Flare Sci-Fi Forums: Planet X?

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Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :

Well, that's actually a ten, not an ex, but it works either way. Some guy thinks he's found another planet out past Pluto.

BBC News' article

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"It'd be a pity if every pencil on Earth suddenly collapsed in on itself and blew everything up."
-Krenim, TNO chat, September 30, 1999

Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :

Keen!

I really have no basis for making this claim, but I'd lean toward the object, if it indeed exists, being a brown dwarf.

At any rate, if it is a planet, what do you think it should be named? Keeping in mind the tradition of naming worlds after Roman gods. Something cold...and very distant.

Or I suppose it could be named Mickey. Or Rupert.

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I do indeed and shall continue
Dispatch the shiftless man to points beyond
--
Soul Coughing

Posted by The_Tom (Member # 38) on :

*nod*

Some better coverage here:

IMHO, the evidence seems pretty good. Let's hope this new IR telescope can spot something, or barring that, Hubble or a Radio Telescope.

Anyone care to start listing some Roman god names?

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"Well, I guess we're an Ovaltine family."
"MORE OVALTINE PLEASE!"
-American Radio Ads... *gag*... one more reason I'm glad to be above the 49th.

Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :

Cold and distant? They already did that. It's called Pluto. :-)

And, actually, it could be a god or a goddess, considering Venus. And, for that matter, Saturn and Uranus weren't gods, were they? Their Greek counterparts weren't, anyway...

Personally, I would suggest Proserpina, the Roman name for Persephone. Persephone was abducted by Hades (R. Pluto) and held as goddess of the underworld. I think it's appropriate because 1) the planet is closest to Pluto, 2) it's "cold and distant", as Sol put it, like the underworld, and 3) Proserpina was captured, as they suggest this planet was.

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"It'd be a pity if every pencil on Earth suddenly collapsed in on itself and blew everything up."
-Krenim, TNO chat, September 30, 1999

Posted by Baloo (Member # 5) on :

I've heard theories of a similar object called "Nemesis" that disturbed the comets in the Oort cloud so they came close to the Sun. I don't know if that would fit in with the current scheme for naming planets, however.

--Baloo

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Women will never be equal to men until they can walk down the street with a bald head and a beer gut, and still think they are beautiful.
--Unknown
www.geocities.com/Area51/Shire/8641/

Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :

Ok, I was going to list a bunch of Roman deities, but I'll just provide a link or two instead.

At any rate, what about Terminus? He's listed as being the "guardian of the boundaries", which this object certainly appears to be. Plus, it makes for a cool Asimov reference.

A place to go for more.

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I do indeed and shall continue
Dispatch the shiftless man to points beyond
--
Soul Coughing

Posted by Jay the Obscure (Member # 19) on :

so, can we start calling you Helios...Mr. System?

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Oh, meltdown. It's one of those annoying buzzwords. We prefer to call it an unrequested fission surplus.
~C. Mongomery Burns

Posted by Montgomery (Member # 23) on :

This is quite interesting.

I don't think you could call this body, if it exists, a planet. It's 32000AU out! That's way into the Oort cloud. It does indeed sound like a brown dwarf, possibly a long-time traveller through space which has become "ensnared" in the sun's gravity and now just mumbles around bumping into protocomets. It'd be interesting to know just how many comets owe their existenxce to its influence.

If it needs a name, may I recall the once recommended name for a "Planet X".
Phersephone (Fer-sef-on-ee)
She was a princess held captive in the underworld by Pluto....
Ah, I see TSN is way ahead of me.

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"FOOLS! Will I have to kill them ALL?!?!"

[This message has been edited by Montgomery (edited October 08, 1999).]

Posted by Kosh (Member # 167) on :

Terminus if it turns out to be a planet, nemisis if a brown dwarf.

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Outside of a dog, a book is a mans best friend. Inside of a dog, it's to dark to read. Groucho Marx

Posted by Krenim (Member # 22) on :

Well, as much as I like the name Persephone (or however you spell it), it will probably be named Nemesis.

