None of these places had names before this mission! As these images are coming out, the New Horizons team is naming various features.

I'm personally keeping logs of our IRC channel since it started, and the end of the old one. I haven't released them publicly for fear of breaching someone's privacy or whatever. I'd be willing to share them if requested.

If the remote machine has a wider pipe, it could download things, compress them, and then serve that to you. This is the Opera Mini strategy.

It's not what firethief was talking about, but it's one way that that could be the case.

I disagree.

I think that if the left was having reasonable issue-driven debates during the primary without any mudslinging (Sanders isn't one to sling mud, hopefully Hilary doesn't either) as a contrast to the republican circus, it would help the party as a whole. It would make them seem like a reasonable counterpart to the republican zeal.

I think that painting themselves as the reasonable party in contrast to the Republican bickering and mud slinging and money and "everything that's wrong with politics in this country" would serve the democrats well.

But hey, I'm no political scientist so what do I know.

I'm not convinced that this is a second Earth yet.

There is still no indication that this is a rocky planet. Many of the super earths that we have found have turned out to be gaseous sub-neptunes. For example, the closest discovered planet to this one in terms of radius is Kepler 138c, which has a density of ~1.9g/cc. For reference, if the planet was entirely rock (no metal core), it would have a density of about 3g/cc. Iron has a density of 8g/cc. Kepler 138c must have an extensive atmosphere to have that low of a density; it is a gas ball much like Neptune (density 1.6g/cc).

There are many other planets that are this size that are also gas balls, and a few that are rocky as well. We don't know if this planet is rocky or gaseous yet. We don't know anything about it other than that it is in the habitable zone around a sun-like star.

If this planet is rocky, then get excited for the JWST or TMT to look at it when either of those are built so that we can analyze its atmosphere.

Don't get your hopes up too high for now though.

Well, you need someone like Alan Stern. He invested his whole career into New Horizons and he is pretty much the only reason why it happened and became the success that it is and has been so far.

You know, his son Jordan is about to start grad school... Unfortunately I don't think that he's up for following in his father's footsteps. He's a math major in undergrad rather than anything astronomy related. Understandable that he wanted the chance to prove himself on his own rather than live in his father's shadow.

But my point is that we need someone with that kind of drive and determination to get a mission through. The type of person where no matter what happens they keep trying until they finish the job. Maybe whoever was in charge of the Hayabusa?

There are definitely some, but there are very few, and in particular no large ones.

Crater counting is one of the easiest ways to date the surface of a body.

For those curious, this hypothetical mission would take longer to get to Pluto than New Horizons because it wouldn't just be flying by, it would need time to set up a slower approach and enter into orbit around Pluto and give the lander time to collect the sample.

It would also need enough fuel to then change trajectories and return to Earth, as well as all of the fuel for the lander. These types of sample return missions are very expensive, which is why there have not been many. There were a few somewhat famous ones to the moon in the 60s and 70s, one that collected solar wind particles (barely had to leave the Earth's neighborhood, no landing required), one that flew through the tail of a comet and collected dust (no landing required), and one by JAXA that retrieved a sample from an asteroid. It's ultimately cheaper to bring the science/instrumentation to the object than the other way around, and those are the types of missions that get funding.

A rover is far more likely than a sample return mission, but even so I wouldn't put money on a return to Pluto in the very near future.

Make friends and conversation with people that you otherwise wouldn't.

The more people you interact with, the more likely you are to get different perspectives, however this is most effective if you seek out those that are outside of your bubble.

If you do it on a social media site that tracks your choices, it will change what it serves you, however you're still being limited by what their algorithms choose to serve you. Ultimately, because of the way that these algorithms are designed, it's very difficult to expand your mind and see different perspectives if you use them.

Better is to do it in a place where the people with different viewpoints congregate - either in real life or online. Maybe go to a large public gathering for something, like a concert or a meet up, but try to find groups that are outside of your usual comfort zone.

I find that IRC is a great online analogue for that. You can go into different channels and talk to people with different views. The drawback is that people using IRC are generally all the type of people that know something about computers, so it's not a truly diverse sample set.

