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Space Science

Hubble Photo of Sedna Suprises Astronomers 342

Posted by CmdrTaco from the he'll-drop-his-pants-soon-enough dept.
waynegoode writes "Soon after the announcement of the discovery of Sedna, the solar system's furthest object and planet wanna-be, the Hubble Space Telescope was pointed at it to answer some of the many questions its discovery generated. The photos were released today and are surprising for what they don't show--a moon. Astronomers were certain it had a moon because of its slow rotation. "I'm completely baffled at the absence of a moon," says Michael Brown, Sedna's discoverer. Story and photo at Universe Today, hubblesite and NASA press release."
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Hubble Photo of Sedna Suprises Astronomers More

Hubble Photo of Sedna Suprises Astronomers

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  • Why am I not surprised :-) (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Space cowboy ( 13680 ) * on Thursday April 15, 2004 @04:26AM (#8867058) Journal

    The planet that's not a planet has a moon that's not there!

    Perhaps it used to rotate fast, but got hit by some other asteroid in an opposing fashion, so now it rotates slowly ? Space is big (!) so this is unlikely, but if Sedna is not too far from the Kuiper belt, perhaps it's less unlikely than one might expect...

    Simon

    • Re:Why am I not surprised :-) (Score:4, Funny)

      by ]ix[ ( 32472 ) on Thursday April 15, 2004 @04:49AM (#8867137)
      Its more likely to have had a moon that slowed its rotation but then the moon somehow got lost.

      Things can get messy out there in the kupier belt. Its not a place where you want to be alone late at night.

      • Re:Why am I not surprised :-) (Score:5, Informative)

        by koody ( 575863 ) on Thursday April 15, 2004 @04:54AM (#8867159)
        There is also a very simple and possible explanation suggested by the article. The moon could be either behind or right in front of sedna.

        The object is not there, though there is a very small chance it might have been behind Sedna or transiting in front of it, so that it could not be seen separately from Sedna itself in the Hubble images.

        Granted the likelyhood of this isn't great, but I think it is a lot more probable than the explanations suggested in the parent posts.

      • Things can get messy out there in the kupier belt. Its not a place where you want to be alone late at night.

        In the outskirts of the solar system it's always night...

        The inner system never sleeps. The oute system never wakes.

        • The oute system never wakes.

          Until the stars are right... Somewhere out there is Yuggoth.

        • Mercury never sleeps? (Score:5, Informative)

          by Kombat ( 93720 ) <kevin@swanweddingphotography.com> on Thursday April 15, 2004 @08:28AM (#8867802)

          The inner system never sleeps. The outer system never wakes.

          Sounds deep, but unfortunately, it is incorrect. Mercury (it doesn't get more "inner" than that) "sleeps" a great deal. Due to its eccentric orbit and bizzarrely-coordinated orbital period and rotational period, a single day on Mercury lasts as long as two of its years! That is to say, its rotational period is exactly two-thirds of its orbital period, meaning "nighttime" on Mercury lasts several Earth months. That's a lot of "sleeping" for a planet in the inner system which, according to you, never sleeps.

          Incidentally, while we generally presume Mercury to be a very hot place (and it is, during the day), the temperature on side of the planet that is in nighttime can drop to -150 degrees Celcius.

    • Re:Why am I not surprised :-) (Score:5, Insightful)

      by arvindn ( 542080 ) on Thursday April 15, 2004 @04:55AM (#8867162) Homepage Journal
      Sorry, that won't work. Basic probability: even if it got hit by an asteroid, the chances that it had exactly the amount of momentum to slow down Sedna's angular velocity to near-zero would be infinitesimal. You could say that it's still not impossible, but then that's precisely what surprises astronomers: very-low-probability events. Of course such cosmic coindicences do happen, such as the moon's angular diameter being almost equal to the sun's when viewed from the earth, but far more often, it indicates a gap either in our observations or our theories.

    • Re:Why am I not surprised :-) (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Arker ( 91948 ) on Thursday April 15, 2004 @06:17AM (#8867394) Homepage

      The collision theory is extraordinarily unlikely, although of course in a sense possible. A few more likely scenarios strike me though.

      But Brown predicted that a satellite would pop up as a companion "dot" in Hubble's precise view. The object is not there, though there is a very small chance it might have been behind Sedna or transiting in front of it, so that it could not be seen separately from Sedna itself in the Hubble images.

