Saturn's Rings Point to Pluto

[floppy_lobster]

http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/extinctions-nemesis.html

[BustaMike]

Berzerker's whacko theories are more plausible than nemesis is.

[Lung]

What a total crock of ****. It took me about two minutes to debunk this whole piece of pseudoscientific crap with a simple google search.

Saturn and its rings are titled on a plane of 27.6 degrees, while Pluto's orbit is tilted 17 degrees from the plane that every other planet is on. Man, in astronomical terms it's not even close. That about 100 trillion miles off

Why don't you do us all a favour and **** off with your psuedoscience and follow some other nutcase instead who will lead you to commit suicide by jumping on the back of the nearest asteroid or by jumping off a cliff in an expected hyper jump to the afore mentioned asteroid by forces which you cannot see, hear or otherwise identify but which you believe beyond all doubt

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Lung
What a total crock of ****. It took me about two minutes to debunk this whole piece of pseudoscientific crap with a simple google search.

Saturn and its rings are titled on a plane of 27.6 degrees, while Pluto's orbit is tilted 17 degrees from the plane that every other planet is on. Man, in astronomical terms it's not even close. That about 100 trillion miles off

Why don't you do us all a favour and **** off with your psuedoscience and follow some other nutcase instead who will lead you to commit suicide by jumping on the back of the nearest asteroid or by jumping off a cliff in an expected hyper jump to the afore mentioned asteroid by forces which you cannot see, hear or otherwise identify but which you believe beyond all doubt

It's not quite that simple. Well it is actually. There is nothing to suggest that pluto was ever a moon of saturn. However it seems that what berz is saying when he says saturn's rings 'point' at pluto is not that saturns plane of rotation is the same as pluto's oribital inclination but rather that Saturn's plane of rotation intersects pluto's orbital plane at pluto's point of highest inclination. He does not however explain why this would be significant in any way or explain why it is less important that the rotational planes of all the other planets spend as much time 'pointing' at pluto as saturn's plane of rotation does or explain how saturn's situation of 'pointing' at the pluto's point highest orbital inclination can have any significance when precession of Saturn's tilt guarentees that it's rotational plane will usually intersect with plutos orbital plane at some other point and that other planets can likewise through precession of their tilt 'point' at pluto at it's highest point of inclination.

[BustaMike]

No reason to be mean about it though... I enjoyed reading about all this stuff, even if it is silly.

I read through that whole nemesis thing, too. To me it sounds like there's no reason why it shouldn't be real, but there's no reason why it should either so what's the point of the theory.

[DRoseDARs]

Originally posted by Lung
What a total crock of ****. It took me about two minutes to debunk this whole piece of pseudoscientific crap with a simple google search.

Saturn and its rings are titled on a plane of 27.6 degrees, while Pluto's orbit is tilted 17 degrees from the plane that every other planet is on. Man, in astronomical terms it's not even close. That about 100 trillion miles off

Why don't you do us all a favour and **** off with your psuedoscience and follow some other nutcase instead who will lead you to commit suicide by jumping on the back of the nearest asteroid or by jumping off a cliff in an expected hyper jump to the afore mentioned asteroid by forces which you cannot see, hear or otherwise identify but which you believe beyond all doubt

Yes, because the answers to all of life's questions can be found inside two minutes with a search on Google.

Black-and-whiters

[DRoseDARs]

Oh, and

[Berzerker]

Ramo -

As I said, this doesn't suggest that Pluto was a moon of Saturn in any way that I can see. And I do know a fair amount about celestial mechanics.

Find another pair of planets with the relationship identifed in this thread.

And as Geronimo pointed out, 3 is clearly wrong since Pluto's and Saturn's orbits' eccentricities are totally different

Their eccenticities are irrelevant. Saturn is ~9.5 A.U. from the sun, Pluto is 29 A.U. at it's closest approach and 49 A.U. at it's furthest. Subtract 9.5 and you get a 2:1 ratio.

Lul -

So I THEREFORE CHALLENGE YOU :

You left out the asteroid belt after I specifically said it was needed to complete the 2:1 ratio. Having left the belt out, you then made a big deal about the fact Jupiter is more than 3 x Mars distance. Jupiter is 2x the asteroid belt. Move Earth to the asteroid belt and we see a nice 2:1 ratio for all the planets out to Uranus. It appears 10 A.U. is the maximum amount of space needed to form a planet once you get further from the Sun. So much for that challenge

As a mathematician, it was too hard to resist, to be able to give an actual "proof" that any random he gives, will be as much "proof" of the existence of God, of funny little blue furries that his supposed interesting coincidences in the Solar System

Before gloating it would be wise to let someone with a keen eye and logical mind point out why your data is flawed...or you could have just read my post

Geronimo -

Certainly when you suggested that astronmers look for new planets by looking along the plane of the solar system you implied that was the interpretation you were using since the comnparison otherwise makes no sense.

