In the good old days spending most of my pastime in the Astronomers’ Club (2000 - 2006), there are two celestial events which I found myself ‘getting involved’ to. The first one is the transit of Venus which has, like the Nightfall, never seen by any living person. The second one is the X-prize flights of SpaceShipOne. It is historical because, for the first time, space travel is made possible without politics and bureaucracy. The space is now open to everyone.
Recently, I started preparing presentation materials on Solar System for the third time. The first two trials are 11 and 5 years ago respectively, which means Jupiter has almost completed another orbit over such period of time. I found such figures scary that the pace of time is really unnoticeable, and it is both fortunate and unfortunate to see that I am still doing the same thing.
Unlike many other amateur astronomers, I pay a lot of attention to the science of Solar System, mainly because of the interest on geology and extraterrestrial stargazing. I found the edge of Solar System attractive because of the affection to ‘boundaries’ and ‘ends’. The blur images made these worlds even more mysterious. What you know is simply the fact that, under the beams of a very bright star, the dim red smooth surface remains un-intact for thousands of years. Only during the short while coming close to the bright star, bluish green fumes slowly engulf the planet and are quickly frozen after that. This is the world of slowness and darkness as if a speck of dust inside dark room, only seen when swept by a beam of light.
90377 Sedna, the outpost of Solar System
Does this image tell anything?
Of course I won’t mix up imagination and science. The edge of Solar System worth mentioning scientifically because objects there are very different from anything we know in the inner Solar System, and they provide important information on early Solar System. The most important of all is, the public know little about it. Therefore I decide to talk about it in details instead of repeating the features of other planets which the audience should have heard/read for several times.
During the research of material, I read Mike Brown's How I Killed Pluto and Why had it Coming. Brown is the most important observer of outer Solar System. Objects discovered include Sedna, Eris, Haumea, Makemake, Orcus and Quaoar. It is the best popular science literature I have read in terms of language. It also integrates research with the astronomer's personal life in great consistency.
I feel a bit regret for neglecting the prolific discoveries of the outer Solar System in the 2000s. During that period of time, the territory of Solar System increased by an order of magnitude. Now we know objects lying on the half way to the stars. I still remember I paid no attentions on the discovery of Quaoar and Eris because I had already held the belief that Pluto is just one of the Kuiper Belt Objects for years (noted in my lecture notes 2005). To me, discovering other KBOs simply completed the puzzle instead of being something really fascinating.
But actually it is entirely unscientific to neglect actual discoveries. It is discoveries which turn hypothesis into theories; huge number of reproduction of a particular discovery (which we call experiment and observation) turn theories into facts; while logical positivists regard this kind of facts as truth. This is why science is different from myths.
I am writing this to give tribute to observers who, through sky surveying, photometry, spectroscopy, keep building the universe. A world forms when a map of it is drawn. But on the other hand, infinitely many worlds perish at the moment the map is drawn. In this sense, astronomers are prophets of Brahman and Shiva.
