Distant Object ‘DeeDee’ Makes the Dwarf Planet Grade

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The solar system’s dwarf-planet population is about to increase by one, reports Space.com. The far-flung object 2014 UZ224 — informally known as DeeDee, for “Distant Dwarf” — is about 395 miles wide (635 kilometers), new observations reveal.

That means the frigid object probably harbors enough mass to be shaped into a sphere by its own gravity, entitling it to “dwarf planet” status, researchers said.

Astronomers first spotted DeeDee in 2014 using the optical Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile (though they didn’t announce the discovery until 2016).

The initial Blanco observations allowed the discovery team to nail down DeeDee’s orbit. The object loops around the sun on a highly elliptical path that takes more than 1,100 Earth years to complete; it’s currently about 92 astronomical units (AU) from the sun but comes as close as 38 AU and gets as far away as 180 AU. (One AU is the average Earth-sun distance — about 93 million miles, or 150 million km.)

DeeDee is therefore the second most distant “trans-Neptunian object” with a confirmed orbit at the moment, researchers said. The dwarf planet Eris is more far-flung, though that’s not always the case; Eris is currently about 96.5 AU from the sun, but it never gets more than 98 AU from Earth’s star.

For perspective, Pluto orbits the sun at an average distance of 40 AU, with a maximum orbital distance of 49 AU.

Continued here.
– – –
Talkshop note: the ratio of DeeDee’s perihelion (closest approach to the Sun) and that of Neptune is around 1.273:1 or the square root of Phi (the golden ratio) to one. For comparison the equivalent Pluto:Neptune ratio fits the 1:1 superresonance (see below).

Re Pluto and Neptune: ‘…the longitudes of ascending nodes of the two bodies—the points where they cross the ecliptic—are in near-resonance with the above libration. When the two longitudes are the same—that is, when one could draw a straight line through both nodes and the Sun—Pluto’s perihelion lies exactly at 90°, and hence it comes closest to the Sun when it is highest above Neptune’s orbit. This is known as the 1:1 superresonance.‘ – Wikipedia

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April 13, 2017 at 08:36AM

Fourth Thing To Know About Climate Change–Nat Geographic

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By Paul Homewood

 

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Even their graph of Arctic sea ice extent shows that the ice has stabilised since 2007. They are, of course, hoping that readers will not notice this.

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They start their graph in 1979, at the end of a period when the Arctic had been getting colder for three decades.

In Climate, History and the Modern World, HH Lamb wrote (in 1982):

 

The cooling of the Arctic since 1950-60 has been most marked in the very same regions which experienced the strongest warming in the earlier decades of the 20thC, namely the central Arctic and northernmost parts of the two great continents remote from the world’s oceans, but also in the Norwegian-East Greenland Sea….

A greatly increased flow of the cold East Greenland Current has in several years (especially 1968 and 1969, but also 1965, 1975 and 1979) brought more Arctic sea ice to the coasts of Iceland than for fifty years. In April-May 1968 and 1969, the island was half surrounded by ice, as had not occurred since 1888.

Such sea ice years have always been dreaded in Iceland’s history because of the depression of summer temperatures and the effects on farm production….. The 1960’s also saw the abandonment of attempts at grain growing in Iceland, which had been resumed in the warmer decades of this century after a lapse of some hundreds of years…

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And during the earlier decades of warming, which he mentions, we know that temperatures around the Arctic were at similar levels to today.

For instance, Nuuk in Greenland:

 

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The warming and cooling cycles in the Arctic have nothing at all to do with global warming, but follow the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, a perfectly natural event, which NOAA says has been occurring for at least the last 1000 years.

 

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As for the Antarctic, the land ice mass there is actually growing, according to satellite altimeters.

 

 

They also mention glaciers, but do not tell their readers that glaciers worldwide grew massively between the Middle Ages and the mid 19thC, in other words during the Little Ice Age. (See here.)

They began retreating around the mid 19thC, and observations show that the rate of recession was greater then and in the early 20thC than it is now.

As glaciers melt, we are finding the remains of forests, carbon dated to the Middle Ages, as far apart as Alaska and Patagonia. Clearly glaciers are simply returning to their natural state prior to the Little Ice Age.

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April 13, 2017 at 06:30AM

Third Thing To Know About Climate Change–Nat Geographic

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By Paul Homewood

 

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The main cause of global warming? Err, well no actually.

According to the Cook study quoted, only 65 papers found explicitly found that humans are the primary cause of recent global warming.

I make that 1.6%, not 97%.

Full details are here.

Virtually all scientists accept that man has some effect on climate, even if only through urbanisation. The Cook study is therefore pretty much worthless anyway, as the authors knew before they published it.

But the fact that only 65 papers identified humans as the primary cause is extremely damning to the supposed consensus.

If humans are actually responsible for less than half of recent warming, the whole scare story falls apart.

 

Prof Mike Hulme of the Tyndall Centre summed up just how meaningless Cook’s study was:

 

The [Cook et al.] article is poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed. It obscures the complexities of the climate issue and it is a sign of the desperately poor level of public and policy debate in this country that the energy minister should cite it. It offers a similar depiction of the world into categories of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ to that adopted in [an earlier study]: dividing publishing climate scientists into ‘believers’ and ‘non-believers’. It seems to me that these people are still living (or wishing to live) in the pre-2009 world of climate change discourse. Haven’t they noticed that public understanding of the climate issue has moved on?

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April 13, 2017 at 06:00AM

A Scottish Panama Canal

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The panama canal is 48 miles cuts through land rising to nearly 100m above sea level is about 35m wide and has 6 locks. It carries a 1000 ships each year and is supposedly one of the seven wonders of … Continue reading →

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April 13, 2017 at 05:17AM