      Remember that Sedna itself is so small the Hubble can't resolve it. So Sednas companion could be quite tiny and still large enough to affect it. If it has a very small companion with a very low reflectivity, would it be surprising if Hubble didn't pick it up immediately? I'm not an astronomer, and there may be something I'm missing, but that seems quite plausible to me.

      It also seems possible that it was part of a binary system earlier and lost its companion, or that it's rotation rate was affected by one or more near misses out in the kuiper belt. We don't know the history of this object at all, we barely even know it exists. It is cool that an initial prediction seems to be a failure here, because that indicates a potential to learn new things, but at the same time it's hardly surprising given how small and far away the thing is and how difficult this makes it to detect and measure.

    • Or the missing moon was hit....

  • When... (Score:4, Funny)

    by jb_davis ( 732457 ) <jb_spa[ ]charterdotnet ['mat' in gap]> on Thursday April 15, 2004 @04:28AM (#8867065)
    When will G.W. announce a manned mission to look for oil?
    • ... the future of that project. The absence of a natural moon which could have been modified a will certainly put a huge dent in G.W's budget since it forces him build from scratch the fortress-moon/deathstar needed to defend US intrests in the region. Then there is the matter of the pesky natives ....
    • Saturn's moon Titan is thought to be covered with a petroleum ocean. A probe will drop into it from the Casini orbiter in January 2005.
    • It's a gas station.

  • That's no absence of a moon ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by BabyDave ( 575083 ) on Thursday April 15, 2004 @04:29AM (#8867069)

    It's an absence of a space station!

  • Sedna's Slow Spin (Score:3, Insightful)

    by meringuoid ( 568297 ) on Thursday April 15, 2004 @04:29AM (#8867071)
    ... Cue 'Hollow Sedna' theories. Oh, and a swarm of bad 'no moon, it's a space station' jokes.

  • it has to be aliens screwing with us (Score:4, Funny)

    by hellmarch ( 721948 ) on Thursday April 15, 2004 @04:30AM (#8867074)
    with all of my astronomical knowledge the only thing i can come up with is aliens playing some sort of april's fools day joke. but this begs to ask "do alien's celebrate april fool's day or some other weird alien day?" maybe they don't call it april

  • news (Score:5, Funny)

    by name773 ( 696972 ) on Thursday April 15, 2004 @04:31AM (#8867077)
    any other interesting things that didn't happen today?
    the sun rose so it can't be that....
    water is still wet...
    i'm baffled.

  • Rare Event (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Maybe Earth, Sedna and "Sedna moon" are co-linear?

  • Not an expert (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BackwardHatClub ( 763903 ) on Thursday April 15, 2004 @04:34AM (#8867086)
    They said there was a very small chance that it's companion rock could be behind or in front of it, what kind of percantage are we talking about? You have to figure that the "Sedna moon" would spend at least 20% of it's time in front of or behind the planet (relative to Hubble). Imagine trying to see the moon from a telescope on Sedna, it wouldn't always be on either side, sometimes the Earth would hide it. Maybe they just need to take another photo when Hubble has another oppurtunity.

    • Re:Not an expert (Score:5, Informative)

      by meringuoid ( 568297 ) on Thursday April 15, 2004 @05:01AM (#8867181)
      They said there was a very small chance that it's companion rock could be behind or in front of it, what kind of percantage are we talking about? Not that much of a chance. If Sedna has been slowed by the presence of a moon, that moon ought to be a goodly distance away - as the planet slows, the moon drifts away, to conserve angular momentum. So the planet would spend the great majority of its time well away from its moon in the sky.

      The other issue is that the planet can only occult the moon if the moon's orbit is edge-on to the Earth. That's true of many moons - consider the Galilean satellites of Jupiter, which eclipse and are eclipsed by their primary on a regular basis - but is very unlikely to be true of such an eccentric object as Sedna. Objects that far out don't adhere well to the ecliptic - they tend to go their own way :-)

    • Re:Not an expert (Score:3, Informative)

      by arivanov ( 12034 )
      20%

      Assuming its orbit is in the ecliptic plane. This is not a good assumption from Neptun onwards.

  • A moon? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Scorillo47 ( 752445 ) on Thursday April 15, 2004 @04:35AM (#8867091)
    It would be surprising that Senda has a moon. After all, Sedna itself is comparable in size with our own moon (Sedna has less than 1700 Km in diameter, and our moon has around 3500 Km in size).

