Xena, Warrior Princess, Favorite lesbi icon of Astronomy Nerds in California
Independent Online Edition > Science & Technology : app3 — Poor Pluto. Looks like we have a tenth planet!
It is a tiny white dot even in the most powerful telescopes, but a dot that moves, albeit slowly, against the background of distant stars.
That means it must be a planet, so now object 2003UB313, spotted two years ago by astronomers in California, has been officially identified as the 10th planet in the solar system, and tentatively christened Xena.
The body is believed to be about 1,700 miles in diameter, about a quarter the size of the Earth, and about one-and-a-half times the size of Pluto, the ninth and last planet to be discovered, in 1930.
But at nearly 10 billion miles out, Xena is the most distant object detected orbiting the Sun, three times as far out as Pluto and 97 times as far out as the Earth. Its full orbit takes 560 years.
Callisto was much prettier! Unfortunately there’s already a moon of Jupiter (I think) with that name 🙁
It’s still a better name than “Quaoar”, another Trans-Neptunian object recently discovered and named.
That being said, we shouldn’t leave it to a bunch of scientists to think of poetic names for things.
Thanks for the hot girl on girl action pic.
To get a planet named, you gotta go through these guys:
http://www.iau.org/IAU/
I thought it was supposed to be Sedna
Sedna is a planetoid – never made the cut to be a planet apparently
see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedna_(astronomical_object)
and
http://scithought.blogspot.com/2005/07/tenth-planet.html
– apparently you have to have a moon to be a planet.
how does that go: “Behind every great planet, there is a moon urging it on”???
So where is pluto’s moon?
Behind Uranus?