Beyond that, when you're out in public start talking to random strangers. Make conversation and make new and different friends. You'd be surprised at how open to conversation some people are. But even this isn't perfect as you'll only be exposed to the extroverted people that won't shy away from talking to a stranger.

It's hard in today's day of social media and content served by algorithms, but it's possible. You just have to put the legwork into creating and maintaining the types of relationships that people used to have pre-technological revolution. It's hard, but if you truly want to expand the range and diversity of people you know and talk to, it's currently the only surefire way.

Very nice! I live in Orlando and am involved with an Astronomy Society here. We have a few 8" telescopes and one 21" (in the Robinson Observatory). I know your pain of trying to cut through light pollution (damn Disney) and humidity and poor conditions. Have fun with all of that!

Pluto's density does not suggest that it is porous like a comet or asteroid.

Nope, because its gravity is pulling it together enough to compress the rocks together and make it not porous. This is the point that I was trying to make, sorry if it wasn't clear.

You get to a point size-wise where eventually you stop just getting bigger, and you start getting denser. This happens when the force of gravity overcomes a force stopping things from compressing. There are many such forces, and thus many such points where "object gets bigger, then starts getting denser, then starts getting bigger again, then denser again, etc" as you add more and more mass.

Something is reforming the surface of Pluto!

Again! Speculation on my part! Take it with a grain of salt! Please don't use concrete language like "is" or else I'll regret posting my thoughts and will take them down so that people don't get confused.

Those aren't facts, that's a hypothesis from me.

Was anyone expecting an active geology?

There was a little bit of speculation because of the atmosphere that was detected by the Hubble, but largely, no. That idea was mostly ignored because we weren't sure what could CAUSE an active geology on an object as small as Pluto.

And yes atmosphere is being mentioned, and that can be a factor, but we are talking thinner than the Martian atmosphere here.

Yes, Pluto's atmosphere is incredibly thin, but something to remember is that while on something like Mars, the only means of the atmosphere destroying evidence of craters is erosive factors like wind, on Pluto the atmosphere is also in equilibrium with the ices on the surface. Ice will "frost" out of the atmosphere and blanket the surface, covering up a lot of features. The ice is melting more on the parts that face the sun and depositing more on the parts that are not. This difference isn't a lot, but it's enough to add up over time. Pluto is also, as you mentioned in your previous post, orbiting "on its side", which means that this deposited ice is melted off of the summer side and redeposited on the winter side over and over for each orbital period. This type of cycling could easily cover up evidence of craters.

this preliminary data is showing it acting more like a comet than a planet.

This was expected. Compositionally, Pluto IS a comet, just a very large one. The tail was expected when we saw that the atmosphere was so large. We expected its atmosphere to be in the process of being depleted. The tail always points away from the sun, so we couldn't have detected it until we got behind it, this is just confirmation.

Why would you want to go outside, when inside is where all of the cool space stuff is?

Pluto does rotate on its side, but its pole isn't (currently) always facing the sun. In fact, the sun is currently mostly heating the equator. Here is its current orientation, and more details.

Also, could you elaborate on why you think that ice caps are so surprising? Pluto has an atmosphere that is in equilibrium with the ices on the surface, so it would redeposit these ices on the surface. More ice would be deposited towards the poles since they are the coldest areas. Also, more ice will sublimate in the warmer areas near the equator. Pluto is very far from the sun, so these differences shouldn't be too pronounced, but as you can see they are not.. It is possible however that there is something else that I'm not considering that would make Pluto unlikely to have ice caps.

If there was a giant impactor that split the proto-Pluto into the current Pluto system, should there not be some scars from that?

No. Not necessarily.

Pluto has a very active geology. It is very possible that this event happened long enough in the past that all evidence has been wiped away, or covered by the deposition of ices from its atmosphere.

EDIT: This active geology is also why we see so few craters.

Dammit! I leave for lunch and all of this discussion happens.

francopoli did a very good job of answering your question, but there is one thing that I'd like to clarify.

Pluto swinging inside the orbit of Neptune would not bring it close enough to the sun to outgas significantly enough to cause the atmosphere that we are seeing today. This is the mystery of "what heated up Pluto and caused these gasses to sublimate" that francopoli was talking about in his posts. It didn't get close enough to the sun, so what heated it up? As he pointed out, it isn't tidal interactions with another large body, the usual other source of heating in our solar system.