    Now I am wondering if our Moon has another moon orbiting around :-) I am sure that somebody searched for it.

    • Re:A moon? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Uh?

      Pluto is comparable in size with our own moon, and it has a moon of its own.

      Asteroid Ida has a moon. Ida is about 56 by 24 by 21 kilometers in size.

      Having a moon has nothing to do with size.

    • Re:A moon? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by frobisch ( 630854 )
      The Hill sphere [republika.pl] for the moon is around 60000km so it is possible, but I think in our solarsystem there is no moon known with a moon (don't know about the asteroid belt)

    • PICTURES of a MOON with a MOON (Score:5, Informative)

      by deathcow ( 455995 ) on Thursday April 15, 2004 @05:38AM (#8867286)
      Here you go. [google.com] Asteroid Ida and it's little moon "Dactyl".

      Dactyl is about 0.75 x 0.8 x 1.0 miles in size [solarviews.com]. Imagine that!! Imagine sitting on Dactyl and orbiting Ida. Now, I'm not sure if a rock of 1 mile in diameter can even hold you down.

      Does anyone know how to calculate your weight on Dactyl? Size listed above and it's probably 2.2 - 2.9 grams per cubic centimeter.
      • OMG! Ida looks like a mummy sarcofagus! It must have been put there by the the same people who built the pyramids and the cydonia structures.

      • Re:PICTURES of a MOON with a MOON (Score:5, Informative)

        by david.given ( 6740 ) <dg@cowlark.com> on Thursday April 15, 2004 @07:20AM (#8867564) Homepage Journal
        Assuming Dactyl is a sphere 1.5km in diameter, then the volume is (4/3) pi r^3 == 1.8x10^9 cubic metres. 2.5 g/cm^3 is 2500 kg/m^3 (standard units are your friend), which gives Dactyl a mass of 4.5x10^12 kg.

        The acceleration due to gravity is Gm/r^2. r, in this case, is the surface of Dactyl, 750m. That gives 0.5x10^-3 m/s^2, or 0.005% of an Earth gee.

        That is, of course, assuming I've managed to do all my arithmetic correctly...

        (Pity Slashdot doesn't support super, or I could make the above look much cleaner. MathML would be nice, too...)

        • Dactyl escape velocity (Score:3, Interesting)

          by barakn ( 641218 )
          Escape velocity would have been more informative, which using your values of r and rho comes out to .9 m/s or about 3.2 km/hr. Just trying to walk would cause you to fly off the surface, though I guess you'd still be stuck orbiting Ida.

  • Colon Powell releases Hubble photos in UN forum. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anubis333 ( 103791 ) on Thursday April 15, 2004 @04:37AM (#8867097) Homepage
    'Astronomers were surprised by what they did not see, a moon. The hubble telescope helped solve the problem when honed onto Sedna itself. The planet's oddly erratic, eliptical orbit is due to a giant mass on it's far side. Colon Powell presented the Hubble photographs today in a speech before the United Nations. The photographs detail the until now, 'unknown mass' that was altering Sedna's orbit. "It is clear from these photos" he said "that we have found the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction".

    It is unclear how Saddam Hussein delivered and stockpiled the weapons on Sedna, but the blury photographic proof shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that the administration was in the Right from the beginning. NASA was unavailable for comment.
  • It's just had to change its name and location, due to an interstellar court action from Microsoft, which has claimed that the term "lunar" infringes on the term "Windows", given the obvious phonetic similarity.

    When Sedna's lu--r object has found a new name, and shaken off Microsoft's legal team, it will reappear.

    Except in Benelux.

  • Not so surprising... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by shachart ( 471014 ) <shachar-slashdot ... ac.il minus city> on Thursday April 15, 2004 @04:42AM (#8867113)
    At a distance of over 8 billion miles, Sedna is so far away it is reduced to one picture element (pixel) in the image taken in high-resolution mode with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys. This image sets an upper limit on Sedna's size of 1,000 miles in diameter.

    So if the so-called planet is the size of one pixel, how do they expect to see a smaller moon?

    And, yes, I'm quite aware of techniques such as extrapolations, anti-aliasing etc. which *may* help extract a smaller-than-1-pixel object using a series of 35 pictures, but I'd speculate that NASA's assertion that Sedna does not have a moon is premature.