I said Saturn's rings point to Pluto at perihelion. Astronomers discovered the outer planets by observing the plane of the ecliptic (as defined by Earth's orbit). To look for moons of Saturn, astronomers observed moons along it's "ecliptic" - Saturn's rings or equator. At perihelion Pluto is in line with those rings.

However it would appear that you are saying that Saturns plane of rotation (along with its ring/satellite system) intersects (ie 'points to') with pluto on its orbital plane around the sun. However, the planes of rotation of all of the other planets (even uranus!) also intersect with the plane of pluto's orbit and even do so in such a way that any rings or satellites they may have will 'point' to pluto at least twice per orbit. The Saturn system doesn't spend any more of its orbital period 'pointing' to pluto than do any of the other planets. Also remember planets don't loiter at perihelion or any other orbital points. The orbital planes are planes not lines. It doesn't make any sense to assume the planets sit around at perihelion waiting for other planets to point at them there. Even worse precession of Saturns rotation ensures that even the special 'distinction' of being able to 'point' at pluto when pluto is at maximum inclination will not last terribly long and other planets will take over this special priviledge as precession lines up their rotational axis with pluto's point of maximum inclination.

I'll take that in conjunction with your later post:

1) All the other planets spend as much time pointing at pluto as Saturn does.

Name one other than Saturn.

Saturns rings spend as much time pointing at Uranus as they do pluto.

For that to be true, Pluto would have to reach it's perihelion right above it because Uranus is on it's side, i.e., it;s equator forms a ~90 degree angle with the ecliptic.

Saturn was never looked it because our data have never been consistent with pluto being an escaped satellite of Saturn.

Somebody wasn't looking too hard at the data.

nonsense! The sumerians were quite aware of the cyclical nature of planetary movements and rivers are an obvious metaphor for a linear motion.

How are rivers an obvious metaphor for linear motion? Another term for the planets from ancient times was "wanderers". They were also "equated" with sheep that needed to be sheparded. Newspaper Rock In Canyonlands Utah is a famous rock art site from the Fremont/Anazasi Indians. It is a large mural and at the top dominating the face of the wall is a deity - horned sky being - with 11 sheep all in a line right below it - 12 celestial beings just like the Sumerians believed.

The problem is that earth's orbit isn't very perturbed. It's on a very boring typical orbit for a body in our solar system. The collision wouldn't effect Earth's orbit much if the two bodies had shared nearly the same orbit for a considerable time before colliding. If the collision had occured between the earth and a plnet on a markedly different orbit it is highly unlikely that earth would have the nearly circular garden variety non inclined non retrograde boring orbit that it has, and only an impact from a body with a much different orbit from earth could send it spiralling from the freakin' asteroid belt across mars's orbit all the way to 1 AU. How it would then resume a neat circular orbit I have no idea and it's probably impossible.

Astronomers don't believe Earth bumped into something, they believe it was a massive collision. And we can see from the Moon just how massive it was and when it happened.

Furthermore the planets look like little points of light. Not lines or bands or any other kind of linear river like entity

These people weren't just looking at points of light, they were charting their movements. All the outer planets do not follow a line, they appear to wander as the Earth passes them.

Exactly. Think of a 1st grade teacher telling kids about the solar system. Are they going to use an analogy of a river with two guardians to explain a planet with two tiny moons?

My God, now we're going to debate whether or not ancient peoples used metaphors? Read Hamlet's Mill...

It's such a misleading and obtuse metaphor as to be useless and more importantly open to zillions of similar vaguely connected interpretations.

If it was so obtuse why do mythologists know how important metaphors are to mythology? Sheesh, a hindu depiction of the earth shows it on a turtle's back. Did they really believe a turtle carried the earth? Of course not, it was a metaphor.

3) Too bad Pluto and Saturn aren't one of the several planet pairs that enjoy such a 2:1 solar distance ratio.

Pluto didn't form in it's current orbit, so why would it? But if you subtract Saturn's distance to the sun from Plutos, you'll see a 2:1 ratio nonetheless.

DRose -

Berz, apologies if I misunderstood your meaning, but JohnT's comment seemed to show that he thought I made it up to support

Yeah, I saw some people here were debating something about Sedna but I figured you were just using the name for this planet X we're discussing.

[Berzerker]

Anyone else out there familiar with the Nemesis theory?

