Sky & Telescope: “Planet X may have left our Solar System Billions of Years Ago”

Using a computer simulation, Huang ran the solar system backward in time for billions of years. He found that the orbits of the three known Sednoids shared some remarkably similar properties just once, in the distant past: Not long after the birth of the solar system, their perihelia clustered at the same solar longitude, and their apsidal lines (the line passing through perihelion, the Sun, and aphelion) were also nearly coincident.

This orbital clustering is a telltale sign that a single event put the Sednoids onto their present paths, an event that happened during the solar system’s youth more than 4 billion years ago. It’s also a sign that nothing has disturbed the slow evolution of those orbits for 4 billion years. In other words, there is no undiscovered planet to be found today.

Huang’s work showed that the culprit could have been a primordial planet, ejected from the solar system only 100 million years after its formation. This rogue planet would now be long gone, orbiting the center of the galaxy rather than our Sun. Other explanations — such as a star from the Sun’s birth cluster passing close by — are also plausible; more work is needed.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Planet X conundrum continues. To me, a massive object causing orbital disruptions in the early solar system remains the most plausible explanation, as I’ve mentioned before – as much as having a black hole practically next door would be an amazing opportunity for observations – and this study is basically reinforcing this view. Absent any visual detections, I’m leaning more and more into the opinion that the initial ‘discovery’ back in 2016 was largely a gimmick to attract more media attention by the guy who ‘killed Pluto’ – an unfortunately too common practice in scientific circles, used to draw funding for their various research areas.

Sky & Telescope: “Solar Cycle may trigger Clouds on Neptune”

Erandi Chavez (now Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian) and others have now found compelling evidence that not only does Neptune brighten soon after the Sun hits its max, but also that the change is due to an uptick in the number of bright, high-altitude clouds.

The researchers collected hundreds of archival near-infrared images taken by Hubble and the Keck and Lick observatories, creating a detailed sequence that reaches back to 1994. At these wavelengths, the clouds reflect sunlight, so the team could use the clouds’ brightness to measure how widespread clouds were, Chavez explains. The images reveal that Neptune was brightest (and therefore cloudiest) in 2002 and 2015 and dimmest in 2007 and 2020 — in fact, Neptune abruptly lost nearly all its clouds beginning in late 2019 and is only slowly recovering now.

The planet’s behavior tracks the 11-year solar cycle, albeit with a 2-year lag: Shortly after solar maximum, Neptune shines brightest; after solar minimum, it’s dimmest.

This correlation may be tied to sunlight’s impact on the molecules in Neptune’s atmosphere, the authors suggest in an upcoming issue of Icarus. The Sun’s total output changes only 0.1% over the course of its magnetic cycle. But its ultraviolet output surges by 40%. Ultraviolet radiation is a powerful chemist: It can break up the abundant methane in Neptune’s skies, enabling various hydrocarbons to form. These molecules might later condense or serve as cloud seeds.

Camille M. Carlisle

Fascinating to see the influence the Sun can have on planets in the system even as far out as Neptune, which receives only 0.1% as much sunlight as the Earth does! It’s a shame we don’t have any missions orbiting the outer giant planets to collect these kind of data – and much more – up close. It would likely yield many astonishing insights into their formation and evolution, which would help us better understand planetary formation in extrasolar systems.

New Send to Kindle web app from Amazon

Following up on plans to improve document syncing for Kindle devices mentioned alongside the launch of the Kindle Scribe, Amazon quietly introduced a new ‘Send to Kindle’ web app. I discovered it via an email announcement together with various updates to file support and reading features. It’s fairly basic, but functional: a simple control for selecting local files, while the right side lists the various other ways to send documents to Kindle devices, and a link to the personal ‘Content and Devices’ saved in your Amazon account.

The Washington Post: “Flawless or fake? Google’s AI now fixes smiles”

Here’s how it works: The AI in Best Take is not actually inventing smiles or other expressions. Instead, the software combs through all the shots you took over a several-second interval to propose a few alternatives for each face it can identify. Based on what you select, it pulls the face out of the alternative and uses AI to blend it into your original. It’s an instant AI version of using Photoshop to cut someone’s head out of one photo and stick it on another.

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Google has also been quick to release other AI photo-editing tools such as Magic Eraser that can remove whole people and objects from photos.

What’s to stop Best Take 2 from opening up to faces captured any time, instead of just in those few seconds? People have filled up their Google Photos collections with years of source material. Then how much harder would it be for Google to offer entirely synthetic versions of the people in your photos, like you can already get in AI selfie apps like Lensa? Next stop: “Hey, Google, make all the people in this photo look more in love/surprised/happy.”

Lost along the way: What’s a photograph, after all? If not a record of a moment, then perhaps we have to figure out how to stop treating it like a memory.

