Just to clarify your point, are you saying we should stop posting archive links.., or? I honestly am intrigued by Llama and company, but don't think about them that much.
It would be an interesting project to see if it works.
Pasting the article into the textbox...
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Like the first ring around Quaoar, announced by a team of astronomers in February, the second ring lies beyond what is known as the Roche limit.
The second ring, at a distance of 1,500 miles from the center of Quaoar, is closer than the ring announced in February, which has a radius of about 2,500 miles.
Another occultation occurred on Aug. 9 last year, and astronomers again pointed telescopes, large and small, at Quaoar in hopes of learning more about the ring.
The new observations revealed more details including a dense, narrow core in the ring just a few miles wide, which is surrounded by an envelope of material that is more dispersed.
A potential explanation for Quaoar's distant rings is the presence of a moon, Weywot.
The moon may have created gravitational disturbances that prevented the ring's particles from accreting into additional moons.
Both rings occur in locations near what are known as resonances with Weywot, and the resonances may turn out to be more important than the Roche limit for determining whether rings turn into moons or remain as rings.
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Going through OpenAI (764 tokens with a simple prompt):
Earlier this year, astronomers announced that a small world beyond Neptune with a diameter about one-third that of Earth’s moon possessed a Saturn-like ring that should not be there. Recently, after further observation, it has been discovered that Quaoar has two such rings. Scientists are still trying to understand how dust and gas in the early solar system coalesced into moons and planets. Quaoar is located in the Kuiper belt, a region of frozen debris beyond Neptune that includes Pluto, and the rings were found through stellar occultations. The first ring is at a distance of 2,500 miles and the second is at 1,500 miles. There is a potential explanation that the presence of a moon, Weywot, has caused gravitational disturbances that stopped the particles from accreting into additional moons.
The rings are not visible in telescope images, but astronomers were able to observe the shadow of the eclipses when distant stars passed behind Quaoar. Another occultation will occur on May 13, visible to telescopes in the US and Canada, which will help to constrain the Quaoar shape better and obtain more details about the two rings.
The discovery of the two rings around Quaoar has been a surprise to astronomers and has led to further research into how these rings were formed and how they remain in place. Additionally, it could offer insight into how dust and gas coalesced into planets and moons in the early solar system. Researchers hope that the upcoming occultation on May 13 will provide more answers.
FWIW gift links don't work if you turn off all tracking stuff in Firefox. It still always asks me to buy a sub to nytimes. archive.today/archive.org links are so much more useful.
Seems it's less than impossible, and more of 'can happen in some rare circumstances, that we didn't account for'. It's certainly not in "type two" Kardashev scale, but rather an intriguing example of the complexities and surprises that the universe holds. These 'impossible rings' serve as a reminder that our understanding of celestial dynamics is constantly evolving, and that there is still much to discover and learn about the intricacies of our solar system and beyond.
"A potential explanation for Quaoar’s distant rings is the presence of a moon, Weywot. The moon may have created gravitational disturbances that prevented the ring’s particles from accreting into additional moons. Both rings occur in locations near what are known as resonances with Weywot, and the resonances may turn out to be more important than the Roche limit for determining whether rings turn into moons or remain as rings."
Arguably the ‘real’ name should be Terra (i.e the Roman name for the goddess of the Earth). But which also looks like the word ‘dirt’, but just wearing its Sunday best.
Although I totally support calling the moon ‘Diana’.
Nah. It’s the same thing as every culture naming themselves “the people”. Every species names their planet after the thing from which life grows and they stand on, ie “dirt”
I hate it when publications label scientific discoveries "impossible". It makes scientists look like idiots.
OBVIOUSLY scientists understand that if something has been experimentally verified then it's by definition not impossible and the theory has to be improved. But I wonder if the general public understands that scientists understand that. Or if they imagine scientists going "Sir, an animal big as a house with a tail on his face? Impossible!"
> But I wonder if the general public understands that scientists understand that.
No, the general public does not. The scientific literacy of the general public is abysmal. There's entire political movements predicated on a lack of understanding of the term "scientific theory".
Any science-related piece of text should use international standard units, period.
I really find it absurdly arrogant from american writers to use their broken system for scientific material, knowing the rest of the whole god damn world is already forced to use english for scientific communication.
As a non-native person reading and writing english all day long, this makes me infuriated every single time. I feel like being shown a middle finger.
