今天是Gurutej的生日,自然她讲了不少有关星象的话题。从她的星象说到太阳系里的行星,关于早期人类如何知道给星球命名,为何与后来的科学发现不谋而合。一直说到希腊神话、非洲女神的纸船上的烛灯。
她讲的是今天的一段新闻。Nasa发现了太阳系里离地球最远的一颗小行星。是红色的。用Inuit人的海之女神Sedna命名。这个发现非常重要。
同学们给她买了蛋糕,还要一个可以在水上点蜡烛的玻璃灯架。暗喻她是Sedna转世。Sedna的info和模样网上有。
今天学了几个“咒语”, 她念咒(chanting)的时候,就是电影上的女巫样子。 今天的chant是打开穴脉。念完,堵得死死的鼻子果真通了。要听她chant,请到这里:
顺便推荐给大家两盘CD,一盘叫Prem,另一盘叫world chant。非常棒!有钱的一定要去卖来。
最近有一个西班牙僧侣的chant CD热卖。还是90年的,CD就叫chant,无伴奏。
这是有关Sedna的新闻:
Scientists on Monday announced the discovery of a frozen, shiny red world some 8 billion miles from Earth that is the most distant known object in the solar system
They are calling it a "planetoid," saying it does not meet the definition of a planet.
"There's absolutely nothing like it known in the solar system," said Mike Brown, the California Institute of Technology astronomer who led the NASA (news - web sites)-funded team that found it last year.
Named Sedna, after the Inuit goddess who created the sea creatures of the Arctic, the planetoid is 800 to 1,100 miles in diameter, or about three-quarters the size of Pluto, and probably half rock, half ice.
It is currently three times farther from Earth than Pluto, the ninth and outermost planet.
Sedna is the largest object found orbiting the sun since the discovery of Pluto in 1930. It trumps in size another icy world, called Quaoar, discovered by the same team in 2002.
Sedna follows a highly elliptical path around the sun, a circuit that takes 10,500 years to complete. It loops out as far as 84 billion miles from the sun. From Sedna's surface, the sun would appear so small that it could be blocked out by the head of a pin.
It is well beyond the Kuiper Belt, a region of ice and rock just beyond the orbit of Neptune.
Brown and his colleagues believe Sedna is the first known member of the long-hypothesized Oort Cloud, a sphere of material orbiting the sun that explains certain comets. If Sedna is part of the Oort Cloud, the cloud extends much closer inward toward the sun than previously believed.
The Oort theory holds that comets in the cloud probably started out as icy objects in places like the Kuiper Belt that were flung out of the solar system by one of the giant planets.
The location of Sedna suggests that it got stuck where it is because its orbit was affected long ago by a star that is no longer nearby.
"What we think must have happened is that early in the history of the solar system, there must have been many, more stars very close to the sun than there are now," Brown said. The sun, in other words, was born in a tight cluster of many stars.
Sedna is one of the most pristine objects in the solar system.
"Very little has happened to this object since the beginning of the solar system," Brown said. "There's not much else out there, so it hasn't been impacted by other objects, it hasn't been heated by the sun. It really has just been sitting out there at 400 degrees below zero for the past 4.5 billion years."
Brown would not classify Sedna as a planet, based on a definition of a planet as an object considerably more massive than any other object in a similar location.
"Sedna sits all by itself in the very outer reaches of the solar system, but our prediction is there will be many, many more of these objects found over the next five years or over the next decade, and it will turn out that Sedna, in fact, is not the most massive object in its orbit out there," Brown said.
Brown, Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, and David Rabinowitz of Yale University discovered Sedna last November, using a 48-inch telescope at Caltech's Palomar Observatory east of San Diego.
Within days, other astronomers around the world trained their telescopes, including the recently launched Spitzer Space Telescope, on the object.
"It took us a few weeks of continuing to see this object until we were really convinced we had stumbled on something big," Brown said.
The team also have indirect evidence a tiny moon may trail Sedna, which is redder than all other known solar system bodies except Mars.
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