"...you'll have to find someone else to name it after"
Easy. My dog found it. He can name it whatever he wants, i.e. except his own name.
Who wants a planet named after him or her anyway? There are much "better" things I can think of...
Boffins crowdsource hunt for 'Planet 9'
The Australian National University (ANU) is recruiting citizens to look at hundreds of thousands of images, in case they can find the mooted-but-not-yet-discovered “Planet 9”. The long-dismissed idea that there's an undiscovered planet beyond Pluto was revived in January 2016 when CalTech boffins claimed they'd spotted …
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Monday 27th March 2017 21:52 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: "...you'll have to find someone else to name it after"
"'Planet IX' just doesn't have the glamour to it."
Oh, I don't know.
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Monday 27th March 2017 08:26 GMT Michael H.F. Wilkinson
Interesting project, and it is great getting the public involved, but I do wonder: if good old image processing can already highlight moving stuff, how hard should it be to generate candidates automatically? It is fairly easy to compare the position of moving stuff to known objects. No AI needed for that: if the epoch of the observation is known, then the position of known objects can be computed from their orbital parameters. Sometimes these parameters might not allow very precise positions, but we could compensate for that by plotting the uncertainty of the position on the night sky. If an object falls into the region that might be occupied by a known target, and there is no other clear candidate for the known object, provisionally rule it out.
We also know roughly how fast it should be moving (slow(!) it is far away from the sun) so we can rule out a lot of the unknown objects too. Finally, we have some idea of the brightness (because it is most likely an ice giant with a mass ten times that of earth, and we have a rough guess of the distance). This too will rule out many objects. I would love to write some code to scour these data automatically. Might be a nice student project
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Monday 27th March 2017 08:55 GMT Tom Paine
Exactly what I was going to say (dammit!|) --
The Register asked Tucker to flesh out why the search isn't using artificial intelligence.
The answer is "for the same reason they're not using carbon nanofibres or genetic engineering", ie., it's the wrong tool for the job. Image recognition to hunt for unexpected moving objects (automated blink comparison) was likely one of the first things astronomers used computers for once digital imaging became the default.
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Monday 27th March 2017 09:04 GMT Dave 126
The actual website suggests that noise and artifacts are the reason that they aren't using AI. I've looked at sample images, and they are very noisy. I don't know enough about machine vision to know how much trickier that makes the task. Perhaps if Mr Wilkinson could look at the images at get back to us? His past posts are such that I defer to his experience in these matters, but his post today seems to be about tracking objects, and less so about determining what is an object in the first place.
Perhaps the crowd-sourced efforts can form the basis of a machine trading data set down the road.
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Monday 27th March 2017 14:38 GMT Dave 126
Re: why the search isn't using artificial intelligence.
Why would you require General AI for this application, Mage? Limited AI is suitable for pattern recognition within many huge data sets.
If you think AI hadn't progressed since the 80s, then it is your own learning capabilities you need to re-examine and not the machine kind. Surely you didn't miss the news last year about DeepMind beating the world's best Go player?
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Friday 31st March 2017 10:12 GMT LionelB
Re: why the search isn't using artificial intelligence.
There is no "general" AI ...
True, and likely to remain so for the foreseeable.
... and successful specific AI is large data sets with human curated rules
Not so true: successful domain-specific AI these days tends to be human-designed learning algorithms trained on large data sets - really not the same thing. With human-curated rule-based systems you can generally trace precisely how the system arrives at an output. With modern machine learning systems (particularly neural network-based ones) you generally cannot - the internal logic of the trained system (as distinct from the learning algorithm underlying training) is inscrutable. Call it pattern-recognition, if you like, but these are not hard-coded rule-based systems. They tend to be better at generalisation (within their domain).
Human-curated rule-based systems are still around to some extent (very 1980s), but machine learning (I won't call it AI, if it pleases) has moved on.
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Monday 27th March 2017 10:13 GMT Anonymous Coward
IMHO there will be a lot of false positive. Removing "known" objects it's almost easy, but this kind of search can reveal many unknown ones (which aren't "planet IX"), and there are also "artifacts" which aren't any kind of celestial body. Some trained people are still better than trained AI, and also you can get a large enough distributed system for free.
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Monday 27th March 2017 13:30 GMT h4rm0ny
Re: Considering that Pluto was demoted.
Maybe if they find another planet they should re-use Pluto then all parties will be happy. Plus it will create even more confusion which seemed to be the purpose of trying to redefine Pluto anyway.
Seriously, "planet" is an arbitrary term. No rocket scientist ever based their slingshot calculations on something being "a planet" rather than, say, 1.3x10^22kg or whatever. The term is a cultural artifact with no useful scientific meaning. It is to astrophysics what the term "race" is to genetics. I.e. a visible thing for non-scientists to get hung up on that is next to useless for any meaningful discussion.
And as it is a cultural artefact, just let it be a planet given that it always has.
Now, would anyone like to hear me rant about applying SI metric definitions to MB that are more useful in powers of 2?
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Monday 27th March 2017 08:56 GMT allthecoolshortnamesweretaken
"Alas, if you discover Planet 9, you'll have to find someone else to name it after, because the International Astronomical Union doesn't let you name things after yourself."
Obvious: Planet Claire.
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Monday 27th March 2017 10:56 GMT Dave 126
Re: Lets keep everyone happy
Can you expand upon your reasoning? Planet 9 - as inferred from its effects upon other bodies - is hypothesised to have a mass around ten times that of Earth and a highly elliptical orbit. There are quite a few orbits it might have that would satisfy the observations (hence the difficulty in locating it) so how can we yet say it hasn't cleared its neighbourhood?
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Monday 27th March 2017 11:44 GMT stephanh
Re: Lets keep everyone happy
@Dave 126
You are right, my "almost certainly" was far too strong. Should have been "possibly". Large size works in favor of clearing out the orbit, but large distance from the Sun works against it. Some possible configurations (far away, not too large) make it into a dwarf planet.
My personal opinion is that it is likely to be far away and not that large, on the grounds that it otherwise would already have been detected. But that's just one uninformed opinion.
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Tuesday 28th March 2017 15:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Lets keep everyone happy
Guess the hypothetical mass and orbit has been calculated from the anomalies found - but it they find a large planet that didn't clear its orbit, it will put a dent in the new definition of planets.
Detection of a dark, very slow body that far would have not been easy in the past, especially if the orbit inclination is high. Maybe it's already in some images - just not identified as such. If the magnitudo is low, it will be among many, many background stars.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