Automated website translation software will sometimes try to translate dates into ‘English’ so 04.01.2023 becomes 01/04/2023.
I can see a time where it‘ll start trying to do the same for other units and the large numbers of metric using English-speakers will have to put up with 1600 km being translated to 1000 miles.
The naming conventions/protocols are fairly fixed at this point see [1], but this name absolutely fits the convention for this class of object
Quoting Wikipedia:
Other trans-Neptunian objects (such as 50000 Quaoar), including classical Kuiper belt objects, are given mythological or mythic names (not necessarily from Greek or Roman mythology), particularly those associated with creation.
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From a physx article [2]
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Consistent with the IAU conventions for naming non-resonant Kuiper Belt Objects after creator deities, the object was given the name Quaoar after the Tongva creator god. The Tongva people (otherwise known as the Mission Indians) are native to the area around Los Angeles, where the discovery of Quaoar was made.
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I see no reason why names need to fit the sensibilities of English speakers
I'd have preferred a name from classical roman/greek religion to keep the theme going, but Quaoar is still a mythical name so at least it partially fits the theme. But why should rings matter?
No, other cultures do not have a name for an extrasolar planet just discovered.
Moreover, the extant names from the Roman pantheon are universal within the international scientific community. They are also nearly exhausted.
I find it tedious to reject names from other pantheons. Not least because they are exceptionally cool - Quaoar and ʻOumuamua are stellar and divine names. Of all things, should not astronomy inspire us to grok human culture as a global and syncretic whole, as opposed to a parochial set of divisions in which English speakers may only use Greco-Roman gods?
Whoa there, I don't reject the Quaoar name. I said it's fine, it fits the theme well enough. I only expressed a preference that they stuck with roman/greek names. I don't think they're running out of those, I clicked a few at random on wikipedia's list and the ones I happened to click didn't have corresponding planets yet.
They could have named it Terminus, or Fontus, or Quirinus, or Vejovis, or... But whatever.
Perseverance landed near crater Jezero, named after a tiny municipality in Bosnia (~1100 population). It's not the only Mars crater named after tiny towns around the world, but the fact that jezero means lake in many Slavic languages had a lot to do with this particular selection. There's also four valleys near the crater named after Bosnian rivers (Neretva, Sava, Pliva, Una).
Anyways, the point I'm trying to make is that the space community is definitely thinking more globally nowadays and that it absolutely works. We went from no particular interest in astronomy amongst general population to meticulously following Perseverance's every step.
To your question, no not entirely anyway. Other cultures might have traditional names for the visible stars and planets, but the heavenly bodies that were discovered by telescope basically just have the names they were given by their discoverers.
For example in Japanese, the visible planets have names that align with their own pre-Columbian traditions, e.g. Mars is named "Kasei" which means Firestar and Jupiter is named "Mokusei" which means Treestar. But when you get to planets discovered in modern times, Uranus, Neptune and demoted Pluto, they're respectively "Tennousei (Heavenly-King Star)", "Kaiousei (Sea-King Star)", and "Meiousei (Hades-King Star)", which are directly derived from the Western names given by their discoverers.
Now imagine the thousands of smaller named bodies in the Solar System, nobody's going to be bothered to come up with independent names for all of them for every culture, it would be too confusing. Imagine if everyone used native-tongue keywords in programming languages. Someone would send you a Python progam in French and it would be littered with sinon, sauf, Vrai, etc. While it might be convenient for the native speaker working alone, it would be a nightmare for interoperability.
Thus, newly discovered heavently bodies are referred to by the designations approved by the International Astronomical Union, in this case via its Working Group - Small Bodies Nomenclature.
> Someone would send you a Python progam in French and it would be littered with sinon, sauf, Vrai, etc. While it might be convenient for the native speaker working alone, it would be a nightmare for interoperability.
When you think about it, would it actually matter?
The AST would be the same. As long as identifiers are defined for multiple locales it would be trivial to translate.
The only language I know of that's tried this is AppleScript. Otherwise this makes it too hard to read sample code/documentation, and MTL isn't good at translating keywords consistently.
I was referring to the implied "euro" culture which you brought up by saying these names are "eurocentric". Obviously NASA aren't Romans. What does NASA have to do with it anyway? Isn't it the National Observatory in Brazil that is primarily responsible for the observations of this planet? NASA doesn't own space.
