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the astronomers who claim to have discovered the 10th planet in the solar system have another intriguing announcement: it has a moon.
while observing the new, so-called planet from hawaii last month, a team of astronomers led by michael brown of the california institute of technology spotted a faint object trailing next to it. because it was moving, astronomers ruled it was a moon and not a background star, which is stationary.
the moon discovery is important because it can help scientists determine the new planet's mass. in july, brown announced the discovery of an icy, rocky object larger than pluto in the kuiper belt, a disc of icy bodies beyond neptune. brown labeled the object a planet and nicknamed it xena after the lead character in the former tv series "xena: warrior princess." the moon was nicknamed gabrielle, after xena's faithful traveling sidekick.
by determining the moon's distance and orbit around xena, scientists can calculate how heavy xena is. for example, the faster a moon goes around a planet, the more massive a planet is.
but the discovery of the moon is not likely to quell debate about what exactly makes a planet. the problem is there is no official definition for a planet and setting standards like size limits potentially invites other objects to take the "planet" label.
possessing a moon is not a criteria of planethood since mercury and venus are moonless planets. brown said he expected to find a moon orbiting xena because many kuiper belt objects are paired with moons.
the newly discovered moon is about 155 miles wide and 60 times fainter than xena, the farthest-known object in the solar system. it is currently 9 billion miles away from the sun, or about three times pluto's current distance from the sun.
scientists believe xena's moon was formed when kuiper belt objects collided with one another. the earth's moon formed in a similar way when earth crashed into an object the size of mars.
the moon was first spotted by a 10-meter telescope at the w.m. keck observatory in hawaii on sept. 10. scientists expect to learn more about the moon's composition during further observations with the hubble space telescope in november.
brown planned to submit a paper describing the moon discovery to the astrophysical journal next week. the international astronomical union, a group of scientists responsible for naming planets, is deciding on formal names for xena and gabrielle.
that's pretty awesome...
:: anathema ::
yahoo
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the 'heart' symbol used to represent love is actually based on the shape of female buttocks, according to a scientist.
pscychologist galdino pranzarone, who studied the origins of valentine's day, says the symbol is inspired by a woman's bottom as seen from the rear.
prof pranzarone, of roanoke college in salem, virginia, told discovery news that he analyzed "essential literary and speculative evidence from mythology and secondary sources."
"the twin lobes of the stylized version correspond roughly to the paired auricles and ventricles of the anatomical heart," he said.
but he added that the organ "is never bright red in color" and its "shape does not have the invagination at the top nor the sharp point at the base."
pranzarone indicated that the ancient greeks and romans could have originated the link between human female anatomy and the heart shape.
the greeks, he said, associated beauty with the curves of the human female behind.
"the greek goddess of beauty, aphrodite, was beautiful all over, but was unique in that her buttocks were especially beautiful," he said.
"her shapely rounded hemispheres were so appreciated by the greeks that they built a special temple aphrodite kallipygos, which literally meant, goddess with the beautiful buttocks.
"this was probably the only religious building in the world that was dedicated to buttock worship."
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an irish company has thrown down the gauntlet to the worldwide scientific community to test a technology it has developed that it claims produces free energy.
the company, steorn, says its discovery is based on the interaction of magnetic fields and allows the production of clean, free and constant energy -- a concept that challenges one of the basic rules of physics.
it claims the technology can be used to supply energy for virtually all devices, from mobile phones to cars.
steorn issued its challenge through an advertisement in the economist magazine this week quoting ireland's nobel prize-winning author george bernard shaw who said that "all great truths begin as blasphemies".
sean mccarthy, steorn's chief executive officer, said they had issued the challenge for 12 physicists to rigorously test the technology so it can be developed.
"what we have developed is a way to construct magnetic fields so that when you travel round the magnetic fields, starting and stopping at the same position, you have gained energy," mccarthy said.
"the energy isn't being converted from any other source such as the energy within the magnet. it's literally created. once the technology operates it provides a constant stream of clean energy," he told ireland's rte radio.
mccarthy said steorn had not set out to develop the technology, but "it actually fell out of another project we were working on".
one of the basic principles of physics is that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only change form.
mccarthy said a big obstacle to overcome was the disbelief that what they had developed was even possible.
"for the first six months that we looked at it we literally didn't believe it ourselves. over the last three years it had been rigorously tested in our own laboratories, in independent laboratories and so on," he said.
"but we have been unable to get significant scientific interest in it. we have had scientists come in, test it and, off the record, they are quite happy to admit that it works.
"but for us to be able to commercialise this and put this into peoples' lives we need credible, academic validation in the public domain and hence the challenge," mccarthy said.
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