosmology, is concerned with the study of the Universe as a whole, Astronomy is the oldest of the natural sciences. The early civilizations in recorded history, such as the Babylonians, Greeks, Indians, Egyptians, Nubians, Iranians, Chinese, during the 20th century, the field of professional astronomy split into observational and theoretical branches. Observational astronomy is focused on acquiring data from observations of astronomical objects, theoretical astronomy is oriented toward the development of computer or analytical models to describe astronomical objects and phenomena. The two fields complement each other, with theoretical astronomy seeking to explain the results and observations being used to confirm theoretical results. Astronomy is one of the few sciences where amateurs can play an active role, especially in the discovery. Amateur astronomers have made and contributed to many important astronomical discoveries, Astronomy means law of the stars. Astronomy should not be confused with astrology, the system which claims that human affairs are correlated with the positions of celestial objects. Although the two share a common origin, they are now entirely distinct. Generally, either the term astronomy or astrophysics may be used to refer to this subject, however, since most modern astronomical research deals with subjects related to physics, modern astronomy could actually be called astrophysics. Few fields, such as astrometry, are purely astronomy rather than also astrophysics, some titles of the leading scientific journals in this field includeThe Astronomical Journal, The Astrophysical Journal and Astronomy and Astrophysics. In early times, astronomy only comprised the observation and predictions of the motions of objects visible to the naked eye, in some locations, early cultures assembled massive artifacts that possibly had some astronomical purpose. Before tools such as the telescope were invented, early study of the stars was conducted using the naked eye, most of early astronomy actually consisted of mapping the positions of the stars and planets, a science now referred to as astrometry. From these observations, early ideas about the motions of the planets were formed, and the nature of the Sun, Moon, the Earth was believed to be the center of the Universe with the Sun, the Moon and the stars rotating around it. This is known as the model of the Universe, or the Ptolemaic system. The Babylonians discovered that lunar eclipses recurred in a cycle known as a saros
35.
Mauna Kea
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Mauna Kea, is a dormant volcano on the island of Hawaii. Standing 4,207 m above sea level, its peak is the highest point in the state of Hawaii, much of the mountain is under water, when measured from its oceanic base, Mauna Kea is over 10,000 m tall. Mauna Kea is about a years old, and has thus passed the most active shield stage of life hundreds of thousands of years ago. In its current post-shield state, its lava is more viscous, Mauna Kea last erupted 6,000 to 4,000 years ago and is now considered dormant. In Hawaiian mythology, the peaks of the island of Hawaiʻi are sacred, an ancient law allowed only high-ranking aliʻi to visit its peak. Ancient Hawaiians living on the slopes of Mauna Kea relied on its extensive forests for food, when Europeans arrived in the late 18th century, settlers introduced cattle, sheep and game animals, many of which became feral and began to damage the mountains ecological balance. With its high elevation, dry environment, and stable airflow, since the creation of an access road in 1964, thirteen telescopes funded by eleven countries have been constructed at the summit. The Mauna Kea Observatories are used for research across the electromagnetic spectrum from visible light to radio. Their construction on a landscape considered sacred by Native Hawaiians continues to be a topic of debate, Mauna Kea is one of five hotspot volcanoes that form the island of Hawaii, the largest and youngest island of the Hawaiian–Emperor seamount chain. Of these five volcanoes, Mauna Kea is the fourth oldest and it began as a preshield volcano driven by the Hawaii hotspot around one million years ago, and became exceptionally active during its shield stage until 500,000 years ago. Mauna Kea entered its quieter post-shield stage 250,000 to 200,000 years ago, Mauna Kea does not have a visible summit caldera, but contains a number of small cinder and pumice cones near its summit. A former summit caldera may have been filled and buried by later summit eruption deposits, Mauna Kea is over 3,200 km3 in volume, so massive that it and its neighbor, Mauna Loa, depress the ocean crust beneath it by 6 km. The volcano continues to slip and flatten under its own weight at a rate of less than 0.2 mm per year, much of its mass lies east of its present summit. Mauna Kea stands 4,205 m above sea level, just 35 m higher than its neighbor Mauna Loa, measured from its base on the ocean floor, it rises over 10,000 m, significantly greater than the elevation of Mount Everest above sea level. Like all Hawaiian volcanoes, Mauna Kea has been created as the Pacific tectonic plate has moved over the Hawaiian hotspot in the Earths underlying mantle. The Hawaii island volcanoes are the most recent evidence of this process that, the prevailing, though not completely settled, view is that the hotspot has been largely stationary within the planets mantle for much, if not all of the Cenozoic Era. However, while Hawaiian volcanism is well-understood and extensively studied, there remains no definite explanation of the mechanism causes the hotspot effect. Lava flows from Mauna Kea overlapped in complex layers with those of its neighbors during its growth, most prominently, Mauna Kea is built upon older flows from Kohala to the northwest, and intersects the base of Mauna Loa to the south
36.
