Anyone else think that Nix looks like a potato ?
My first impression anyway.
Astronomy fans are still split over whether it was right to declassify Pluto as a planet in 2006 and call it a dwarf. Now the latest data from the Hubble Space telescope shows that the distant rock-ball is far weirder than we first thought. Pluto has one large moon, dubbed Charon after its discovery in 1978, and the two orbit …
First it can't make up its mind if it's the outermost or not, then it causes arguments because someone thinks it's not big enough, and now we face turmoil as the flames of the 'potayto-potahto' schism are fanned anew, bringing us yet again to the brink of worldwide destruction. Who knew? I had always thought it was going to be the religious nutters.
Actually, the three-body problem IS chaotic in the modern, mathematical sense. There are non-chaotic three-body configurations (for example, when several small bodies orbit a much larger mass in near-circular orbits), but the general problem is chaotic. Smaller moons closely orbiting two large co-orbiting bodes are almost bound to be a chaotic system.
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@Betacam - "The 3 body problem is why physicists rarely indulge in threesomes." - Well, that's what they would say.
Like many problems physicists deal with, finding reasons to reject threesomes is very much a theoretical exercise.
Rugby, among other things, is a common subject for experimentation in US universities. Football players who have spent their childhood and teenage years throwing around a "pigskin" particularly seem to like to dabble in rugby because of the commonality in the sports. As I understand, rugby is faster and easier to play as "pick up" game because you don't need 50lbs of armor to play it, though US football players sometimes need a pre-game warning to tackle differently.
Unlike soccer, rugby hasn't picked up the same pre- and post-university following and professional clubs, but someone at a US university is more likely to be aware of it than elsewhere in the US.
I wouldn't chalk up Kereberos to being an oddball capture yet. The other moons have bright surfaces because of post-formation modifications, but the amount of hydrocarbons and other carbonaceous materials in the system would make it easy for Kereberos to have been heavily doused like Iapetus from a large impact on another moon.
"It's postulated that Pluto was once much larger and suffered an impact that formed Charon and most of the chaotic moons around the dwarf planet."
I still want to know why Neptune's orbit isn't as far out as Pluto's average orbital distance: this would validate Titius-Bode. I suspect something happened out there a long time ago, some big collision. Maybe a chunk from that collision bumped into us... and gave us the Moon.
"I still want to know why Neptune's orbit isn't as far out as Pluto's average orbital distance: "
See: Nice Model. The planets didn't settle down into a primate-pleasing, mathematically-simple arrangement because they're the result of chaotic collapse of an interstellar cloud of gas and dust. Our pre-solar cloud initially collapsed into a very different pattern than is observed today and the planets gradually migrated into the current configuration.
"this would validate Titius-Bode."
No, it wouldn't. Having the solar system set up in the pattern of Titius-Bode would be a single case of Titius-Bode working - a coincidence not repeated elsewhere. Titius-Bode is not repeated in the moon systems of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto, nor in any of the observed extra-solar planetary systems.