    • Re:Not so surprising... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ]ix[ ( 32472 ) on Thursday April 15, 2004 @04:56AM (#8867167)
      Just because its smaller than a pixel doesent imply that it is invisible. As long as there is light coming of it it wil register as a blip in a pixel.

      So they are looking for a darker blip next to the gray blip that is sedna.

    • Re:Not so surprising... (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Sedna is one pixel with RGB (255,255,255).

      You'd expect its moon to be one pixel, with RGB (50,50,50) maybe.

      How someone using the buzzwords "extrapolations" and "anti-aliasing" can miss this would be a better question.

  • maybe it had a moon (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Wellmont ( 737226 ) on Thursday April 15, 2004 @04:45AM (#8867120) Homepage
    The slow rotation maybe due to the material the planet is made out of...haven't done enough research...but the limited work i've done on planetary rotation and gravity tells me two things.

    The slow rotation may account for a moon or child body which was able to escape the rotational cycle, or was flung off into space during its creation. Which is FAR FAR more likely given its distance from the sun

    The other reason maybe attributed to the fact that it is beyond the astroid belt, and is the furthest satellite we've discovered yet. Although it is a small target, it maybe the solar system's first line of defense (eg a riot shield) although not a good one. That could account for both slow/erratic rotation or a missing orbital body.

  • space.com (Score:5, Informative)

    by noselasd ( 594905 ) on Thursday April 15, 2004 @04:52AM (#8867148)
    Story also here [space.com]
    Small info:
    * Sedna is about three-fourths the size of Pluto.
    * It takes 10,000 years to orbit the Sun.
    * Sedna spins on its axis once every 20 Earth-days.

  • Resolution (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MoP030 ( 599234 ) on Thursday April 15, 2004 @04:55AM (#8867160)
    At a distance of over 8 billion miles, Sedna is so far away it is reduced to one picture element (pixel) in the image taken in high-resolution mode with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys.
    This surprised me a lot. Hubble can take pretty (for me as a non-astronomer) pictures of objects far away and in the past (wasn't only recently something so old that it is almost the beginning of the universe?), and yet it can't take a picture of something within our system larger than a pixel... Anyone with some knowledge care to elaborate on that?

    • Re:Resolution (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Well from this we deduce that 1 Hubble pixel corresponds to 1,000 miles at 8 billion miles, so 1/8,000,000 radians.

      According to the Google calculator = (1/8,000,000) radians = 0.0257831008 arc seconds.

      The field of view in the "pretty pictures of objects far away" is simply much larger than 0.025 arc seconds.

    • Re:Resolution (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Civil_Disobedient ( 261825 ) on Thursday April 15, 2004 @05:18AM (#8867238)
      Hubble can take pretty (for me as a non-astronomer) pictures of objects far away and in the past [...] and yet it can't take a picture of something within our system larger than a pixel.

      Now you may start to get a sense of just how mind-freakingly big some interstellar objects are. This logarithmic maps of the universe [princeton.edu] should help put things in perspective. Once you've got the image, start from the very bottom and work your way up. And keep repeating to yourself, "another order of magnitude... and another order of magnitude... and another..."

    • Re:Resolution (Score:5, Informative)

      by ColaMan ( 37550 ) on Thursday April 15, 2004 @05:23AM (#8867251) Journal
      Caution! This is a explanation involving a astonomical unit called "Really", that astronomers often use when talking to laymen.

      Sedna is Really small and Really far away.

      The rest of the universe is Really Really far away, but is also Really, Really Big.

      Hubble's lenses, when imaging, take into account these Really's so that when you cancel out the Really's, Sedna ends up small and the rest of the universe ends up Big in hubble pictures.

  • No moon, no Mars. (Score:5, Funny)

    by mezelf ( 658504 ) on Thursday April 15, 2004 @04:56AM (#8867163)
    I really pity the people on Sedna. Without a moon, how can they ever hope to get to Mars?

  • Quality? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by martingunnarsson ( 590268 ) *
    How come Hubble can take wonderful pictures of distant nebulas and stuff, when the quality of these pictures is far from good?

    • Re:Quality? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by EvanTaylor ( 532101 )
      Check the fine print. Those images are renderings.

    • Re:Quality? (Score:2, Informative)

      by api_syurga ( 443557 )
      Myabe because the distant nebulaes and stuff are actually billions times trillions times gazillions times larger than sedna...?

