Now a team at the University of Arizona in Tucson has made a mystifying and “exciting” discovery while analyzing an incredibly dense asteroid named 33 Polyhymnia. The asteroid — named after the Greek muse of sacred hymns — is so dense that researchers theorize that it may be made up of elements not contained on the periodic table.
Maybe, maybe not. But until more data, it all guesswork.
1 comment:
I give odds of 100:1 that it's measurement error. Density is mass divided by volume, and both of these numbers are guesswork. Unless an object has a satellite in a stable orbit, or is big enough to shift other planets a little and has been observed for centuries, they're just guessing at the mass. For volume, if it's small and far away, it's actual size is masked by fluctuations in our atmosphere that distort the image or even make it twinkle. So they measure the intensity of the light from it, _guess_ the reflection coefficient, assume a sphere, and calculate the size.
So when someone takes the ratio of two numbers that are mostly guesswork and calculates that they are looking at something that physicists have been trying and failing to create ever since 1940, I think it's far more likely that they guessed wrong.
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