(48639) 1995 TL8
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1995 TL8 is a classical Kuiper belt object possessing a relatively large satellite. The assumed diameter of 352 kilometres is derived from an albedo guess of 0.09, a companion was discovered by Denise C. Stephens and Keith S. Noll, from observations with the Hubble Space Telescope taken on 9 November 2002, and announced on 5 October 2005. The satellite, designated S/20021, is large, having a likely mass of about 10% of the primary. 1995 TL8 is classified as scattered–extended by the Deep Ecliptic Survey, however, if Neptune migrated outward, there would have been a period when Neptune had a higher eccentricity. It has been observed 48 times and has an orbit quality code of 4
37.
(229762) 2007 UK126
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2007 UK126, also written as 2007 UK126, is a scattered disc object with a bright absolute magnitude of 3.7. This makes it probably a dwarf planet, as of August 2011, Mike Brown lists it as highly likely a dwarf planet. Its light-curve amplitude is estimated to be Δm =0.03 ±0.01 mag and its orbital eccentricity of 0.49 suggests that it was gravitationally scattered onto its eccentric orbit. It will come to perihelion in February 2046 and it has been observed 73 times over 11 oppositions with precovery images back to 1982. It has been reported that 2007 UK126 has a satellite, but a mass estimate has not been made, the magnitude difference between the primary and the satellite is 3.79 mag. The satellite has a diameter of 139 km, a semi-major axis of 3600 km
38.
(84522) 2002 TC302
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2002 TC302 is a red 2,5 resonant trans-Neptunian object discovered on October 9,2002 by Mike Browns team at the Palomar Observatory. 2002 TC302 has a magnitude of 3.78. It has an diameter of 584. 1+105.6 −88.0 km. Using the Spitzer Space Telescope, it was estimated to have a diameter of 1145+337 −325 km. This overestimation was due to insufficient motion to allow for a good sky subtraction and it was predicted that on 30 November 2013,2002 TC302 might occult a star for slightly less than a minute. However, the possibility to observe this occultation was judged as small, the precise duration that a Solar System object occults a star provides a precise way to determine its diameter, if observed from multiple locations. The red spectra suggests that 2002 TC302 has very little ice on its surface. Its rotational period is most likely 5.41 h, and its perihelion of 39.1 AU is about the same as Plutos semi-major axis. It is classified as a scattered disc object, given the long orbit that TNOs have around the Sun,2002 TC302 comes to opposition in late October of each year at an apparent magnitude of 20.5. Both the Minor Planet Center and the Deep Ecliptic Survey show this probable dwarf planet to be in a 2,5 resonance with Neptune, due to the resonance, it completes two orbits for every five orbits of Neptune. As of 2009, it is the largest likely dwarf planet that is known to be in a resonance with Neptune. Plutinos are objects in 2,3 mean-motion resonance with Neptune, for every two orbits that a plutino makes, Neptune makes three. It has been observed 76 times over nine years, kuiper belt Minor planet Orbital simulation from JPL / Horizons Ephemeris TNO2002 TC3022002 TC302 at the JPL Small-Body Database Discovery · Orbit diagram · Orbital elements · Physical parameters
39.
Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking
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Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking was a program run by NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, surveying the sky for near-Earth objects. NEAT was conducted from December 1995 until April 2007, at GEODSS on Hawaii, with the discovery of more than 40 thousand minor planets, NEAT has been one of the most successful programs in this field, comparable to the Catalina Sky Survey, LONEOS and Mount Lemmon Survey. NEAT was the successor of the Palomar Planet-Crossing Asteroid Survey, the original principal investigator was Eleanor F. Helin, with co-investigators Steven H. Pravdo and David L. Rabinowitz. NEAT has an agreement with the U. S. Air Force to use a GEODSS telescope located on Haleakala, Maui. GEODSS stands for Ground-based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance and these wide field Air Force telescopes were designed to optically observe Earth orbital spacecraft, the NEAT team designed a CCD camera and computer system for the GEODSS telescope. The CCD camera format is 4096 ×4096 pixels and the field of view is 1. 2° ×1. 6°, beginning in April 2001, the Samuel Oschin telescope was also put into service to discover and track near-Earth objects. This telescope is equipped with a camera containing 112 CCDs each 2400 ×600 and this is the telescope that produced the images leading to the discovery of 50000 Quaoar in 2002, and 90377 Sedna in 2003 and the dwarf planet Eris. In addition to discovering thousands of asteroids, NEAT is also credited with the co-discovery of periodic comet 54P/de Vico-Swift-NEAT, the C/2001 Q4 comet was discovered on August 24,2001 by NEAT. An asteroid was named in its honour,64070 NEAT, in early 2005,1996 PW was discovered on 1996 August 9 by a NEAT automated search camera on Haleakalā, Hawaii. It was the first object that was not a comet discovered on an orbit typical of a long-period comets. This is raised the possibility it was a comet or a usual asteroid. List of Near-Earth asteroids by distance from Sun Minor Planet Center Planetary Data System Spaceguard Near Earth Asteroid Tracking
40.