    • Re:Quality? (Score:5, Informative)

      by d60b9y ( 692396 ) on Thursday April 15, 2004 @06:14AM (#8867387) Journal
      I may not be a lawyer ;-) but I have just finished a Ph.D. in astonomy and I've worked with Hubble images (included ACS images) before.

      NaSa are wonderful at using Hubble to produce pretty publicity images. I'm not saying that the images of nebulae etc. are not without scientific justification, only that NaSa are very good at presenting them to the public.

      These images are more typical of the data taken by Hubble on a day-to-day basis; single filter images (presented in black and white) of faint objects pushing down close to the detection limit of the instruments.
      • Is it true that the original nebula images are black & white, and colored afterwards to look prettier?

        • Re:Quality? (Score:5, Informative)

          by mph ( 7675 ) <mph@freebsd.org> on Thursday April 15, 2004 @12:35PM (#8870751)
          Is it true that the original nebula images are black & white, and colored afterwards to look prettier?
          That's true, in a sense, but a misleading way of putting it. It's not as if the people at Space Telescope are pulling out their Crayolas.

          The electronic detectors (CCDs) on HST, as on virtually all professional telescopes, are inherently monochrome detectors. During an exposure, the detector is behind one of several filters. There are filters that pass UV light, blue light, green light, red light, infrared light, etc. In many cases, the same bit of sky is observed in multiple filters, one after the other. If these happen to be red, green, and blue filters, you can put the three images in the red, green, and blue channels of a color image, and get something that's approximately true color. The filters are not designed to exactly mimic the human eye's color response; that's not an important concern from a scientific standpoint. If some other combination of three filters is used, they can still be placed in the RGB channels of an image, but the result will be a false-color image. That doesn't mean the color information is meaningless; parts of the nebula that look "blue" in the image probably have something physically different happening than parts that look "red."

          Many people have an unrealistic expectation that colors in astronomical images should be exactly correct. That's a hard thing to nail down. As I mentioned above, the filters are not designed for human-vision color fidelity, since that's not relevant to the scientific goals at hand. Also, if you look at a nebula with your eye, even through a very large telescope, you vision will be dominated by the color-insensitive rods, and the nebula will appear quite washed-out. So do you want the publicity pictures to mimic this shortcoming of human vision (that we don't see much color in faint things)?

          Back to the topic of the CCDs being monochrome detectors: This is true of the CCD or CMOS detectors in consumer digital cameras, too. But instead of putting the whole detector behind a colored filter, each pixel on the detector is behind a tiny red, green, or blue filter. Thus, each detector pixel is still only recording one of the three colors of light. (The new Foveon chips are an exception to this rule.)

  • that isn't the planet in the picture ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by xlurker ( 253257 ) on Thursday April 15, 2004 @05:05AM (#8867196) Homepage
    it's the moon!
    (the planet is hiding behind it)....
  • If that's a planet start calling it Rupert, please...

  • No more Hubble (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 15, 2004 @05:23AM (#8867253)
    We really need to replace Hubble with a telescope that won't challenge us so much.

  • Dr.Mike Brown gives four possible explanations.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by EqualSlash ( 690076 ) on Thursday April 15, 2004 @06:20AM (#8867404)
    Dr.Brown one of sedna's discoverers gives out the following expanation at his site [caltech.edu]

    We can think of 4 possibilities for why we do not see a moon around Sedna.