And to expand on this mystery:

1. Pluto has an atmosphere that should have been stripped away by now by the solar wind. This is what is currently happening to it and is creating the tail. The question is, what is replenishing it?

2. Pluto, like any other comet, is full of ices which sublimate into gasses when heated. This is what causes the atmospheres and the tails on comets that venture closer to the sun. This is where that gas is coming from, the question is, what's heating the planet?

The three common, go-to sources of heat in a body in our solarsystem are

1. The sun (Pluto is too far away)

2. Tidal forces (Pluto is already tidally locked to Charon, francopoli gave a good description of this)

3. Latent heat of formation (Pluto isn't big enough for this to have stuck around. Source: Mercury's has not stuck around, and it is bigger than Pluto).

So what's causing this heat? Well first here are some other facts that I'd like you to consider:

With all comets, as the ices sublimate off, they leave the rock behind. With smaller comets, this rock is left behind in an almost "haphazard" fashion. The rock stays where it was, and it might roll a bit downhill towards the comet's center of mass. This leads them to be to porous and misshapen (like 67P).

----Leaving facts behind, entering speculation. Everything below here is an educated guess from someone who has never studied Pluto in particular, but has taken graduate level Planetary Science classes, including (recently) one in geophysics (the relevant subject here). It is very possible that I think that I know more than I do, so take everything below with a grain of salt----

My thoughts/hypothesis/speculation that might be completely wrong (feel free to NOT read this, it might be wrong)?

I think that there is something special about Pluto that we haven't seen with other large bodies that makes it take longer to lose its latent heat. And that special thing is its composition and size. The only other object similar to it in both of these respects is Triton, but Triton has tidal heating that might mask this effect.

Remember how the other comets are misshapen and porous? Well, Pluto is big enough to pull itself back into a spherical shape (hydrostatic equilibrium). Its gravity is strong enough to pull the rocks back down and close up these porous "gaps" left by the escaping volatiles.

Perhaps some event (possibly an impact) imparted a lot of heat into Pluto in the somewhat recent past and caused a lot of ices to sublimate all at once, and now the atmosphere is slowly returning to equilibrium. As Pluto reforms itself into a spherical shape, it would create all sorts of active geology like mountains and canyons and other things that we are seeing there that we weren't expecting. This active geology would also cover up the scars of this event, much like what happens on the Earth, or possibly by the refreezing of these gasses, creating an ice layer that would hide the craters.

This isn't too unreasonable. While the Earth has plate tectonics and thus is only geologically active along faults and at hot spot volcanoes, this would be happening to Pluto everywhere, and the surface rock would be being reformed everywhere, because all of Pluto would have been outgassing and all of Pluto would now be compressing.

(CAUTION: EXTREME SPECULATION IN THIS PARAGRAPH) Perhaps the "heart" is the impact site, and the heat from impact melted a lot of the ices and created a muddy crater that had a low enough viscosity to flow into becoming flat again (no crater), and even flow some mud into the surrounding areas. I would suspect that the original impact crater was MUCH MUCH smaller than the heart, and the rest of the heart would be caused by this mud flowing out. We already know that this region resembles frozen mud cracks on the Earth, and is rich in Carbon Monoxide. This would fit with liquid Carbon Monoxide mixing with the rocks and dirt on the surface and creating a mud that then refroze. In fact, this feature is so consistent with a freezing mud flow, that I would personally be surprised if it wasn't caused by some sort of local heating, causing what I just described.

The hypothesis that I just described fills in a lot of the gaps in knowledge and questions that we currently have about Pluto, BUT keep in mind that I am by no means a Pluto expert. There are definitely things about Pluto that people have studied and that the experts know about that I do not, and it is also very possible that one of those things could throw my whole hypothesis out of the window. I'm mostly just typing this out so that I have a record of what I thought "way back when", so that I can objectively see how right I was later on, and as "food for thought" for you guys. Again, it may all be wrong, so take it with a grain of salt.

The following is long, rambling, only tangentally related to the article, and I don't agree with all of it. But for whatever reason these are the words that my hands decided to type this morning/late evening in response to inspiration from this article. Some of you might find it interesting so I figure that I might as well share.

