
Press Conference in Brazil to Announce Discovery in Outer Solar System - mariusz79
http://www.eso.org/public/announcements/ann14021/
======
samwillis
Early leak of press announcement:

"Brazlian researchers discover asteroid with rings"

"The European Southern Observatory announced this week the discovery of rings
around an asteroid 1.4 billion miles from Earth. Chariklo is the largest of
the class of asteroids orbiting the sun between Saturn and Uranus known as
Centaurs."

Google cache before it was thaken down:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.wral.com%2Fdiscovery-
an-asteroid-with-rings%2F13510966%2F)

[http://www.wral.com/discovery-an-asteroid-with-
rings/1351096...](http://www.wral.com/discovery-an-asteroid-with-
rings/13510966/)

~~~
hrjet
Whoa! I guess the big news here is that rings around such a gravitationally
weak body would be a rare occurrence in nature... indicating a high
possibility of an artificially designed / constructed structure.

Edit: Not sure if I am being downvoted for stating the obvious or the
incredulous :)

~~~
bitJericho
You're exactly right. A race of beings sprung up out of the mud of their home
world, discovered science, space travel, faster than light travel, decided to
visit a solar system and place an artificial ring around a rock in the distant
outer reaches of a solar system, and then... profit?

~~~
memracom
Actually ceramic materials make the best protection against missiles like
bullets or meteorites. So an advanced race of star travelers would not use
metal-skinned ships, they would coat their vessels with a thick layer of
porous rock. All we can see is that outer protective skin. Inside the star
travelers live generation after generation patiently waiting until they find a
habitable planet to take over.

~~~
bitJericho
And then they immediately die because life is designed for a planet, not the
other way around, unless by habitable you mean a planet that is uninhabitable,
artificially made habitable.

------
joshvm
[http://aerospace.firetrench.com/2014/03/20-seconds-that-
chan...](http://aerospace.firetrench.com/2014/03/20-seconds-that-changed-our-
understanding-of-the-solar-system-surprise-discovery-of-double-ring-system-
around-asteroid-like-body/)

This was published yesterday, hasn't been taken down yet. The DOI is
10.1038/nature13155.

~~~
forgotAgain
I think the importance goes up a lot if the rings are made of water as
conjectured in parent. Getting access to water in space without dragging it
out of a gravity well would make asteroid mining much easier. There's water in
comets but their availability is not nearly as reliable.

~~~
Sharlin
Not really. At those distances, beyond the frost line [1] pretty much
_everything_ solid is bound to be mostly water. Ice is plentiful even in the
main belt asteroids and in this case we're talking about the Centaurs that lie
much farther away - of course, their distance also makes them ineligible for
any short-term mining endeavors.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frost_line_%28astrophysics%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frost_line_%28astrophysics%29)

------
icebraining
Shame it's not broadcast, nowadays it should be a given, in my opinion. Why
keep it closed to "members of the media", particularly when we all know how
often they screw up these stories?

~~~
InclinedPlane
Embargos are designed to give every news outlet sufficient time to write up
their stories and do their background reasearch without having to worry to
rush to print to beat their competitors. In practice it's questionably useful.

------
valarauca1
Http redirects to https, which is awesome. Except they don't support any 'new'
ciphers. So I can't connect.

Site only supports

    
    
          TLS_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_MD5 (0x4)
          TLS_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_SHA (0x5)

~~~
welterde
> Http redirects to https, which is awesome.

Huh..? Here it's doing the opposite (but will check again once I get home if
it's just at work..)..

Or weren't you talking about the eso.org website?

------
andyjohnson0
Some recent papers by the team's leader, Felipe Braga-Ribas, are at [1]. I'm
not any astronomer, but they mainly seem to concern studies of the atmospheres
of the outer planets and mintor planets using observations of stellar
occultations.

Maybe the announcement is about Pluto's atmosphere, or detection of atmosphere
around an asteroid or one of the Centaurs?

[1] [http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Felipe_Braga-
Ribas/publi...](http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Felipe_Braga-
Ribas/publications/)

------
lifeisstillgood
> Each of the outer planets: Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune and of course Saturn
> have rings.

What? Really?

* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rings_of_Jupiter](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rings_of_Jupiter)

OK, so there are things I don't know, and more importantly there is water in
fairly easily accessible places dotted around our Solar System.

~~~
mathattack
When you have kids, your internal Wikipedia gets an update. :-) I had no idea
about the rings until I read a book about planets to my kid. Then he started
telling me that there were other dwarf planets besides Pluto. I told him that
he was wrong. Then I went to a new book, and had to explain that "Even Papai
makes mistakes."

Getting current on science is one of the great perks of having kids.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _Then I went to a new book, and had to explain that "Even Papai makes
> mistakes."_

Probably the most important thing for your kid to learn.

~~~
mathattack
And oh boy he likes to remind me of this lesson. :-)

------
Mchl
Science through press conferences. Exactly how you're not supposed to do it.

------
czottmann
Hot on the heels of the discovery of Big Bang's gravitational waves there's
now news that for the first time ever alien live has been witnessed, in the
form of Silver Surfer ridin' dat wave.

------
jneal
This is very cool, I'm anxious to see the full announcement and see what is
said. I want to hear what others in the field see and have to say as well
because I would never think a body with a diameter of just 250 km could
actually have enough gravitational power to maintain rings.

~~~
T-hawk
Read up on the Hill sphere:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_sphere](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_sphere)

How much mass you need to retain rings isn't an absolute quantity. It depends
on distance and size of other masses. A 250km body in Earth orbit couldn't
retain its own rings because Earth's gravity would dominate the system. But a
250km body in deep space with no competition could.

Neptune can actually maintain satellites at a greater distance than Jupiter
can, despite Jupiter having over 10x the mass. This is because Jupiter has
closer competition from the Sun and Saturn, while Neptune has enormous amounts
of space to itself.

------
mathattack
I have to admit that this excites me a lot more than Oculus and Facebook, even
if the latter will have a more immediate impact on my life.

~~~
huherto
Virtual worlds or space. That is the dilema.

~~~
clef
If the universe is holographic, wouldn't it be kind of the same thing?

------
chasing
I wonder if it's better to just wait until the discovery is announced before
submitting and upvoting? The speculation's fun, but, y'know. The announcement
is in just a few hours.

------
Wohui
"We have found the inventor of Bitcoin. At 15 AU, harassing him will be
extremely expensive, however we hope NASA will do the right thing and
repurpose their 2025 europa lander"

------
wikiburner
Planet X???

:)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planets_beyond_Neptune](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planets_beyond_Neptune)

------
DoggettCK
Come on, Reapers. Or even Reavers.

------
emeidi
It has to be Nibiru (or better known as Planet X)!

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibiru_cataclysm#Planet_X](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibiru_cataclysm#Planet_X)

------
clef
Big alien motherships on their way to acquire Facebook?

~~~
mariusz79
I think you mean "Facebook to acquire big alien mothership" ;)

~~~
clef
Oops, what the heck was I thinking? Of course.

------
mkohlmyr
I guess Zecharia Sitchin was right. They be a comin' for our gold, dontcha
know.

------
stuaxo
The beginning of The Fifth Element ..

------
hello2
Breaking news: From some undisclosed confirmed sources, it appears they
discovered a new planet after Pluto. Could this be planet Nibiru?

~~~
hello2
I don't understand why this was voted down. The sources were trusted and the
news was accurate.

------
morituri
It's the Klingons.

~~~
clef
They want their beer back :)
[http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/mar/25/star-trek-
warnog...](http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/mar/25/star-trek-warnog-
official-klingon-beer)

------
onion2k
Event Horizon has returned.

