#missing planet

[wyrmfedgrave]

Pics:

1. Book cover on the all true science history of finding a new planet - & then, losing it!

2. Chart of where the planet Vulcan was supposed to orbit.

3. Modern rendition of what such a 'vulcanoid' dwarf planet should look like - from a far orbit.

4. What the surface of Vulcan should have looked like - a totally molten orb!

1906: Does Vulcan Exist?

Astronomers once thought that a minor spacial object existed - closer to the Sun than any other planet!

This was due to calculations finding an error in Mercury's predicted orbit versus actual observations.

The point of its orbit nearest to the Sun was - 'wobbling'...

In 1611, German astronomer Christoph Scheiner wrote down the 1st known record of this hard to see planet.

Then, in the early 1800s, a Jacques Babinet named it Vulcan, after the Roman God of Fire, Smithing, etc...

On March of 1859, a French country doctor & amateur astronomer was out looking for new asteroids.

Then, he spied a small, regular dot that was a quarter of Mercury's diameter!

Strangely enough, he waited a whole 9 months before sending a letter to France's top scientist.

This astronomer, a J.J. Le Verrier, came to suspect that a planet or, at least, a # of planetoids orbited inside the orbit of Mercury!

Verrier was believed, since he had earlier predicted the existence of Neptune - by using only math!

This possible planetoid set off a 50 year search!! And, "planet fever" hit most national newspapers...

So, from 1859 til 1909, various folk (professional & amateur) claimed to have found the missing planet.

Serious attempts were made during solar eclipses & transits - to no effect.

Lovecraft's short article presented both sides of the 'argument' & then concluded that Vulcan didn't exist.

But, it took Einstein's General Theory of Relativity to truly end the problem.

Einstein's work showed that Mercury's gravity well was being affected by the Sun's gigantic spacial curve!

A wobble that isn't a problem for the other, further away planets. And, just like that, Vulcan ceased to exist...

At least, until Star Trek needed a name for a certain alien planet...

Pics:

1 thru 3. Vulcan is originally the name of the Roman God of Fire.

However, when Rome defeated the old Greek nation states, the Romans culturally appropriated the Hellenic pantheon's attributes & gave them to their own Latin Gods.

4 thru 6. In this case, Hephaestus' "divine gifts" - as an armorer, architect & artist were transfered on to Vulcan!

And the Roman Empire would spread these ideals thruout most of Europe.

Weird Factoid: Both Hephaestus & Vulcan were thought to be lame in 1 leg! And both share the same reason for this disability.

As divine babies, both of these Gods 'fell' - from Olympus to all the way down to Earth!! And, it took most of a day to fall thru all that distance!

Even weirder, neither God would be healed by magical panaceas, by their pantheon's physician God nor by their own divine powers...

Definitions:

1. Eclipse - Basically, when the Moon's orbit takes it in front of the Sun. A full eclipse only covers most of its solar furnace.

At that point, the Sun's atmosphere (the corona) is fully visible.

And, partial eclipses remain more common than total ones.

2. Transit - This happens when a planet crosses in front of the Sun's disk. Experimental measurements can then be made - especially on planets' atmospheres.

This same method can also be used to find far away planets - when a world's crossing makes its star's light dim...

3. General Theory of Relativity - This is 1 of Einstein's major works. Its proof gave him the high respect that we still honor today...

For our purpose, it reveals that gravity isn't a force of nature.

Instead, an object - like a planet or sun - 'curves' the nearest spacetime (the 4 known dimensions that space is actually made up of) around itself. Then, smaller bodies will 'fall' towards the larger gravity well.

Some of these objects will fall into orbit around each other or, miss each other completely! They can also crash into each other!!

It's all due to where they are on each other's curved spacetimes. The larger an object, the deeper their spacetime will curve & the 'easier' to 'fall' towards it.

4. Albert Einstein - Come on now. This is our century's Big Brain! Everybody has heard of him.

His works actually describes most of the forces that affect our universe!!

Yet, even he had a hard time dealing with quantum physics! So, don't despair - even Brainy here couldn't hack... some thing.

Weird Fact: Even though Einstein didn't want it to happen, his brain was separated from his corpse & then, scientifically measured.

His brain turned out to be quite normal - though rumors claimed that it had more neural 'connections' than usual...

Then, his brain was kept stored under an old staircase! So much for the old fellow's wishes.

I've yet to read that it's been reunited with Einstein's body...

[arcus-official-blog]

Ʌ Missing Planet - Waiting Ʌ

As we shared his music in the past, Missing Planet is back at again with the refreshing future sounds! This track feels like it wants to tell you a story about this person who's impatiently waiting for someone. So many thoughts and feelings are going through the person's mind but when the second drop kicks in, everything comes slowly but steady back at ease. But those are just my thoughts about this masterpiece #deep hope you enjoy x

Free Download: https://goo.gl/9vG3Zh Subscribe: https://goo.gl/tQK6q4 Contact: [email protected]

[arcus-official-blog]

Missing Planet - Big White Dot

I know, I know.. You were all wondering where that future is on this channel.. Well it's here! An extremely new kind of sound by Serbian producer Missing Planet translates this song into a warm wave of electronical sounds, perfect at this time of the year if you ask me Subscribe: https://goo.gl/tQK6q4

[knowtoomuch]

Is Our Solar System Missing a Giant Planet?

