Talk:Centaur (planetoid)
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Curps: Good edit on comet/asteroid mixture of 2060 Chiron. It looks like the CFA prefers to list SDOs and Centaurs in reverse chronological order, for some reason. There is a de facto standard for listing objects in Wikipedia in decreasing diameter (see Kuiper belt, Natural satellite, first table in List of noteworthy asteroids) or sometimes chronological order (see second table in List of noteworthy asteroids).. I was trying to not use a third ordering. It would be cool to get diameters on these objects, by the way. -- hike395 05:17, 12 Apr 2004 (UTC)
- In this case, I imagined future maintainers of the page would click on the external link to look up any updated info. For lists of more than a few elements, it can be very confusing to compare them if one is in the opposite order of the other (assuming the list on the Wikipedia page might grow considerably). So that's basically the reason I kept it that way. I don't know the diameters of the other objects, maybe the info is out there somewhere. -- Curps 05:45, 12 Apr 2004 (UTC)
- That makes sense. -- hike395
Removed to where?
"Centaurs are not in stable orbits and will eventually be removed by the giant planets." Removed to where? Could someone who knows their stuff clarify this sentence? The Singing Badger 16:15, 26 Sep 2004 (UTC)
- Centaurs will be removed from the solar system either by impacting on a planet, perturbed into a sungrazing object and destroyed by impact on or disruption by the sun (like the Kruetz family of Sun-grazing comets) or will be perturbed by one of the planets onto an orbit that will escape the solar system (the most likely removal route...). Most asteroids and Kuiper Belt objects are on orbits which are relatively stable and will last for billions of years, orbiting far enough from the planets so that their orbits will not be drastically perturbed. But in the case of planet crossing asteroids (like Centaurs or Earth-crossing asteroids), the planets (especially Jupiter) will cause drastic changes to the objects orbit, including total ejection from the solar system when the object passes relatively close to the planet in question. Typical dynamical lifetimes of Centaurs are around 1 million to a few 10s of millions of years depending on the specifics of their particular orbit. Jim 00:22, 28 Sep 2004 (UTC)
- Cool! That's what I wanted to know. :) The Singing Badger 17:24, 28 Sep 2004 (UTC)