neufer wrote: ↑Sat Jun 02, 2018 12:41 pm
MarkBour wrote: ↑Sat Jun 02, 2018 3:06 am
I was searching for a name that related to one that moved or behaved in a contrary fashion to both the Greeks and Trojans, which is where I got Xanthos.
Achilles talking horse? Diomedes's man eating horse?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balius_and_Xanthus
Sorry, there is more ambiguity than I would have guessed. I was referring to Xanthos the god of the river Scamander, who became angry with Achilles and tried to kill him. In my copy of the Iliad, which does indeed name Achilles' horse with the same name, there is:
The eddied River broad by mortal men
Scamander call'd, but Xanthus by the Gods.
Soon as the windings of the stream they reach'd,
Deep-eddied Xanthus, progeny of Jove,
(But Wikipedia seems to prefer the spelling Xanthos to Xanthus --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scamander)
Anyway, I guess the discoverers of 2015 BZ509 will have the privilege of naming it, eventually?
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I have a very limited understanding of planet formation. Just having learned a few bits from simplistic presentations, that would typically just say "planets form as the material in a disk clumps together". And the suggestion from that IAU definition, that planets should be clearing out their orbits. It seemed reasonable that in a given orbital band, a growing mass would perturb all the other mass in the same orbit -- pushing and pulling on the orbits of the diffuse material and causing it to either come join the larger mass or get perturbed into another orbit. But I don't put much stock in this intuition. We have a laboratory for this around Saturn, where one can see cleared bands in the rings with a single moon occupying them. Of course we have not observed for very long.
But I find the stability of trojans interesting. Their pattern in this APOD reminds me of density waves elsewhere in physical phenomena. If enough mass accumulated at a Lagrange point, would that not give rise to new Lagrange-like points, stable points in an n-body system (n > 2)? For example, if enough mass is placed at L4, it should give rise to an L4' further around the circle, and no doubt other points of stability. But in the really long run, I have no idea, because it seems like I'm beginning to give a plausibility argument for spreading out around the whole ring, in contrast to what seems to be the expected trend.