Pluto The Pup

Charlie Brown “Pluto (Disney)” Brown Chris Official Hey World “Music Video” “The Walt Disney Company”

Scientists have deflected inquiries about the discovery of new planet for a few years now, mainly because they feared being associated with these “fringe” theories. But, according to a team of Spanish astronomers who call themselves StarViewer Team they found a brown dwarf star with large satellites encircling it. It’s twice the size of Jupiter The group made the rounds of all the news web sites in the past two weeks, claiming they discovered something very significant. It’s almost twice the size of Jupiter and just beyond our furthest planetoid, Pluto. Although it’s not a planet, it appears to have planets or large satellites encircling it. It’s what astronomers call a “brown dwarf star” and its official name is “G1.9?. What’s a Brown Dwarf Star? All matter attracts other matter. A larger mass will attract smaller masses towards it. In space this results in growing clouds of matter that tend to clump together and attract more matter. Since most of the matter in space is gaseous, these clouds eventually get so dense that they collapse into dense gaseous spheres. When they do this there is usually some “left over” matter that forms a ring around the sphere. If there is enough matter in a sphere of hydrogen, for example, it can cause so much compression at the shpere’s core that the hydrogen atoms begin to fuse together and a fusion-reaction ignites a new born star. In this reaction two hydrogen atoms join together to form one helium atom and release extra energy as …

For More Webcasts: www.nasm.si.edu Pluto, Eris, and the Dwarf Planets of the Outer Solar System Presenter: Mike Brown Tuesday, March 20, 2007 The Kuiper Belt is a mysterious region beyond Neptune and stretching more than four billion miles from the Sun. Using powerful telescopes, scientists are scouring the Belt and beyond, finding hundreds of small frigid objects such as Eris, which is larger than Pluto and takes 560 years to orbit the Sun; and smaller Sedna, with an elliptical orbit that takes more than 10000 years to complete. Join Mike Brown as he describes the hunt for these ancient and elusive worlds. Mike Brown is Professor of Planetary Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology and the discoverer, along with colleagues, of Eris (formerly 2003 UB313), Sedna, and other distant bodies. The 2007 Exploring Space Lectures, Journey Through the Outer Solar System, will feature four world-class scholars discussing current missions to the distant realm of the gas giants, the icy Kuiper Belt, and beyond. For More Webcasts: www.nasm.si.edu