209th AAS Meeting winding down
Published on Jan 11, 2007 at 12:55 am.
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Filed under conference blogging.
Well, the 209th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society has ended. And it ended on a very high note. The last talk was Mike Brown talking about dwarf planets in the outer Solar System. For those that don’t recall my posts at the end of the summer, Mike Brown was the one who found 2003 UB313, now called Eris, the thing that triggered the whole “is Pluto a planet?” thing. He gave a very good talk, and discussed several Kuiper Belt Objects, not just Pluto and Eris. In particular, he talked about 200 FY9, another large KBO that shares many similarities with Pluto and Eris. But, what I found really interesting was the talk about 2003 EL61, and several of its companions. It, too, is nearly the size of Pluto. All of these have moons. But, 2003 EL61’s moon tells us that it has a much higher density than the other bodies. In fact, it is believed to be composed mostly of rock with a layer of ice on top. Furthermore, it lacks much of the methane signature typical of the largest KBOs. And, what’s more, there seems to be a family of similar bodies in orbits very nearly the same as it. The interpretation here is that this body was smacked by something big that blew many parts off of it. Even more interesting, 2003 EL61 seems to be in an orbit very nearly in resonance with Neptune. that means that in a few million years, it will likely be kicked either out to the Oort cloud or into the inner Solar System, where it will be one of the largest and brightest comets ever seen. In fact, he said that this impact debris might be the source of some rather unusual comets that seem to be mostly water ice without the more typical organics common in comets. Hmm. Very interesting.
This has been a wonderful conference, and I have a lot to blog about still. I filled an entire notebook with notes. My students complain that they need two or more notebooks for my class for the semester. I filled one completely in four days of the conference. That tells you how intense this was. I don’t want to go back, though. I have really enjoyed it, and this really has got me fired up. But, I need time to process it all. I am not ready to go back home and start the new semester. Worse, I will have a mailbox filled with trivial forms that I have to fill out. Yuck.
But, with all the stuff that I’ve still got to talk about, I can keep blogging for another week or two about just what I saw and heard here. I will continue, in fact, to post about some of these things, because I find them really interesting.
-Astroprof