(474640) 2004 VN112
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2004 VN112, provisional designation 2004 VN112, is a detached object. It never gets closer than 47 AU from the Sun and averages more than 300 AU from the Sun and its large eccentricity strongly suggests that it was gravitationally scattered onto its current orbit. Because it is, like all detached objects, outside of the current gravitational influence of Neptune,2004 VN112 was discovered by the ESSENCE supernova survey on November 6,2004 observing with the 4 m Blanco Telescope from Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. Its orbit is characterized by high eccentricity, moderate inclination and an axis of 316 AU. Upon discovery, it was classified as a trans-Neptunian object and its orbit is well determined, as of January 11,2017 its orbital solution is based on 34 observations spanning a data-arc of 5821 days. 2004 VN112 has a magnitude of 6.5 which gives a characteristic diameter of 130 to 300 km for an assumed albedo in the range 0. 25–0.05. Michael Browns website lists it as a dwarf planet with a diameter of 314 kilometres based on an assumed albedo of 0.04. The albedo is expected to be low because the object has a blue color, however, if the albedo is higher, the object could easily be half that size. 2004 VN112 was observed by the Hubble Space Telescope in November 2008 and it reached perihelion in 2009 and is currently 47.7 AU from the Sun. It will be in the constellation of Cetus until 2019 and it comes to opposition at the start of November. 2004 VN112s orbit is similar to that of 2013 RF98, indicating that they may have both been thrown onto the orbit by the body, or that they may have been the same object at one point. 2004 VN112s visible spectrum is different from that of 90377 Sedna. The value of its spectral slope suggests that the surface of object can have pure methane ices and highly processed carbons. Its spectral slope is similar to that of 2013 RF98 and this minor planet is one of a number of objects discovered in the Solar System to have a semi-major axis >150 AU, a perihelion beyond Neptune, and an argument of perihelion of 340 ± 55°. Of these, only eight, including 2004 VN112, have perihelia beyond Neptunes current influence
41.
Orbital resonance
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Orbital resonances greatly enhance the mutual gravitational influence of the bodies, i. e. their ability to alter or constrain each others orbits. In most cases, this results in an interaction, in which the bodies exchange momentum. Under some circumstances, a resonant system can be stable and self-correcting, examples are the 1,2,4 resonance of Jupiters moons Ganymede, Europa and Io, and the 2,3 resonance between Pluto and Neptune. Unstable resonances with Saturns inner moons give rise to gaps in the rings of Saturn, thus the 2,3 ratio above means Pluto completes two orbits in the time it takes Neptune to complete three. In the case of resonance relationships between three or more bodies, either type of ratio may be used and the type of ratio will be specified. Since the discovery of Newtons law of gravitation in the 17th century. The stable orbits that arise in a two-body approximation ignore the influence of other bodies and it was Laplace who found the first answers explaining the remarkable dance of the Galilean moons. It is fair to say that this field of study has remained very active since then. Before Newton, there was consideration of ratios and proportions in orbital motions, in what was called the music of the spheres. In general, a resonance may involve one or any combination of the orbit parameters. Act on any scale from short term, commensurable with the orbit periods, to secular. Lead to either long-term stabilization of the orbits or be the cause of their destabilization, a mean-motion orbital resonance occurs when two bodies have periods of revolution that are a simple integer ratio of each other. Depending on the details, this can either stabilize or destabilize the orbit, stabilization may occur when the two bodies move in such a synchronised fashion that they never closely approach. For instance, The orbits of Pluto and the plutinos are stable, despite crossing that of the much larger Neptune, the resonance ensures that, when they approach perihelion and Neptunes orbit, Neptune is consistently distant. Other Neptune-crossing bodies that were not in resonance were ejected from that region by strong perturbations due to Neptune. There are also smaller but significant groups of resonant trans-Neptunian objects occupying the 1,1,3,5,4,7,1,2 and 2,5 resonances, among others, with respect to Neptune. In the asteroid belt beyond 3.5 AU from the Sun, orbital resonances can also destabilize one of the orbits. For small bodies, destabilization is actually far more likely, for instance, In the asteroid belt within 3.5 AU from the Sun, the major mean-motion resonances with Jupiter are locations of gaps in the asteroid distribution, the Kirkwood gaps
42.
