Today
scientists announced two surprising discoveries relating to the
solar system. The first discovery was the discovery of a 250-mile-wide
planetoid some 7.7 billion miles from the sun. The New York Times
described the discovery as follows: “Astronomers have discovered a
second icy world orbiting in a slice of the solar system where,
according to their best understanding, there should have been none.”
The
area mentioned is an area between the orbit of Pluto and the Oort
Cloud, a gigantic cloud- like region of comets believed to surround
our solar system. Scientists originally thought this area was empty,
but then they discovered within it Sedna, a 600-mile wide planetoid three
times farther from the sun than Neptune.
Some
are speculating that the planetoid discovery announced today may hint
at the existence of a super-Earth planet ten times bigger than the
sun, existing too far away from the sun to have been previously
discovered. But if such a planet existed, it would almost certainly
be too cold for life to exist on it, unless the planet had some type
of geological activity that produced heat.
The
second discovery announced today was the discovery of the first ring
ever detected around an asteroid. These observations come as a
surprise as big as the discovery a few weeks ago that a particular
asteroid is disintegrating, for unknown reasons.
Humbling
discoveries such as these make me wonder: why does any scientist
claim to understand exactly what happened during the first second of
the universe's history? Evidently we don't even yet fully understand
our own solar system, our own tiny little cosmic backyard. So give out a hardy
chuckle the next time a scientist speaks as if he has a detailed knowledge of exactly what happened at the dawn of time 13 billion years
ago.
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