Requiem for Relativity

"Barbarossa, found near the coordinates of Object #3 (USNO-B 0820-0274026) must be either an asteroid, a Kuiper belt object, or something stranger within our solar system (no nebula or external galaxy would be relatively strong in Red yet very weak in Blue and in optical and all other IR)."
Joe, how can Barbarossa be an "asteroid" in the commonly accepted meaning of the term, but have moons large enough to generate internal heat? From your earlier posts, I thought you felt evidence indicated it was a giant planet or brown dwarf.

I estimate from the Aladin SERC.ER.DSS2.713 "Optical Red" plate, that Barbarossa's track is 2" to 5" long, likeliest 3". This would correspond to a seven-hour exposure, for this 330 AU - distant object's apparent angular speed at opposition.

The expected 26-degree track slope isn't obvious, but part of the slope could be obscured by limited resolution, and part by the appearance of the bright red side (beard) of Barbarossa, as Barbarossa rotates left-handed, with period roughly one Earth day, with rotation axis parallel to its orbital progression. Barbarossa's apparent diameter of 0.4" would allow Barbarossa's rotation to mask up to arctan(0.4/2) = 11 degrees of the slope of its track. If Barbarossa progressed from "no beard" to "half beard" during the exposure, then it would average "quarter beard", consistent with the relatively faint Red magnitude of Object #3 vs. the other Objects (+18.57, vs. range 17.41 to 18.84 for Objects #1-.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by nemesis</i>
<br />"Barbarossa, found near the coordinates of Object #3 (USNO-B 0820-0274026) must be either an asteroid, a Kuiper belt object, or something stranger within our solar system (no nebula or external galaxy would be relatively strong in Red yet very weak in Blue and in optical and all other IR)."
Joe, how can Barbarossa be an "asteroid" in the commonly accepted meaning of the term, but have moons large enough to generate internal heat? From your earlier posts, I thought you felt evidence indicated it was a giant planet or brown dwarf.

<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

"...or something stranger within our solar system..."

I've looked at the Aladin plates for Objects #5-8. Object #8 almost overlies an arm of a face-on spiral galaxy (like that of Object #4, but much smaller). The galaxy is seen about equally well in Optical R and Optical B. It is sketchier in Optical I, but both of its apparent twin nuclei remain visible. It becomes vague but definite smudges in all of the IR J, K & H plates (I looked at all three plates available of each, for this region).

The dimness of this galaxy in Optical I, gives a caution about misidentifying highly redshifted (face or edge-on) spiral galaxies which might be visible only on the Optical R plate. On the other hand, the face-on spiral galaxy near Object #4, which has much greater apparent diameter (8s = 120", vs. 12"), also easily is visible with detail, though smaller & fainter, on the Optical I, and J, K, & H plates. A distant, apparently small, highly redshifted galaxy would have further advantage on Optical I.

The spot near the catalog position of Object #3, which I identify as Barbarossa, is brighter than F1-3 in Red yet, unlike any of F1-3, disappears in Blue and in Optical Infrared. Barbarossa's spot is about the same size as the spots made by F1-3. A photon is a photon. If the spot is a nebula or external galaxy, the only way it could disappear when the three stars don't, would be if its spectrum somehow were much narrower than that of the three stars, i.e., narrower than a Planck spectrum.

If the spot is an edge-on full-size spiral whose 100,000 lt yr diameter subtends 5", it would be 4 billion lt yr distant with a Hubble redshift of about 30%. This makes it even less likely to disappear from the Optical I plate.

Spiral galaxies usually are fairly symmetrical. Even a barred spiral, if symmetrical, will have its bright bar centered along either the major or minor axis of its apparent ellipse. The asymmetry of Barbarossa's light distribution, argues against its being an edge-on barred spiral galaxy.

Help!

What is the date of the "Aladin" plate which shows Barbarossa? (In my earlier post, I tell how to find this plate.) It is labeled:

"SERC.ER.DSS2.713"

Some Aladin plates (usually IR plates) are labeled, on the menu or description, with the day they were made, but others aren't. This must be a plate on file somewhere, maybe at Palomar (Cal Tech and UMass are mentioned).

Sincerely,
Joseph C. Keller, M. D.

The USNO-B catalog coordinates for Objects #1-8 (see above) have rms deviation 13.40" from the best-fitting great circle track. Let's consider the deviation, to either side, to be a coordinate in 8-dimensional Euclidean space. The r.m.s. catalog proper motion perpendicular to Barbarossa's track, is roughly 400mas/yr; x 30 yrs for the typical epoch, = 12". If regaining the originally observed positions, by undoing the catalog's automatic Proper Motion correction, merely adds random error to the points which I had selected to be near some line, then the radius of the error ball in 8-dimensional space, should increase to sqrt(13.40^2 + 12^2) = 18". The actual 12.16" r.m.s. deviation error ball obtained, is only p = (12.16/18)^8 = 0.043 times that volume.