Pluto
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Pluto is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of bodies beyond Neptune. It was the first Kuiper belt object to be discovered, Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 and was originally considered to be the ninth planet from the Sun. After 1992, its planethood was questioned following the discovery of objects of similar size in the Kuiper belt. In 2005, Eris, which is 27% more massive than Pluto, was discovered and this led the International Astronomical Union to define the term planet formally in 2006, during their 26th General Assembly. That definition excluded Pluto and reclassified it as a dwarf planet, Pluto is the largest and second-most-massive known dwarf planet in the Solar System and the ninth-largest and tenth-most-massive known object directly orbiting the Sun. It is the largest known trans-Neptunian object by volume but is less massive than Eris, like other Kuiper belt objects, Pluto is primarily made of ice and rock and is relatively small—about one-sixth the mass of the Moon and one-third its volume. It has an eccentric and inclined orbit during which it ranges from 30 to 49 astronomical units or AU from the Sun. This means that Pluto periodically comes closer to the Sun than Neptune, light from the Sun takes about 5.5 hours to reach Pluto at its average distance. Pluto has five moons, Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos. Pluto and Charon are sometimes considered a system because the barycenter of their orbits does not lie within either body. The IAU has not formalized a definition for binary dwarf planets, on July 14,2015, the New Horizons spacecraft became the first spacecraft to fly by Pluto. During its brief flyby, New Horizons made detailed measurements and observations of Pluto, on October 25,2016, at 05,48 pm ET, the last bit of data was received from New Horizons from its close encounter with Pluto on July 14,2015. In the 1840s, Urbain Le Verrier used Newtonian mechanics to predict the position of the then-undiscovered planet Neptune after analysing perturbations in the orbit of Uranus. Subsequent observations of Neptune in the late 19th century led astronomers to speculate that Uranuss orbit was being disturbed by another planet besides Neptune, by 1909, Lowell and William H. Pickering had suggested several possible celestial coordinates for such a planet. Lowell and his observatory conducted his search until his death in 1916, unknown to Lowell, his surveys had captured two faint images of Pluto on March 19 and April 7,1915, but they were not recognized for what they were. There are fourteen other known prediscovery observations, with the oldest made by the Yerkes Observatory on August 20,1909. Percivals widow, Constance Lowell, entered into a legal battle with the Lowell Observatory over her late husbands legacy. Tombaughs task was to image the night sky in pairs of photographs, then examine each pair
43.
Minor planet
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A minor planet is an astronomical object in direct orbit around the Sun that is neither a planet nor exclusively classified as a comet. Minor planets can be dwarf planets, asteroids, trojans, centaurs, Kuiper belt objects, as of 2016, the orbits of 709,706 minor planets were archived at the Minor Planet Center,469,275 of which had received permanent numbers. The first minor planet to be discovered was Ceres in 1801, the term minor planet has been used since the 19th century to describe these objects. The term planetoid has also used, especially for larger objects such as those the International Astronomical Union has called dwarf planets since 2006. Historically, the asteroid, minor planet, and planetoid have been more or less synonymous. This terminology has become complicated by the discovery of numerous minor planets beyond the orbit of Jupiter. A Minor planet seen releasing gas may be classified as a comet. Before 2006, the IAU had officially used the term minor planet, during its 2006 meeting, the IAU reclassified minor planets and comets into dwarf planets and small Solar System bodies. Objects are called dwarf planets if their self-gravity is sufficient to achieve hydrostatic equilibrium, all other minor planets and comets are called small Solar System bodies. The IAU stated that the minor planet may still be used. However, for purposes of numbering and naming, the distinction between minor planet and comet is still used. Hundreds of thousands of planets have been discovered within the Solar System. The Minor Planet Center has documented over 167 million observations and 729,626 minor planets, of these,20,570 have official names. As of March 2017, the lowest-numbered unnamed minor planet is 1974 FV1, as of March 2017, the highest-numbered named minor planet is 458063 Gustavomuler. There are various broad minor-planet populations, Asteroids, traditionally, most have been bodies in the inner Solar System. Near-Earth asteroids, those whose orbits take them inside the orbit of Mars. Further subclassification of these, based on distance, is used, Apohele asteroids orbit inside of Earths perihelion distance. Aten asteroids, those that have semi-major axes of less than Earths, Apollo asteroids are those asteroids with a semimajor axis greater than Earths, while having a perihelion distance of 1.017 AU or less. Like Aten asteroids, Apollo asteroids are Earth-crossers, amor asteroids are those near-Earth asteroids that approach the orbit of Earth from beyond, but do not cross it
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