Geoffrey A. Fowler

I fully expect people to use Magic Eraser (or similar AI-based photo-manipulation tools) to wipe out their exes from past photos after breaking up – or even to replace them with their current partner.

The Lightroom Queen: “What’s New in Lightroom Classic 13.0, Mobile & Desktop (October 2023)?”

Classic, Desktop & Mobile – Lens Blur

Lens Blur uses AI to simulate shallow Depth of Field. Some mobile devices use multiple lenses to create this kind of depth map at the time of capture, like the iPhone in Portrait mode, so Depth Range Masking and Lens Blur make good use of this technology. If a depth map isn’t available, however, Lightroom’s Lens Blur tool uses AI to try to estimate the distances.

The amount of blur can be adjusted, as can the style of bokeh in highlights in the background, which isn’t currently possible when using Masking to blur a background. Focal Range can also be adjusted to determine what’s in focus.

Victoria Bampton

It’s been a while since I’ve written about Lightroom here, but this new feature caught my interest. It has a lot of potential for creative results – and an even greater potential for horrendously over-the-top editing. This was also an area where I felt Lightroom Classic was lagging compared to mobile photo apps, which could capture and edit depth maps for various blurring effects, so it’s good to see the feature coming to desktops as well. (I personally can’t wait for the day when AI-magic can restore focus in photos; I have some great shots where the main areas are just slightly out-of-focus, either because the camera was not up for the task or through my own negligence.)

CNN: “Box of giraffe poop seized at Minnesota airport”

Customs workers at a Minnesota airport discovered a traveler had brought a unique souvenir in her luggage: Giraffe feces.

The passenger arrived at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport from Kenya on September 29, according to a news release from US Customs and Border Protection.

The passenger declared giraffe feces and stated she had obtained the droppings in Kenya and planned to make a necklace, the release stated.

The traveler said she had previously used moose feces to make similar jewelry at her home in Iowa, according to customs officials.

Zoe Sottile

This story is almost too absurd to be true, but one should never underestimate the depths of human foolishness. With folks like these, is there any wonder that efforts to contain a virulent new pathogen were in vain?

Ars Technica: “SpaceX projected 20 million Starlink users by 2022—it ended up with 1 million”

A 2015 presentation that SpaceX used to raise money from investors reportedly projected that in 2022, Starlink would hit 20 million subscribers and generate nearly $12 billion in revenue and $7 billion in operating profit. The WSJ said it obtained the 2015 presentation and recent documents with numbers on Starlink’s actual performance in 2022.

Actual Starlink revenue for 2022 was $1.4 billion, up from $222 million in 2021, according to the report. The documents apparently didn’t specify whether Starlink is profitable.

Starlink hasn’t signed up customers as quickly as SpaceX had hoped, the WSJ wrote. Toward the end of last year, Starlink had more than one million active subscribers, SpaceX has said. The company thought its satellite-Internet business would have 20 million subscribers as 2022 closed out, according to SpaceX’s 2015 presentation.

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Starlink is bumping up against a reality articulated by many skeptics of satellite Internet, the WSJ wrote. The majority of the world’s population that the business could serve and that can afford high-speed broadband lives in cities. In those regions, Internet service is readily available, usually offers cheaper monthly costs than Starlink and doesn’t require specialized equipment.

Jon Brodkin

So glad we’re polluting our skies with thousands of satellites so that a handful of people from the richest countries can have mediocre Internet connections!

The Verge: “YouTube is axing its ad-free Premium Lite subscription plan”

At €6.99 per month, YouTube’s Premium Lite plan first launched in select European countries in 2021, including Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. It offers ad-free viewing across YouTube’s spectrum of apps and formats but doesn’t come with Premium’s other features like offline downloads, background playback, or any YouTube Music benefits.

But soon, existing Premium Lite subscribers will be left with two options: go back to watching YouTube with ads or subscribe to the pricier YouTube Premium that also includes YouTube Music. In an email notifying users of the change, YouTube says it will offer Lite subscribers a one-month free trial of YouTube Premium, regardless of whether they’ve had a trial before. It notes that subscribers will need to cancel their Lite subscription or wait for it to be canceled in order to redeem the offer. YouTube raised the price of its Premium and Music subscriptions in the US in July.

Antonio G. Di Benedetto

This ‘Premium Lite’ plan does indeed sound like the best YouTube subscription for me. I subscribed to YouTube Premium at the start of the year because I was offered a couple of months free of charge with my purchase of a new Samsung Galaxy smartphone, and continued because I was increasingly annoyed by YouTube ads long before that and couldn’t stand the thought of returning to forced ad breaks. The most obnoxious for me were the ads that would sometimes pop up five seconds into the video – you did not even get a chance to see what the video was about before getting interrupted! I never used the other features included in the plan, such as offline downloads and background playback, so a basic ad-free plan without any added features would have been perfect.