{"id":185,"date":"2006-04-12T09:17:46","date_gmt":"2006-04-12T09:17:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/04\/12\/lets-call-the-whole-thing-off\/"},"modified":"2006-04-12T09:17:46","modified_gmt":"2006-04-12T09:17:46","slug":"lets-call-the-whole-thing-off","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/04\/12\/lets-call-the-whole-thing-off\/","title":{"rendered":"Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Kuiper Belt Controversy continues, with the lastest round showing up in the Times<\/cite> today: Planet Discovered Last Year, Thought to Be Larger Than Pluto, Proves Roughly the Same Size<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

The object — still unnamed more than a year after its discovery but tagged with the temporary designation 2003 UB313 and nicknamed Xena by the discoverer — covered an area only 1.5 pixels wide in the digital image, taken by the space telescope in December. But that was enough to extract the diameter: 1,490 miles, give or take 60 miles.<\/p>\n

A previous estimate by a team of German researchers, based on measurements taken from the ground, had put the diameter at 1,860 miles, or 30 percent more than Pluto’s 1,422 (as measured by the telescope).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This, of course, fans the controversy over whether Pluto ought to be officially called a “planet” back into a roaring smolder. If it’s just one of many similarly-sized ice-balls out in the distant regions of the Solar System, why should Pluto get a special name? And should anybody actually care?<\/p>\n

The far more interesting aspect of this, to my mind, is in the first paragraph: The thing is only a pixel and a half across, and they get the diameter to a few percent. That’s some nifty curve-fitting, and some serious faith in your image-processing capabilities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Kuiper Belt Controversy continues, with the lastest round showing up in the Times today: Planet Discovered Last Year, Thought to Be Larger Than Pluto, Proves Roughly the Same Size: The object — still unnamed more than a year after its discovery but tagged with the temporary designation 2003 UB313 and nicknamed Xena by the… Continue reading Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,33,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy","category-in_the_news","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}