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@thunkii.bsky.social

Reposted by @thunkii.bsky.social

astrafoxen @astrafoxen.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Last year I rewrote Wikipedia's article on Makemake and it's now featured on the front page!! i spent 2 months hyperfixating on this topic and doing all the research and writing. It was SO worth it :D Special thanks to @renerpho.bsky.social & others for reviewing it ^^ (1/12 thread) 🔭 #planetsci

A screenshot of the "Today's featured article" section on the Main Page of Wikipedia. The section, highlighted in green, features an excerpt from the Wikipedia article on Makemake:

"Makemake is a dwarf planet orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune. It has a diameter 60% that of Pluto, and is the fourth-largest trans-Neptunian object and the largest member of the Solar System's classical Kuiper belt, a disk of icy bodies beyond Neptune's orbit. Its discovery on March 31, 2005, by American astronomers Mike Brown, Chad Trujillo and David Rabinowitz at Palomar Observatory contributed to the reclassification of Pluto as a dwarf planet in 2006. Makemake's surface, like Pluto's, is largely covered by frozen methane and stained reddish-brown by tholins. It has one known satellite, unnamed, whose orbit suggests that Makemake's rotation has a high axial tilt. Makemake shows evidence of geochemical activity and cryovolcanism, which has led scientists to suspect that it might harbor a subsurface ocean of liquid water. No high-resolution images of its surface exist because it has not been visited up close by a space probe."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makemake

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thunkii.bsky.social @thunkii.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

After some minor fixes I made to the visualization of 1,509,413 asteroids, and their position in space as of last week, it's good to go for Wikipedia! commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:As...

Plot of the position in space, as of the instant of midnight ephemeris time 15 May 2026, of 1,509,325 asteroids. The size of each circle represents the square root of the asteroid's diameter, and is not to scale with their orbital distance. Types of asteroids are color-coded; white are main-belt asteroids, pink are Trojan asteroids ('Greeks' at L4 and 'Trojans' at L5 lagrange points), purple are Hilda asteroids, orange and yellow are Mars-crossing and near-Earth asteroids, and green dots are comets. The inner planets and Jupiter are labeled in gold. The top chart represents a view top-down into the plane of the solar system, and the bottom chart is a side view.

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thunkii.bsky.social @thunkii.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

There are more ways to visualize asteroids, such as their location in space today. Here are 1,509,413 of them, plotted to scale with each other (but not to the planets or their orbits). We can clearly see the main belt in white and Trojan asteroids in pink.

A view from above the plane of the solar system (top) or in its plane (bottom) onto the asteroid belt, showing 1.5 million asteroids to scale with each other, with their positions as of 15 May 2026 (but greatly enlarged compared to their orbits). The inner planets and Sun is shown in gold, while the main belt is visible as a donut-shaped cloud in white, and Trojan asteroids are in pink clouds 60 deg ahead or behind Jupiter. Other categories of asteroids are seen on closer inspection, including the Hildas triangle (purple), outer-belt/Cybele asteroids (light blue), Hungarias (orange), Amors and Mars-crossers (yellow), and near-Earth asteroids (red), as well as scattered comets (green).

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Reposted by @thunkii.bsky.social

Luke Dones @lukemeister.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

🧵 Link to high-resolution versions of inclination and eccentricity vs. semi-major axis at end of thread Proper elements from David Nesvorný's catalog www2.boulder.swri.edu/~davidn/Prop... David's paper: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...

iopscience.iop.org

A Census before Rubin of Asteroid Families in the Main Belt

A Census before Rubin of Asteroid Families in the Main Belt, Nesvorný, David

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thunkii.bsky.social @thunkii.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

This is a graph of the inclination vs semi-major axis (distance from the sun) of 1,249,051 asteroids in the asteroid belt. Using proper elements allows us to see the belt's fine structure, including asteroid families that are fragments of past collisions. Each asteroid is (roughly) to scale.

A plot of 1,249,051 asteroids within the asteroid belt, showing (proper) inclination vs semi-major axis (in AU) and orbital period (in years). The size of the circles is proportional to the diameter of each asteroid. The main asteroid belt is shown in shades of white, while Hungaria asteroids are in orange and the Cybele asteroids are in blue. Red markers note the position of the 1:4, 1:3, 3:8, 2:5, 3:7, 4:9, 5:11, 1:2, and 3:5 orbital resonances with Jupiter.

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