In recent months, I'm beginning to wonder if anyone but me cares about naming. I know 2003 UB313 got a name fairly quickly, but what about 2005 FY9, announced at the same time? Why is it that 2002 TX300 and 2002 AW197 remain unnamed, despite being fairly large and known about for a few years? Does anyone have any info on this?

Also, does anyone have info on the satellite of Orcus?

Anyone but you?
Boy...
"Naming" is my middle name.
What is there to be named? Under which rules?

I wouldn't call 20 1/2 months "fairly quickly". Although, given that it took 49 months to name Sao, Halimede, and Laomedeia, perhaps it might seem that way.

Well, to be fair, the naming of 2003 UB313 probably had to wait until the issue of whether it was a planet or not was settled. However, for the others, they are large enough (or probably large enough) to qualify as 'Dwarf Planets', but they still are given nothing more than numbers, when even 1 km natural satellites of Jupiter get real names.

I'm wondering when we'll get to hear what the mass of the Eris/Dysnomia system is. Michael Brown's Dysnomia page remains silent on the issue, and there's nothing relevant in arxiv.

The data seems to have been collected but nothing has been published yet.

http://www.stsci.edu/cgi-bin/get-visit-status?10860

On naming KBO, I believe that the outer ( retrograde orbiting ) little moon of Saturn was confirmed ( after scans by Cassini-Huygens mapping spectrometer ) as an object coming from the Kuiper Belt... and it's named PHOEBE after one of the Titans from Greek mythology... But one day we'll be out of names from Greek mythology

Since we're on the subject of names, it's not the Kuiper Belt, it is the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt and the objects we are discussing are EKBO's.

Kenneth Edgeworth was an Irish polymath with published research in the fields of engineering, economics and astronomy. He wrote only one paper for the British Astronomical Association's prestigeous Journal, in July of 1943, but in it he reasoned that there should be a very large number of small bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. He further noted that, at such a distance from the Sun, collisions between particles were so infrequent that only small bodies could form out of the limited amount of cosmic rubble.

Edgeworth's paper was published eight years before Kuiper presented his ideas at the 50th anniversary symposium of the Yerkes Observatory. Kuiper's 1951 paper makes no reference to Edgeworth's published work (K. E. Edgeworth 1943, J.B.A.A. 53, 186).

Kenneth Edgeworth was virtually unknown in international astronomical circles. Gerard Kuiper on the other hand was, by any measure, one of the most accomplished astronomers of the 20th. Century. His contributions include the discovery of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Mars and (in 1944) the existence of methane in the atmosphere of Titan. In 1960 he founded the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona.

Is that the BAA Journal? I've never been sure of its status as an academic publication or how widely it has been circulated, historically.

Has anybody ever made an estimate of the total mass of the Kuiper Belt? I've been thinking of it as a halo of basically unaccreted primordial material, would be interesting to know how much of it there is. Would be suprised if the total mass was greater than that of Mars...

The problem with making estimates of the total mass of the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud is that we only have a rather general idea of the original composition, extent and characterization of the solar nebula. We have some rather basic constraints to it, but we really don't have a lot of definitive data to determine how much mass was in the original nebula, what the distribution of that mass was throughout the nebula, how much has been ejected from the solar system over its lifetime, etc.

There are models out there, of course. Depending on which model you use, and how you set your variables, you can get any number of answers for how much mass is wandering out there past Neptune's orbit.

-the other Doug

Since this is a thread about nomenclature - but at the risk of sounding like an obsessive - I must point out that just as the Kuiper Belt is actually the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt, the Oort Cloud is in fact the Öpik-Oort Cloud.

This is not a completely trivial matter. Aside from which Greek god should get a mention, should original ideas in astronomy not be attributed to the people who propose them first?

In 1932 Ernst Öpik postulated his theory that comets originated in a cloud orbiting far beyond the orbit of Pluto. This was eighteen years before Jan Oort published.

