Re: I Spoke to Nancy Online and all I got was this Lousy T-Shirt!

In Article  <[email protected]> Greg Neill wrote:
> 1.  Nancy now claims that her incoming Plant X is a 
>     brown dwarf. Brown dwarfs have a minimum 
>     absolute magnitude of about +17, but can be much 
>     brighter (for example, Gliese 229B located some
>     21.8 ly away has an absolute magnitude of +8.14).  
>     At the distance that Nancy claims for her imagined 
>     object, ... 

Would you prefer I  make up a NEW term, so you can be comfortable with
the current human definition staying the SAME, Greg?  Tan-Dwarf? 
Mini-Dwarf? BrownISH-Dwarf? The definition for brown dwarf keeps
changing, based on new discoveries, but we can't give that presumption
here?  The scale is moving, on size and temperature and the like (see
below). It's like the silly argument over whether Planet X is a planet
or comet or brown dwarf.  The rigid have a field day.  It CAN'T be such
or such or such, as the definition does not exactly fit.  Never mind
that the definition is constantly being changed.

Sky Survey Scientists Discover New Celestial Dwarfs
Sloan Digital SkySurvey, May 31, 1999

    Scientists of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey announced 
    today (May 31) that early data from the Survey have
    revealed a new type of astronomical object, smaller
    than a star but larger than a planet. Until now, only 
    one such object had ever been detected in the universe. 
    Early this spring, while searching Sky Survey data for 
    unusual objects such as the universe's most distant 
    quasars, graduate student Xiaohui Fan and astronomer 
    Michael Strauss, of Princeton University, found a faint 
    but extremely red dot of light in the night sky. 
    Subsequent spectroscopic observations revealed that 
    the object was not a distant quasar but instead an equally
    fascinating find - a nearby cool, brown dwarf with 
    properties between those of a planet and a star. Until 
    their discovery, only one of this type of "cool substellar 
    object," known as Gliese 229B, discovered in 1995, 
    had ever been observed. However, unlike Gliese 229B, 
    which is a close companion to a star, the new object 
    was not orbiting a star, but occurred as a free-floating 
    object about 30 light years away in the constellation 
    Ophiuchus.