     If you think interplanetary space is a dangerous place now, with asteroids screaming by at close range and comets crashing into planets with the force of multiple H-bombs, be grateful you weren't here 4 billion years ago or so. Back then, our solar system was still getting itself organized. Planets caromed around like so many billiard balls, their gravity whipping smaller objects both outward into deep space and in toward the sun. One consequence of the latter: the Late Heavy Bombardment, which pummeled the inner planets with a barrage of asteroid strikes that gave the moon a goodly fraction of the craters we see today. (Earth got slammed too, but erosion, submersion in the oceans and plate tectonics have cleaned up most of the scarring.)

It wasn't just asteroids that got flung around, however: a paper just published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters argues that the young solar system started out not with four giant planets but five. Once upon a time, says lead author David Nesvorny, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune had another sibling. But that fifth giant, perhaps as big as Neptune, perhaps only half that size, went too close to Jupiter — or Jupiter went close to it — and the nameless world was whipped out into space at a screaming 200,000 m.p.h. (322,000 km/h) or so. "After 4 billion years," says Nesvorny, in a masterpiece of understatement, "it's probably pretty far away."(See photos of an illustrated history of planet Earth.)

The evidence for this long-departed planet comes out of complex computer simulations that try to reproduce the solar system as it used to be. To qualify as plausible, such a model has to set up the conditions that could evolve into the configuration we see today. That means all the planets have to wind up in the right places, as does the Kuiper Belt of comet-like objects out beyond Neptune, and as does a second, bigger bunch of comets — the Oort Cloud — that stretches a good fraction of the way to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star.

In 2005, a group of planetary astronomers came up with an idea that worked pretty well: the so-called Nice model (it was named not for its pleasant attributes, but for the French city of Nice, where most of the scientists were based). According to the Nice model, the four familiar giant planets were originally bunched up much closer than they are now. Thanks to millions of small encounters with comets and asteroids, and a few bigger ones with each other, Jupiter ended up moving inward, the other three moved out, the Late Heavy Bombardment happened on schedule, and the Oort Cloud and Kuiper Belt took shape just right.

At least that's the way it worked some of the times the model was run. To be really successful, however, a solar system model has to come up with the right answer over and over again, and when Nesvorny ran his own version of the simulation, it ended up throwing one of the four giant planets out into space. Or else it disrupted the inner planets, so Mars and Earth destroyed each other in a cosmic crash. Not ideal.(See if there is a giant hidden planet in our solar system.)

One idea that had been floating around (so to speak) among planetary scientists, however, was the idea of the long-lost fifth giant planet, bunched up with the other four. "This result was not out of the blue sky," Nesvorny says. "Some of my colleagues even mentioned it in passing in the papers they published." Nesvorny added the fifth planet to his simulations — and it worked. More often than not, just as predicted, the extra planet was thrown into the void, a Neptune-size sacrificial lamb that changed things enough to keep Earth safe.

If it happened here, of course, it could happen in other solar systems — and in fact, a report last spring claimed the fleeting detection of 10 rogue Jupiters wandering through the depths of the Milky Way. "There's nothing physically mysterious about this," David Stevenson, a Caltech astronomer, told TIME in May. "It's a perfectly natural outcome."

It's so natural, in fact, that Stevenson himself made an even more audacious proposition more than a decade ago. The smaller the planet, the easier it is to fling into deep space, so a planet with the mass of Earth could be catapulted out with little gravitational effort at all. The real planet Earth wouldn't fare well in the frigid darkness between the stars. But, says Stevenson, it's plausible that some Earths could be more like mini-Jupiters, with a thick atmosphere of mostly hydrogen.

"Hydrogen," he says, "is well-known to be a greenhouse gas." On Earth, greenhouse gases trap the heat that flows in from the sun. In interstellar space, there is no solar heat. But there would still be heat rising from inside the planet, the result of radioactive minerals deep underground. "A hydrogen atmosphere," Stevenson says, "would trap that heat very efficiently." The result: while the top of the atmosphere would plunge to hundreds of degrees below zero, the surface would warm enough to keep water in liquid form.

Since water is essential to life, it's not impossible that such a vagabond Earth could harbor organisms — even intelligent life, as long as it could handle the noxious air. And since there are so many billions of stars in the Milky Way, there could be at least millions of these nicely insulated planets. Astronomers currently assume that their best bet for finding life in the universe is to look for an earthlike planet basking in the light of its parent star. Maybe they should be looking into the darkness instead.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2099347,00.html#ixzz1e5buoLD3