[PHOTO] Walking home in Seaton Village in the late evening, 30 March 2014

This warmth and light, so late in the day (6:36!), is so appreciated.

[BLOG] Some Monday science links

• Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster notes that there is a class for bright F-class stars to host Earth-like worlds, and observes that the ESA's Rosetta probe is set to rendezvous with Comet 67P/Churymov-Gerasimenko.


• D-Brief suggests that mitochondrial damage might be responsible for so-called "Gulf War syndrome".


• The Dragon's Gaze notes that the Kepler satellite can detect large exomoons, links to a paper suggesting that Jupiters aren't needed to deliver water to the surfaces of rocky habitable-zone planets, and observes that the geological cycles of the Earth are necessary for life.

[BLOG] Some Monday Crimea links

• Eastern Approaches follows the story of Crimean Tatars who are now refugees in western Ukraine.


• At the Financial Times' The World blog, John Reed examines the unlikely media star who is Crimean attorney-general Natalia Poklonskaya.


• A Fistful of Euros' David Weman notes the United Nations vote against the annexation of Crimea by Russia.


• Geocurrents has a series of posts on Ukraine and its area: one on the Moldovan region of Transnistria, a possible western anchor for Russia; one on Transcarpathia, a Ruthene-populated enclave in western Ukraine not quite Ukrainian; one on Ukraine's energy reserves.


• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Robert Farley notes the Russian takeover of the Ukrainian Black Sea fleet ships based in Crimea.


• The Volokh Conspiracy's Eugene Volokh points out the many, many ways in which Kosovo does not compare to Crimea.


• Window on Eurasia has a veritable brace of posts. Crimeans aren't taking up Russian passports with much enthusiasm, it seems, while the financial costs of annexation will be significant indeed. A Russian war in southeastern Ukraine would be a difficult war to fight, while post-Soviet space has already been destabilized (1, 2). Will South Ossetia be next to be annexed? (Northern California is not so likely.) Meanwhile, Turkish support for Turkic peoples can be destabilizing.


• Understanding Society's Daniel Little takes a social science approach to the Russian annexation. What does it mean for the international system's future? Will there be more annexations?

[LINK] Some Monday links

• Crooked Timber's Henry Farrell is skeptical of Josh Marshall's new journalism site featuring paid advertisements from Big Pharma.


• The Dragon's Tales' Will Baird provides another update about Ukrainian events.


• Joe. My. God. notes that World Vision Canada, unlike its American counterpart, is legally required not to discriminate against non-heterosexuals.


• Language Hat links to a study on the formerly Russophone Alaskan community of Ninilchik.


• Language Log suggests that handwriting is a dying art in East Asia, too.


• Marginal Revolution links to a book on maritime conflicts in the South China Sea.


• The Signal features a guest post from two librarians working for the Library of Congress explaining how they do their work.


• Savage Minds explains the myth of the sexy librarian.


• Torontoist has two photos memorializing recently-closed stores, one from the World's Biggest Bookstore and the other from Sears in the Eaton Centre.

[BRIEF NOTE] On what the discovery of 2012 VP113 means

The recently-announced discovery of 2012 VP113, one of the most distant bodies ever discovered and one of the first objects likel to belong to the Oort cloud, is exciting. It was widely covered in the blogs I read: Bad Astronomy and Centauri Dreams and D-Brief and The Dragon's Tales and the Planetary Society Weblog all had features.

Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait did a good job of outlining the import of the discovery. Why is a body likely only a few hundred kilometres in diameter important?

Astronomers have announced the discovery of an amazing object in our solar system: 2012 VP113, an icy body with an orbit so big it never gets closer than 12 billion kilometers (7.4 billion miles) from the Sun! That’s 80 times the distance of the Earth from the Sun. No other solar system object known stays so far from the Sun. And at its most distant, it reaches an incredible 70 billion kilometers (44 billion miles) from the Sun—and it takes well over 4,000 years to circle the Sun once.

It’s not exactly clear yet, but it’s likely that VP113 is a member of the Oort cloud, a huge collection of gigantic frozen ice balls that orbit the Sun way, way past Neptune. Sedna is the only other object known in that part of the remote solar system, and it gets closer to the Sun by a smidge than VP113 ever does. The closest point an object can get to the Sun is called perihelion, and VP113 has the largest perihelion distance of any object known.

Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society, meanwhile, makes a good case that the existence of this body and of the similar Sedna do not at all provide evidence of a "Planet X" influencing their erratic orbits. (It looks like their orbits wee disrupted by nearby stars in the young solar system instead._

I have confess to a bias here: I really wanted this coincidence in argument of perihelion to be strong evidence of a planet X. I would love for there to be a planet X. So would [discoverers Chad Trujillo and Scott Sheppard], evidently, because they spent quite a bit of space showing it could work. And so would Nature, because then the first clear indication of a planet X would be in an article published in their journal.

But Hal [Levison] dashed my hopes, or at least my certainty. "It's a very weak result," he told me; and indeed the paper spends more column inches on what 2012 VP113 tells us about the inner Oort cloud as a population than it does about this potential "perturber." Meg Schwamb seems to agree; her News & Views piece didn't even mention the possibility of a planet, only that "This result may be the first hint we have of an identifiable signature of the inner Oort cloud’s formation mechanism on the orbits of closer-in Solar System bodies. If true, any formation mechanism proposed for the origin of Sedna and 2012 VP113 will need to explain this orbital structure."

Hal told me that he looked carefully at whether the clustering in argument of perihelion could just be a statistical fluke, but that ultimately, he "believes the data."

The question is whether it's a planet. And then you have to be a little careful. If this population were massive enough, if there were like one or two Earth masses in it, which is possible, because something like a hundred Earth masses was scattered out as Uranus, Neptune, Jupiter, and Saturn were growing, then maybe it's the self-gravity between these objects themselves that's doing it. There may be other explanations for this, rather than the extreme position of, "it's a planet"; but I can believe there's something going on.

Hal was more interested in a different coincidence about Sedna and 2012 VP113. "It's a little odd that the first two objects that have been discovered have perihelia that large. There's not a guy at 55 or 60 AU. It probably means there's an inner edge to this population; that certainly would constrain things." I poked at this, really wanting the distance to tell me that there was a planet X at 80 AU, but unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. Hal said that some solar system formation simulations do turn out to have an inner edge to the inner Oort cloud or first-generation Oort cloud without the help of any interloping planet, "Because you have to get far enough away from the planets to stabilize the orbits for long periods of time. I don't think it's hugely surprising that that edge is there." He pointed me to this 2012 paper, which mentions a 100-AU inner edge in the abstract.

[URBAN NOTE] On the 60th anniversary of the Yonge subway

On Saturday the 30th, the Yonge subway line celebrated its 60th anniversary of operation. Stretching from Union station north along Yonge Street to Eglinton, this 1954 subway line was the first built in Canada, and is still the spine of the entire transit grid in Toronto.

• blogTO's Chris Bateman had a photo essay showing how politicians and the general people reacted to the subway. One commenter notes that users seemed rather excited to be riding the line.


• Torontoist's Jamie Bradburn outlined a barely-avoided moment of pique, as Ontario's premier and Toronto's mayor found a way to share the on switch for the cameras.


• Transit Toronto's Robert Mackenzie has a very nice, detained two-part overview (1, 2) of the histo and impact of the Yonge line.What was the first ride like? What streetcar and bus routes were transformed? Mackenzie has it all.


• Finally, from the Tumblrverse comes
• lexestrex's beautiful image showing the original different colour schemes of the different subway stations along the line. (I reshared it on my Tumblr.)