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"Alright... Who wrote 'Beavis and Butthead rule' on the back of my skull?"

- Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek Parody, The Critic

Posted by First of Two (Member # 16) on :

some others which came to me:

Somnus / Hypnos, God of sleep
Morpheus (or Roman equivalent), God of dreams
Oneiros (or Roman equivalent), son of Dreams
Ops, wife of Saturn

But I think it'll come down to Persephone or Terminus... but what if they discover that Terminus ISN'T the last planet?

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"We shall not yield to you, nor to any man." -- Freak, The Mighty.

Posted by Kosh (Member # 167) on :

I think I'll look up the name of the rouge planet in "Dragon Riders of Pern".

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Outside of a dog, a book is a mans best friend. Inside of a dog, it's to dark to read. Groucho Marx

Posted by The First One (Member # 35) on :

I don't remember it ever having a name. . . maybe in that prequel, I think. . .

Posted by Jubilee (Member # 99) on :

The red star? ... it didn't have a name.....

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"...when all that is driving my heart forward
is you, thoughts of you, hopes for you,
and a fading dream with a Mona Lisa smile
that whispers "are you thinking of me too?"

43 days till the dreams become reality...

Posted by Elim Garak (Member # 14) on :

Nemesis sounds horribly corny...

Peresphore seems much more appropriate.

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Elim Garak: "Oh, it's just Garak. Plain, simple Garak. Now, good day to you, Doctor. I'm so glad to have made such an... interesting new friend today." (DS9: "Past Prologue")

Posted by Omega (Member # 91) on :

I think it's one of the Pierson's Puppeteer planets, personally.

By my calculations, and being liberal with estimates, the thing couldn't be traveling any faster than 200 meters per second on average, or it would fly off into space. At that rate, it would take a good three million years to get from here to Alpha Proxima. If someone would care to do the math a little more exactly, please do.

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- Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, 1791

Posted by HMS White Star (Member # 174) on :

I can't believe no one has thought of calling planet, VULCAN.

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HMS White Star (your local friendly agent of Chaos and a d*mn lucky b*st*rd:-) )

Posted by Krenim (Member # 22) on :

Actually, they did. A long time ago, some scientists thought there might be another planet closer to the sun than Mercury is. They called the theoretical planet Vulcan, but such a planet was never found.

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"Alright... Who wrote 'Beavis and Butthead rule' on the back of my skull?"

- Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek Parody, The Critic

Posted by Baloo (Member # 5) on :

The perturbations in Mercury's orbit were thought to be caused by a small planet orbiting even nearer to the sun than Mercury. It turns out that they eventually calculated the time distortion at Mercury's orbit due to the strong solar gravity, and it turns out that Einstein was right about that, too. Exit, Vulcan, enter, gravity-induced time distortion.

Go fig. Nature really is a mother!

Posted by First of Two (Member # 16) on :

The God Vulcan was cast from the heavens by Zeus, who was once impersonated by a stone. (when his mother discovered that his father, Cronos was eating all his children, she substituted a rock in Zeus's blankets for Zeus, and fooled Cronos.)

The hypothetical PLANET Vulcan was "cast from the heavens" by the gravity-theory of Albert EINSTEIN, whose name means "a stone."

o_O

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"We shall not yield to you, nor to any man." -- Freak, The Mighty.

Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :

Um... The planets have Roman names. You'd have to call it Proserpina, not Persephone (which is Greek).

And, actually, I suggested to Sol after I posted this that they should call it Vulcan if it's a brown dwarf. Because, if it's a planet, it'll be so cold that calling it Vulcan would be, shall we say, illogical. A brown dwarf, however, would be relatively warm, so it would make more sense.

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"It'd be a pity if every pencil on Earth suddenly collapsed in on itself and blew everything up."
-Krenim, TNO chat, September 30, 1999