    • (1) Perhaps we got extremely unlucky and the moon is hiding directly behind Sedna. This possibility is unlikely (about 1 in 100 chance), but can't be ruled out completely.
    • (2) Perhaps the moon is fainter than expected. We think that the moon has to be quite large to explain the very slow rotation of Sedna, so we think that it should be bright. But it is possible that it is large but has a very dark surface and so is difficult to see. We believe that many objects (other than Sedna!) in the outer reaches of the solar system should be quite dark, so perhaps this suggestion is not unreasonable.
    • (3) Perhaps the moon is gone! It is possible that there once was a moon which slowed the rotation of Sedna but now the moon is gone. Moons can get destroyed by impacts with other large objects in space or they can be stripped away by close encounters with other planetoids. While we can't rule out this possibility, we do not think it is very likely.
    • (4) Perhaps our circumstantial evidence is misleading us. There are 2 ways that we can think of for this to have happened: Perhaps the brightening and faintening that we think we see are not real. Measurements in science are never perfect, and perhaps some of these imperfections have, by bad luck, led us to believe that we are measuring Sedna's rotation when we are really not. From our understanding of the measurements, we can estimate that there is about a 1 in 20 chance of this type of bad luck. We thus think it is unlikely, but, again, we can't rule it out. Perhaps the measurement is real, but we are being fooled. Imagine that you look at a clock once every twenty-five hours. How fast would you think the hands were turning? The first day the clock would say noon. The second day 1pm. The third day 2pm. You might think the clock only moved 1 hour per twenty-five hours. Perhaps the same thing is happening with Sedna: Our measurements were made approximately every 24 hours, so if Sedna rotates every 25 hours, then every time we look it appears to have only rotated a little, and we think it takes 24 days to make a full rotation. This possibility cannot be ruled out with the current data, though it would require the unusual coincidence that Sedna's rotation period would have to be unusually close to the earth's rotation period!

  • Well duh (Score:2, Funny)

    by brunes69 ( 86786 )
    You think any respectable moon is going to hang around a mere planetoid???

    Sure, things were going great till we discovered her... Sedna had convinced the moon he was all that and a bag of potatoes. But as soon as the moon heard the word on the street that her man wasn't even big enough to be considered a planet....

    Its just like the saying goes... in some relationships, size *does* matter.
  • The moon is a superdense glob, set in a special orbit around Sedna, specifically to attract our attention. We have to alter its orbit in order to indicate that we are ready to be inducted into the Federation of Sentient Planets.
  • This clearly, totally demonstrates why we no longer need the Hubble! With our advanced Earthbound technology, we can resolve Sedna and its moons without the assistance of an orbital observation platform and....

    oh wait.

    Never mind.

    See more Sedna [savehubble.org]

  • This is what happens.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by linuxrunner ( 225041 ) on Thursday April 15, 2004 @08:07AM (#8867719)
    When plants are completely extracted of all their dark matter...

    Has someone saved the animals yet? Nibbler?

  • those are nice big.... pixels (Score:3, Funny)

    by WormholeFiend ( 674934 ) on Thursday April 15, 2004 @08:50AM (#8867961)
    Dyou guys think Richard Hoagland will manage to find some alien artifacts in those big pixels?

  • Astrological significance? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by The Queen ( 56621 ) on Thursday April 15, 2004 @08:54AM (#8867978) Homepage
    Are astrologers calling Sedna a "planet" or an "asteroid" - ? Since the 50's they've been waiting to ease the burden on Mercury and Venus, who currently have to rule two signs at once (Mercury rules Gemini and Virgo, Venus rules Taurus and Libra.) I've been reading an astrological course book from 1952, and they were absolutely convinced, since they'd just found Pluto, that there would be at least 2 more planets behind it, one to rule Gemini and one to rule Taurus. (Personally, I think new planets should take over for Virgo and Libra, but that's my modern opinion.)

    Offtopic? Only if you've never read a horoscope.
  • Amazing we can get the Hubble to take pictures of distant galaxies, but a picture of a planet in our Solar System comes out as crappy as my channel 57.

    • Re:Crappy picture (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I guess you have no sense of scale. You see, a galaxy is very, very, very, very big, and Sedna is only sorta big. . . .

  • 1986 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme (Score:4, Funny)

    by jtheory ( 626492 ) on Thursday April 15, 2004 @09:50AM (#8868354) Homepage Journal
    "Hubble Photo of Sedan Suprises Astronomers"

    I immediately pictured astronomers scratching their heads over Hubble photos of my former '86 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, named "Plum" (for the color, and short for "Plum Tuckered Out")... zooming through the far reaches of space.

    So it DID go to car heaven!!
  • How hard is it to run a spell checker before posting a story.. It is one thing for quoted material inside a posting to have misspelling, but the headline? That's just sad.
  • Or not drunk enough.

  • Save Hubble (Score:4, Informative)

    by ocie ( 6659 ) on Thursday April 15, 2004 @11:47AM (#8869988) Homepage
    Don't allow Hubble to fall back to Earth. It is still doing good science and can for years to come. New modules for Hubble have already been built and tested and only await a shutle mission to be installed. Call your congressman / woman today. Here [marssociety.org] is some info from the Mars Society on the work to save Hubble.

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