Naturally Nemesis caught my attention when it first came out because of the obvious implications for a 12th member of the solar system. It says a brown dwarf - burnt out star - following something like a 28 million year orbit comes close once every orbit triggering comets to fall inward from the Oort Cloud. The Oort Cloud is a theory that says a cloud of debris surrounds the solar system, leftovers from the solar nebula. They even said Nemesis followed a retrograde orbit to account for the preponderance of long period retrograde comets. Sitchin said the intruding object follows a retrograde orbit 25 years ago.

Lung -

What a total crock of ****. It took me about two minutes to debunk this whole piece of pseudoscientific crap with a simple google search.

Sounds like you spent more time on Google than reading what I said.

Saturn and its rings are titled on a plane of 27.6 degrees, while Pluto's orbit is tilted 17 degrees from the plane that every other planet is on. Man, in astronomical terms it's not even close. That about 100 trillion miles off

You don't compare Pluto's orbital inclination to the ecliptic with Saturn's axial tilt. Draw a line from Saturn along it's equator/rings, and you will hit Pluto when it's at perihelion. No other planet does that...

Why don't you do us all a favour and **** off with your psuedoscience and follow some other nutcase instead who will lead you to commit suicide by jumping on the back of the nearest asteroid or by jumping off a cliff in an expected hyper jump to the afore mentioned asteroid by forces which you cannot see, hear or otherwise identify but which you believe beyond all doubt

Insulting people from the safety of the internet is like Bill O'Reilly calling people cowards from the safety of his TV studio.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Berzerker
Geronimo -

I said Saturn's rings point to Pluto at perihelion. Astronomers discovered the outer planets by observing the plane of the ecliptic (as defined by Earth's orbit). To look for moons of Saturn, astronomers observed moons along it's "ecliptic" - Saturn's rings or equator. At perihelion Pluto is in line with those rings.

Berz, the problem is that Pluto crosses saturns ecliptic pretty much only at that point (perihelion)! An object whose orbit intersects an ecliptic at only a couple of points has an orbit that is not on that ecliptic! Furthermore orbits precess so that the elipse of a long eccentric orbit like Pluto's if charted multiple times will appear to rotate like a pinwheel around the sun, and as a rule this precession is *not* in sync with other planets. This means that even if you believe the fact that a point where pluto crosses saturns ecliptic occurs at plutos pherihelion has some significance this will be only a temporary phenomena, being dead on for only a single orbit and immediately drifting further from that point each consecutive orbit afterward. Over thousands of years even an orbit of almost 250 years like plutos will have precessed a considerable arc around the sun eventually precessing 360 degrees so that it briefly crosses Saturns ecliptic at perihelion once again.

Originally posted by Berzerker
Name one other than Saturn.

Name one! I just named them all (ie: all 8 other planets) in the post you replied to but I'll elaborate with uranus which you mention next since it is conceptually the least obvious if you are looking at it the way I suspect you must be.

Originally posted by Berzerker
For that to be true, Pluto would have to reach it's perihelion right above it because Uranus is on it's side, i.e., it;s equator forms a ~90 degree angle with the ecliptic.

Here is the problem. You appear to be visualizing the planetary ecliptics or rotational plane of the planets as if they are a linear one dimensional line when in fact they are a 2 dimensional plane that revolves around the sun along with the planet itself. If you stop and picture this plane as an enourmous disk large enough to touch plutos orbit and watch it revolve around the sun with the planet you will see that it must intersect with every other planet at least twice per orbit whether pluto happens to be at those points or not.

So if you imagine Uranus with it's ecliptic disk tipped so that it is perpendicular to the solar ecliptic you can also see that as you revolve uranus (with it's ecliptic) around the sun it will intersect with plutos orbit along enormous arcs covering in fact most of pluto's entire orbit. Only at two small arcs defined by the portions of plutos orbit that are further out than a line tangent to uranus's orbit at either of it's two solstices will Pluto not get 'pointed at' ie crossed by the uranus ecliptic during that orbit. Of course as pluto and uranus's orbits precess other arcs will become not pointed at instead but in any case as a consequence of uranu's nearly 90 degree tilte with respect to the solar ecliptic it will continually 'point' at two particular points of Pluto's orbit such that at the end of uranus's full orbit a large majority of pluto's orbit will have been 'pointed' at by Uranus and it's ecliptic and it's rings.

Currently the small arcs of Pluto's orbit that don't intersect with Uranus's 'ecliptic' do not include pluto's perihelion so Uranus is certainly pointing at Pluto's perihelion as often as saturn is.

Originally posted by Berzerker

Somebody wasn't looking too hard at the data.

they look amazingly hard. Have you seen the ungodly power of that supercomputer NASA recently aquired? Astronomers look at these orbits harder than you or I can even imagine.

