New Saturnian moon

Post #1by **granthutchison** » 18.07.2007, 19:05

2007S4, announced in IAU Circular 8857 today, by the Cassini team.
If you want to take a look I've added the provisional orbital elements to my little file poormoons.ssc, which lives outside the Celestia distribution.
Selden kindly hosts the file at:
http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/hutchison/poormoons.html
Copy it into your extras folder.

Grant

Hungry4info · Post #2by **Hungry4info** » 18.07.2007, 19:08

Alright, thank-you for that.

LordFerret · Post #3by **LordFerret** » 19.07.2007, 04:45

Thankyou!

ajtribick · Post #4by **ajtribick** » 19.07.2007, 17:03

The question is: how small do these things have to get before they become unworthy of receiving a name? Is a 2km-wide object really worthy of a mythological title?

Dollan · Post #5by **Dollan** » 19.07.2007, 18:34

If it is alone in its orbit, and not a part of the ring system, then I would say so. After all, there are asteroids much smaller which have their own names.

...John...

Hungry4info · Post #6by **Hungry4info** » 19.07.2007, 20:39

Dollan wrote:If it is alone in its orbit, and not a part of the ring system, then I would say so. After all, there are asteroids much smaller which have their own names.

But surely, there must be a line where we say "No, you're a rock, nothing more."

What happens when we start finding moons that you can fit in your desk drawer? (of course, assuming it's not part of the ring system)

Dollan · Post #7by **Dollan** » 19.07.2007, 21:14

Hungry4info wrote:
Dollan wrote:If it is alone in its orbit, and not a part of the ring system, then I would say so. After all, there are asteroids much smaller which have their own names.

But surely, there must be a line where we say "No, you're a rock, nothing more."

I suspect that the Human penchant for naming things will not go away, regardless of size. Frankly, I really don't see a problem with naming an object, regardless of its apparent small size.

What happens when we start finding moons that you can fit in your desk drawer? (of course, assuming it's not part of the ring system)

My initial assumption would be that, when we start finding such objects, that will mean that we are close enough to find them (I doubt Cassini or any probe on the boards could locate such objects). And if we're close enough to find a rock the size of my fist, then we'll probably remove it to keep the orbital slot clean....

Of course, that's something of a flippant answer. My more serious thought is that, when viewed in the context of the Solar System, something only a kilometer or two seems awfully small. When you're actually there, though, that is still a pretty big chunk of real estate. If you can name a city park that is less than a block in size, a great dirty chunk of rock and ice a mile long is certainly worthy of a name if you so choose to name it.

Again, there are asteroids only a few tens of meters in size with proper names. Why not a moon?

...John...

Hungry4info · Post #8by **Hungry4info** » 19.07.2007, 21:58

We'll need to just resort to numbering them, like asteroids are these days. Though I do not know for sure of course, I am willing to bet there is a horde of small objects a few centimetres across in orbit of Jupiter out beyond Callisto. There is, afterall, a lot of small, kilometre-sized, moons in that area. I am going to take a wild guess that there are several thousand such objects in orbit of Jupiter (feel free to comment on the multiplicity of tiny objects).