#w: Sedna triton

[belegaciesarchive]

@xsednax

[astronomeys]

why is the sun your favorite planet? do you have a favorite moon orbiting a planet outside of ours? (mine is io because of the volcanos) what's a fact about space that scares you (or excites you, or both)

Hewwo!

Okay I was going to try to condense my answers but I care about astronomy too much so I’ll just put it all under the readmore to be less Irritating but here’s the gist:

The sun isn’t a planet, that’s Ironic Stupidity. Uranus is my fav!

Neptune’s moon Triton is my favorite moon cuz its history is dark

The Kuiper Belt excites me!

Alright alright, so if for some reason people wanna know more about me (????????????????????????????????????????????) here’s more detailed answers:

The sun isn’t my fav planet because the sun isn’t a planet, that’s a joke I have on my blog TM because I used to study astrophysics really hardcore for a long time, so it was Ironic Stupidity. My fav planet it actually Uranus! Basically when the universe made Uranus, it was wearing a LET’S GET FUCKING WEIRD snapback. The bitch is orbiting on its side bc 2 Mars-sized planets smacked the fuck out of it early on, so because of that, its days/seasons are a bit fucking wild. It has an 84-year orbit, right? But bc it’s on its side, the north pole doesn’t face “up,” it’s either facing the sun or facing away from the sun. If you lived on its north pole, you’d have 42 years of perpetual daylight and 42 years of perpetual darkness. BUTTTTT even tho it’s on its side compared to the solar plane, it’s actually right side up compared to the galactic plane. WACK. Also you know how the Earth’s magnetic field is more or less a dipole (a magnet with a north and a south -- 2 poles, dipole)? Uranus has a quadrupole going on, and it’s off-center. WACK AGAIN. Also!!!!! It used to be the furthest planet from the sun and then Saturn bullied Neptune into fucking off and now Uranus is only the 7th planet from the sun. I wanna say that that’s the reason it’s the coldest planet (by average temp). WACK ONCE MORE. Here’s a crappy picture I drew:

My favorite moon is 100% Triton! I especially love the cryovolcanoes -- essentially, they are volcanoes that are made of liquid nitrogen!!! Nitrogen is a gas at room temp (obv) so it has to be SUPER FUCKING COLD to be a liquid. When I worked at the [REDACTED] Planetarium, I used to do experiments with liquid nitrogen where we got to recreate Triton’s cryovolcanoes and it was soooooooooo fun. Triton also has a “cantaloupe terrain” which is just cracks in the surface made from the liquid nitrogen (think of ice cracking from flowing water). But more than anything, I love love love its history as a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO). Lemme break it down tho-- WAIT FIRST here’s cantaloupe terrain (the actual scientific word for it)

Look at that and tell me that isn’t a shitty 2007 Nokia image of a cantaloupe!

ANYWAY OK so Triton’s emo history

So beyond Neptune is a section of the solar system called the Kuiper Belt, which is a bunch of icy rocks that never coalesced into a planet (also where Pluto lives!). It’s full of some of my favorite celestial bodies, but I’ll talk about that later. So anyway, it’s all ice and rock, cool. Remember how I mentioned Saturn yeeted Neptune? Well in doing so, Neptune plunged into the Kuiper Belt and threw a bunch of those icy objects out of the way. One of those objects was Triton and its sister object -- the two orbited each other, more or less. But Neptune and Triton got close to each other, too close, and Neptune’s gravity did two things: it pulled Triton in, and it flung Triton’s sister object out into space. God knows where, it’s gone. But typical of captured objects, Triton started orbiting Neptune backwards, and it was a brutal capture -- Triton, being so massive, destroyed many of Neptune’s moons or shoved the others out of Neptune’s orbit in its attempt to get into a more stable orbit itself. It has done so and the two objects live in temporary harmony, but there’s a caveat: as a backwards-orbiting object, Triton is slowly getting closer to Neptune, and at some point it’ll get so close that either it’ll crash into Neptune and be destroyed, or it’ll be ripped apart by Neptune’s gravity.

Fun (: Here’s a great pic of Voyager 2 flying away from Neptune and Triton (no color correction, so it’s b&w)!

Last one!!!! The Kuiper Belt

Ooooo how I love the Kuiper Belt. If I could restart my education, I’d go into astrophysics and follow in Mike Brown’s footsteps in researching the outer solar system. Everything from Uranus and beyond fascinates me, but the Kuiper Belt is full of intense stories. It’s essentially an icy version of the asteroid belt, and just beyond it is where comets come from. But inside the Kuiper Belt is a bunch of really cool dwarf planets, including Pluto, Makemake, Haumea, Quaoar, Eris (kind of), and Sedna (also kind of). I say “kind of” about Eris and Sedna bc those are beyond the Kuiper Belt, though they’re structurally identical to KBOs. Eris is a Scattered Disc Object and Sedna is an Oort Cloud Object. They’re basically just Kuiper Belt 2 and 3 but further away, less populated, and their orbits are WACK. Oh speaking of wack orbits, all the KBOs have orbits that are elongated, off-center, and tilted. They r all drunk. All the dwarf planets discovered in the Kuiper Belt (besides Pluto) were discovered by Mike Brown actually LMAO. They’re all named after creation gods -- Makemake is Rapanui, Haumea is Hawaiian (AND MY FAV KBO), Quaoar is Tongva, and Sedna is Inuit. Eris and Pluto are exceptions to the rule. There’s also another Dwarf Planet, Ceres, which is in the asteroid belt.

But who cares about any of THAT, the point is that Haumea is the best KBO because, in its discoverers words, it’s shaped like a squashed egg. That is because some other bitch smacked it when it was still liddol and so it went SPINNING and the spinning made it all Ovalesque cuz it was stretching itself out. We can tell that this happened cuz Haumea has relatively little ice on its surface BUT it has 2 moons made almost entirely of ice AND astronomers kept finding these mainly-icy bodies whose orbits had the same shape, timing, and tilt as Haumea’s, they were just all skewed about. But if u rewind time, all those icy bodies meet up at Haumea, so we know that something hit Haumea and sent the ice on its surface flying. She’s my queen. Here’s an artistic rendition of my queen and its 2 moons Hi’iaka and Namaka. (we also know Haumea has rings tho iirc?)

OKAY WELL THAT’S A LOT OF WORDS I just think astronomy is neat, I wish I had the money to go back to school and study astrophysics </3