Originally posted by Berzerker

How are rivers an obvious metaphor for linear motion? Another term for the planets from ancient times was "wanderers". They were also "equated" with sheep that needed to be sheparded. Newspaper Rock In Canyonlands Utah is a famous rock art site from the Fremont/Anazasi Indians. It is a large mural and at the top dominating the face of the wall is a deity - horned sky being - with 11 sheep all in a line right below it - 12 celestial beings just like the Sumerians believed.

Astronomers don't believe Earth bumped into something, they believe it was a massive collision. And we can see from the Moon just how massive it was and when it happened.

Earth and a mars size object 'bumping' into each other would be a tremendous world shattering cataclysim even at the slowest possible impact speed. IIRC most moon formation models rely on the lowest possible relative impact speed (which due to mutual gravitational attraction before impact can only get just so slow and no slower) in order to allow the impact ejecta to form the moon rather than just forming a huge ring around the sun.

Originally posted by Berzerker


These people weren't just looking at points of light, they were charting their movements. All the outer planets do not follow a line, they appear to wander as the Earth passes them.

Yes quite unlike a river, eh?

Originally posted by Berzerker

Yes.

My God, now we're going to debate whether or not ancient peoples used metaphors? Read Hamlet's Mill...



If it was so obtuse why do mythologists know how important metaphors are to mythology? Sheesh, a hindu depiction of the earth shows it on a turtle's back. Did they really believe a turtle carried the earth? Of course not, it was a metaphor.

We have to agree to disagree on this I guess. I just can't see how the river with two guardians was a useful analogy. It paints entirely the wrong picture. You seem to justify this by pretending that i don't acknowedge that the ancients loved to use vague and bad analogies in their texts, but in fact I certainly do recognize this. It is precisely because the ancients are so fond of using lousy analogies (metaphors) that I put so little stock in their texts or I assume the 'anologies' weren't really anologies at all or that they were intentionally vague to make them harder to debunk.

Originally posted by Berzerker

Pluto didn't form in it's current orbit, so why would it? But if you subtract Saturn's distance to the sun from Plutos, you'll see a 2:1 ratio nonetheless.

You'll have to be more clear. Subtract Saturn's distance from the sun from which of Pluto's large range of distances from the sun? the closest and the furthest? why pick those two? and picking those two gives you two numbers but why form a ratio out of them?

[DRoseDARs]

Berz, not that I have an equal grasp on all this info (fact or fiction, God and the Sumerians only know ) that you seem to, but are you mistaken about brown dwarfs? Aren't they sub-stellar objects, planets really, who's mass while forming never reach a sufficient level to ignite stellar fusion and not burnt-out stars?

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by DRoseDARs
Berz, not that I have an equal grasp on all this info (fact or fiction, God and the Sumerians only know ) that you seem to, but are you mistaken about brown dwarfs? Aren't they sub-stellar objects, planets really, who's mass while forming never reach a sufficient level to ignite stellar fusion and not burnt-out stars?

That's correct. They aren't burnt-out (i.e. post-nova) stars.

[Az]

A brown drawf isn't a burnt-out star, IIRC. [/sidenote]

[Berzerker]

You'll have to be more clear. Subtract Saturn's distance from the sun from which of Pluto's large range of distances from the sun? the closest and the furthest? why pick those two? and picking those two gives you two numbers but why form a ratio out of them?

Yes, from both. Because those are Pluto's nearest and furthest points in it's orbit. Because they form a ratio themselves, a ratio that is found in the distances of most planets from the sun.

We have to agree to disagree on this I guess. I just can't see how the river with two guardians was a useful analogy.

Encountering a red river with two sentries on a celestial voyage from Heaven to Hell. Red = Mars, River = planet/orbit, Red River = the planet Mars and it's orbit, 2 sentries = Mars' 2 moons. You come up with a better metaphor and complain to Dante...

It paints entirely the wrong picture. You seem to justify this by pretending that i don't acknowedge that the ancients loved to use vague and bad analogies in their texts, but in fact I certainly do recognize this.

So your gripe is that the metaphor doesn't strike your fancy. So what? Your tastes are irrelevant to the meaning of the metaphor.

It is precisely because the ancients are so fond of using lousy analogies (metaphors) that I put so little stock in their texts or I assume the 'anologies' weren't really anologies at all or that they were intentionally vague to make them harder to debunk.

If it was such a terrible metaphor, how did the authors of Hamlet's Mill know what the metaphor means?

Yes quite unlike a river, eh?

Just the opposite, very much like a river. The path looks like an "s" on it's side. I forget the name for the phenomenon but the outer planets all make the same "s" in our sky as we catch and pass them.

[Berzerker]

You're right, a brown dwarf is a failed star. Nemesis is a campanion star...if it exists...