Each of these "long cycle upswings" involve increased automation and the average human getting pushed upwards into a job that involves more intellectual expertise. This is clearly what has happened in the past, in spite of the preventative measures placed on society by that time period's privileged class. However, as the author points out, this process appears to be stalling this time.

The author claims that this is because the current privileged class is too powerful, but I think that it's more likely that there is another force at work. I don't see the current elite being any more powerful than the robber barons of old. Bill Gates's wealth is small compared with John D Rockefeller (adjusted for inflation), and the people of today have more information and more of an ability to organize than ever.

Instead, I hypothesize that we may have reached the limit of intellectualization of the average human in our society. Not every human can survive this most recent wave of automation, because in order to do so, they must possess an intelligence and education that allows them to reach this next set of opportunities. I believe that as humanity in western societies stands today, either due to our nature or our culture (although my money is on culture), we are unable to take that next intellectual step and truly embrace this wave of automation.

You need not look past the average high school, or the average media served towards school children to see the anti-intellectualism that is rampant in our culture. Many of the protagonists in television today and in the past have held a contempt for math, science, and schooling. Many of the cultures in highschools across the nation shame the "nerds" in favor of those with outdated physical prowess. This has been true of our nation since the last long cycle upswing that the author discussed.

The author is also correct that there are barriers to entry in place, and until the general public has the time and resources to pursue this higher education instead of clamouring to fulfill the lower rungs on their hierarchy of needs, we will continue to stagnate. If we want to escape this current rut and truly join the future society that we are starting to see sparks of on the internet, and that this author wishes to be a reality, we must enact social policies that enable lower class individuals to seek higher education without the risk of crushing debt and without having to sacrifice feeding themselves or keeping themselves healthy. But that will only enable people to reach higher, it will not convince them to. You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make them drink. Indeed, similar barriers of education and lack of free time existed for the previous upswings, but we were able to overcome them. Until we fix our society and culture's antiintellectual tendencies, these opportunities will not be seized and we will continue to stall.

The following quote from the passage supports my contention:

Faced with the possibility of creating gene-sequencing labs, they instead start coffee shops, nail bars and contract cleaning firms

Instead of pursuing an education while they are young, our privileged children (those that have free time) are instead pursuing gossip and fashion and other trivialities that thrive in the types of businesses that they eventually are employed by. And unfortunately, these human proclivities towards gossip are made easier to indulge in thanks to the very technology that we should be trying to master. We must be sure to master our technology, or else the few that have will make slaves of the rest.

This upswing is stalled by the powers that be, just like every upswing before it, however it is also being stalled by our culture, and human culture and behavior is a hard thing to change. But fortunately, it appears that this change is coming. We are beginning to see more and more the celebration of the nerd and the cool things that nerds can do with computers, technology, math, and science. This progress, however, is slow. If we are to continue advancing our society, we must embrace this trend on top of enacting the social programs that will allow us to act on it.

Ah interesting. Does it also remove counting badges?

This might be a good place to ask this, but what does "zen" mean in the settings? I'm not seeing any difference between it turned on or off. Also, the entry in "settings explained" is just "what is the sound of one hand clapping" which doesn't explain much. Is it just some sort of joke setting?

Well, maybe not, but I'm so used to hydrodynamics as it applies to atmospheres that adding in charges and magnetic fields just seems like it would make everything so much more complicated. You're a braver man than I to tackle it. Nice meeting you!

Very cool! Not my cup of tea personally, sounds like the worst of E&M, fluid dynamics and atmospheric science all rolled into one. But still, always cool to see another astronomer around.

But yeah, I feel you about the lack of pretty pictures. I've got some nice plots for you to ogle, but nothing of the actual planets. Just some blobby pixelated images of their host stars.

Still, the pretty stuff is cool and generates a lot of public excitement which is always nice.

Also, I wouldn't sell your field short. I'm assuming that you're studying plasma around the sun, and those CMEs and stuff can be pretty beautiful.

EDIT: I added some stuff.

I do! Exoplanets are my field in particular.

Well like most things in our solar system, cometary size distributions follow a power law, Pluto just happens to be at the larger, rarer end of that spectrum.

