Don't you see??@!
I'ts PROOF of a Flat Earth.
PROOF!!
NASA's New Horizons probe mission has once again given boffins something exciting to think about. New data sent back to Earth has meant they'll need to rework our understanding about the shape of 2014 MU69 (aka Ultima Thule). Previously, the thing might as well have been dubbed Frosty the Snowman as boffins speculated that the …
This is completely off-topic, but I was relating to one of my fellow students the other day about an interaction I had in EVE Online during the year and a half I played that game. There I was, happily mining away when some berk warped in-system and immediately greeted me with something like
'Esme? What kind of a name is that? "Esme = it's me" is really lame!"
"You really need to stop playing computer games and get out and meet more girls if you have never met one called Esmerelda before" I replied.
Exit interloper stage left in silence.
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the fixation you seem to have with Uranus...
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"2014 MU69 is a relic from the formation of the solar system."
I really wish people would stop saying things like this every time there's a report on asteroids or whatever. Everything in the solar system is a relic from the formation of the solar system. Stuff like this is interesting enough without having to devolve into meaningless nonsense in efforts to big it up.
I think the point is that these things have not changed that much in the last four and a half billion years. Ignoring volatile stuff that has been driven off what you are left with is "primordial stuff". Even bodies like Ceres and Vesta have radically changed since their formation.
So, if you had enough stuff like this you could build a solar system. Or, at least, work out how it had evolved.
I am a body in the solar system, but you'd have a pretty hard job trying to work out how Jupiter formed by looking at my chemical constituents.
I am also a relic and parts of me may be four and a half billion years old. (I believe most of my hydrogen is thirteen and a half billion, give or take.)
Whilst not in any way spherical, as I am less than 400km across, my GP thinks I am more spherical than I should be. I guess he must have changed degree from astrophysics to medicine?
I am fully, 100 percent confident that they have no idea. But then, how could they? What they are trying to do is figure out how spaghetti was made by looking through a telescope from 5 miles away at a bowl made last month, without knowing what spaghetti is supposed to be. This was the equivalent of sending a drone over to look, where they discover that it looks different from up close than it does from a long ways off. While this is a start, nobody's really going to know until we can stand on it with a full set of a analysis tools on hand.
well, yes and no. it all depends on the size distribution of the material being accreted, and whether it happens symmetrically. For instance, if all the material accreting onto a body was the size of dust grains, and was uniformly distributed, you might expect the result to be a spherical body even if it was well under the mass for gravity to do the job, for example if you had a body moving through a large, dense dust cloud (such as in a planetary ring system). On the other hand, if you have a relatively sparsely populated field of material, where the size varied from microscopic upwards, in a Poisson distribution, you might expect accretion to happen as a serious of collisions between bodies of varying sizes, resulting in a much more random shape. The observations suggest that in the outer solar system at least, the mode of formation is much more the latter.
I think Version1.0's point is that when things get big enough gravity tends to make them spherical no matter what shape they were originally. There is a minimum size/mass for this to happen.
For rocky/metallic bodies this size is somewhere between Vesta and Ceres.
For icy bodies this happens at a smaller mass (presumably bigger than Ultima Thule.)
For something made out of nickel and iron this size will be bigger than Ceres.
But if they spin fast enough (like Saturn) they start to bulge out at the equator and stop being spherical.
But if they spin fast enough (like Saturn) they start to bulge out at the equator and stop being spherical.
They don't have to spin very fast, Earth technically is not a sphere either, it is an oblate spheriod [citation - wikipedia] - it bulges at the equator.
Both must be approaching. What NASA isn't telling us is that they've analysed it's trajectory, and decoded a message revealed in close-up images. It's heading for Canada, and the message reads 'All your maple syrup are belong to us!'
(A smalled message reads 'and bacon')
All this talk of pancakes and nuts is making me hungry.
Since I'm north of the 52nd, I'll be making myself nice hot,gooey oatmeal.
Pancakes are for sundays.
I'll leave you nuts here in the forum discussing odd shaped things floating about in the outer reaches of the solar system.
) possibility? -> Ultima and Thule were moving in substantially different ways, possibly on drastically different paths at one time, and the intersection of their paths, the resulting impact put them roughly where they are now. This might explain the difference in planar form between the two objects and why they are so 'slim'. -- I'll note I'm still working on first coffee and first breakfast. I'll think on it more after third coffee.
Physics would put a rotating saucer for simulated gravity, then a spherical engineering/engine area. Though that arrangement of saucer would be strange, changing the axis would probably be a better arrangement, as spinning the entire ship would be possible.
Beside, we already got a picture proving it's no station... wait
"That's no moon!"
Yeah, I no doubt do not doubt that the thing is flattened in shape. Just having hard time accepting it's THAT flat based on such little observations. However, TBH they guessed it's shape based on background stars previous to the direct photography really really well.
Perhaps solar wind/photon pressure is shaping it?
Looking at it logically it is quite clearly a redundant Enterprise class starship that's been circling out there long enough to accrete a layer of snow. Presumably left over from the seeding of the solar system with DNA and parked far enough out so the monkeys wouldn't get too excited until they had developed at least a modicum of technology.
OK, so let's consider the following facts:
1) NASA claims they can't even explain why such an flat-shaped object exists.
2) The object looks like a pancake.. or a flying saucer.
3) The object is called "Thule" - after the "Thule-Society": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule_Society
4) The Thule society was an occultist group which tried to create flying saucers.
Go figure, sheeples.
What exactly do they HIDE from us?!?!
:-O