Ernst Öpik (October 23, 1893 – September 10, 1985) was an Estonian astronomer and astrophysicist who fled the Russian occupation of his country and spent the last part of his career (1948–1981) at Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland. British readers may know that his grandson Lembit Öpik is a member of the British parliament and a strong supporter of Spaceguard.


You can hear the last talk given by Ernst Opik before he died at:

http://www.arm.ac.uk/history/opik/opik-talk.html

Yes, but... history is replete with examples of situations where the original discoverer, first publisher, etc., gets passed over and the real estate, planet, formation or effect are named after someone else. (After all, we don't call the land masses on my side of the pond North and South Columbia, or even North and South Erikland. They're named after the guy who published the first well-used *maps* of this hemisphere.)

In other words, these things have never been done fairly. Who are we to start now?

-the other Doug

Not to threadjack, but since they were mentioned, does anyone know if either Edgeworth's or Kuiper's original papers are available online (without being behind somebody's firewall, of course)? I've always been curious to read them.

Back to names - I'll just put in a brief plug for my fave EKO, 2003 EL61, "Santa." I'm looking forward to it and its two moons getting official (if not as cute) names.

http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/iauc/RecentIAUCs.html


SATELLITES OF 2003 AZ_84, (50000), (55637), AND (90482)

Hi all
Not sure if you have seen this before or if this is the best place to post this link. Heres a nice picture of all the Solar System objects bigger than 320km (200 miles) Lots of TNOs
This is the link for the full size
http://kokogiak.com/solarsystembodieslargerthan200miles.html

Cool link, abalone!
Even tough, the KBO list will be, for sure, obsolete in a short time...

Nice. It looks like 2003 EL61 is the largest non-spherical body in the solar system

It made me realise how far down the pecking order those moons of Saturn that we all have been enjoying close-up at the moment like Dione, Tethys, Enceladus and especially Mimas are

A nice set of images. It reminds me of the disputes several months ago about "roundness", and illustrates just how far apart "big enough to be round" and "big enough not to be irregular are". In fact, the relatively smooth (craters apart) ellipsoid of Mimas appears to be quite exceptional for its size. Given that it obviously didn't escape severe bombardment, it's a wonder that it's not some jagged or blocky remnant like Proteus or Nereid.

It's been suggested (I forget by whom) that 2003 EL61 is actually a binary, rather than a single body.

A point of distinction: What is important is not that a body be spherical, but that it be "relaxed". A fast rotator that's "soft" will relax into an oblate spheroid, a very-fast rotator may relax into a tumbling prolate ellipsoid.

Vesta *was* a dwarf planet when it was young. It was hot enough to melt internally, differentiate (except for maybe a crust), and erupt basaltic lavas onto the surface. NOW cold, it got WHACKED onto what is now it's south pole (the whole body reoriented, I'd presume) and lost one helluva lot of crust and mantle. It's cold enough now, and was cold enough at the time, it couldn't round itself back to near spherical.

That would make me a planet most of the time. My wife describes me as excessively spherical and but I'm generally relaxed about that, except when my kids want to borrow my car keys

The authors of the paper that proposed the squashed football shape didn't believe it was possible for 2003 EL61 to be a contact binary:

http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/papers/ps/santa.pdf

I wonder if the scientists who 'voted' KBO out of planethood realized the impact on funding for future exploration of this region. The public likes planets, and likes to check-off planets on the 'we've been there' list. Would the US congress have approved New Horizons if the target had been a dwarf?

This is a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot mentality.

Anyone know if these discoveries were part of a larger search? It would be interesting to know which of the KBO's they didn't find satellites orbiting.

Most recent listing of distant minor planets is from July 3, 2007... 2003 EL61 and 2005 FY9 remain unnamed. Since Brown et al. submitted their proposal long ago, then why they still haven't got names?

Various methods of determining which of the Kuiper belt objects are dwarf planets as described by G. Tancredi.

http://www.sc.eso.org/santiago/science/OPS...ncredi_talk.pdf