Actually, it's all three! It's a comet, it's a planetoid, and it's a dwarf planet.... and it's a Trans-Neptunian object, a Plutoid, a Kuiper belt object, a Plutino... The list goes on and on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_planet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto

It's one of the biggest comets! Big enough that it's reached hydrostatic equilibrium and has become round, which is coincidentally the criteria required for it to be called a "dwarf planet" as well. Compositionally, it is indistinguishable from a comet, and formed in the same region as most comets (the Kuiper Belt - the same place that 67P was formed!). If it were moved closer to the sun, the ices on its surface would begin outgassing, just like a comet, however because of its larger mass and escape velocity, the gasses would be mostly bound to the surface instead of making a tail (at first, of course over time that atmosphere would escape and Pluto would lose enough mass that its atmosphere would begin to form a tail).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto

That doesn't mean that we couldn't monetize them. As amouseinmyhouse said:

Your value add model is an interesting one and it's worked successfully in games for quite some time. The basic gist to the video game version is to open the platform as a simple, but complete, space where you gain access to more functionality through time. You can bypass the time restrictions through money. Take Team Fortress 2 for example. All of the weapons in the game that have effect on actual game play can be unlocked through actual game play, or you can spend a few bucks and buy the weapons now. Such a system could easily apply to hubski where you earn gold tokens through the slow acclimation of social capital, or you can buy them in bulk with bit capital. This is one of the more interesting systems for me, but creating such a system would take a lot of time and consideration.

And especially if it's something that they can get somewhere else for free.

But my point is that I wouldn't have stayed around this long if there was the threat of eventually having to pay. I never would have even finished making my account after I saw that. I would never have started hanging out here, I would have gone to one of the many other content aggregation and discussion sites.

So my thoughts.

1. I don't like ads. They look ugly and people will block them. Also, advertisers prefer sites that have content that is quickly digestible - so that the user will quickly load another page and thus another ad. I don't want that kind of pressure on hubski. I prefer the more thoughtful, long-form discussion that we have now over some quickly digestible memes.

2. I don't like the subscription model. To quote goo:

The issue I see with the subscription is it's a freaking subscription. I could only really see the regulars paying for one without a second thought. When I came here from elsewhere, I would have been immediately put off by the idea that it would eventually cost me money to use this site. Hubski is slow to grow and pull in users, so this may make that even worse. The regulars would all buy one, and then where would we be?

People move on and don't stay in one place forever. At least some of our regulars will eventually move on for whatever reason. If we don't have enough new people replacing them, this place will stagnate and shrink. I don't want to see that.

I, personally, wouldn't have stayed for a second after I had seen that it would eventually cost me money when I was a new user. Now that I've been here for a while, I'll gladly pay, but I wouldn't even do the 30 day trial if on day one I was told this was going to cost me.

The subscription model will scare away new users before they get the chance to see how great this place is. It would have scared me away.

3. I like the idea of the NPR/Wikipedia model. I would pay, and I'm sure that many others would as well after they begin to get involved in the community. If there were other "value added" things, that would also be pretty cool. I also like the "reddit gold" idea of being able to gild a well written comment or post and give someone that subscription to these added perks for a brief amount of time. This would be my preferred model from a user's standpoint. The question is: will it generate enough revenue?

I think that a "hubski gold" model will be more effective on here than on somewhere like reddit. Reddit has a lot of users (but not all) that are just there for entertainment and then fuck off. Hubski has a more thoughtful and discussion oriented user base that cares more about the site. Many redditors wouldn't care where they got their cat pictures from, as long as they get them. They aren't invested in the site. Hubski users are invested in the site and the community. We have friends here. We are more likely to want to support our home.

But not just free from spammers and drive by goons, also free from new people that might grow our community and improve the conversation.

People move on and don't stay in one place forever. At least some of our regulars will eventually move on for whatever reason. If we don't have enough new people replacing them, this place will stagnate and shrink. I don't want to see that.

I, personally, wouldn't have stayed for a second after I had seen that it would eventually cost me money when I was a new user. Now that I've been here for a while, I'll gladly pay, but I wouldn't even do the 30 day trial if on day one I was told this was going to cost me.