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Jack Taylor/The Avion Newspaper Onion Co-Founder and longtime Editor-in-Chief, Scott Dikkers, spoke to students in the IC Auditorium on Tuesday, Nov. 3. An Honor’s Series event, the funny man spoke of the early developments of the publication and where he sees the Onion in the future. The Avion had an exclusive interview with Mr. Dikkers after the event, which will be posted later this week on our website, theavion.com.

Onion Co-Founder Comes to Campus Scott Dikkers, a longtime Editor-in-Chief of the satirical newspaper, shares his favorite stories...

Himani Parekh Staff Reporter The Onion began as a poorly performing little venture to be funny; it is now one of the most popular humor news outlets. On Tuesday, November 3, Scott Dikkers, second speaker in this year’s Honors Series and co-founder of The Onion, told the story of the humor newspaper’s creation and his own journey with the publication. To a room full of engineering, aviation, and space lovers, Dikkers spoke of

his love for comedy, his start as a comic strip writer, and his acquiring of The Onion publication from its two initial creators Tim Keck and Chris Johnson. As The Onion began to grow, the publication began to acquire writers, people who worked for no pay and came from the unlikeliest walks of life. One writer was an alcoholic. Another lived in his mother’s basement. One of the writers once spent three weeks apparently feeding her cats. These people wrote comedy because they wanted, or

as Dikkers put it, because they needed to do so. They were already cynics; now they had an outlet. Over time, and with The Onion’s growth, some of these original contributors went on to have successful careers in writing and producing humor television. Shows such as The Colbert Report and The Daily Show all have or have had former Onion writers as producers and head writers. Intriguingly, when The Onion initially started to gain traction and make profit as a publication, Dik-

kers was, in fact, homeless. All the money The Onion made went into paying the writers and running the publication. Nevertheless, Dikkers described that time as his happiest because he was, in essence, living his dream, running a successful humor publication. Today, The Onion is more of a modern publication, with a corporate end and a publication end, all housed in offices in Chicago. Legal issues are handled professionally, not in the ramshackle manner of the original Onion, full of

inexperienced writers who just wanted to create comedy. The turnaround rate is much higher, with young employees often leaving to pursue careers in humor television writing. However, Dikkers says he stands by the principles that guided him then as now: live your dream; invest your passion, not your money; and be prepared to scrap everything. The former Editor-inChief ’s story was punctuated by wonderful slices of humor and garnered much laughter from the occu-

pants of the packed I.C. Auditorium. While Dikkers’s life centered around the worlds of humor and publishing, ones very far away from the aviation, space, and engineering worlds, his story served as a reminder that pursuing one’s dream, even if it means taking actions without any clear fallbacks, safety nets, or pre-approved end results, is perhaps the most important part of shaping one’s own life and quite possibly creating something very new and very interesting.

Jupiter Possibly Expels a Rival Gas Giant Keenan Thungtrakul Staff Reporter Scientists believe that there may have been a fifth gas giant planet that existed when the Solar System was still forming. If this planet actually existed, where is it now? A gravitational interplay between that planet and Jupiter could be the reason why it isn’t among the current gas giants orbiting the Sun. Astronomer David Nesvorny of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, originally proposed the theory in 2011. In he suggests that a fifth gas giant planet

existed during the formation of the Solar System. He points to a peculiar group of asteroids in the Kuiper Belt as evidence. The asteroids seem to always stick together and orbit the sun like a planet would. This so-called “kernel” is thought to be the remnant of some extra planet, an orphaned baby in a cold sea of rocks beyond Pluto. The kernel may have been thrown out of the solar system as a result of planetary ejection, where one planet’s gravity accelerates another planet to the point that it escapes the gravitational pull of the parent star. Nesvorny used a com-

puter simulation to go back 4 billion years to the formation of the planets. In the model, the bodies that made up the kernel were caught in Neptune’s gravity as it moved away from the sun to settle in its current orbit. According to Nesvorny’s calculations, when it was 2.6 billion miles from the sun, approaching its current orbit, Neptune jumped 4.7 million miles farther from the sun, freeing the kernel to fly off into the orbital position it occupies today. In explaining why Neptune would make such a drastic jump in its migra-

tion to its current orbit, Nesvorny says that only a gravitational field as big as that of a planet would be enough to pull Neptune further away from the sun. He adds that none of the other gas giants were responsible since their orbits never interacted with Neptune’s in a fashion as seen in the model. In a new study, astrophysicists at the University of Toronto point to Jupiter in explaining the ejection of the unknown planet that would have had a strong enough gravitational field to force Neptune further out during its migration. Previous investigations into the

possibility of giant planets ejecting each other did not consider the effects of such violent encounters with smaller bodies, such as the moons of the giant planets. Ryan Cloutier, lead author of the study concerning Jupiter, worked with his colleagues to create computer simulations of two particular moons, Jupiter’s moon Callisto and Saturn’s moon Iapetus. The simulations show the current trajectory of each moon, which was used to measure the likelihood that each moon produced its current orbit as a result of the host planet’s ejecting of the hypothetical fifth planet.

Such an ejection would have caused a significant disturbance in the moon’s orbit. The results of the simulations show that Saturn would not have been able to eject the planet since the disturbance would cause too abrupt of a shift in the orbit of Iapetus, a shift that is difficult to reconcile with its current trajectory. Jupiter, on the other hand, is capable of ejecting the fifth planet while retaining a moon with the orbit of Callisto. Therefore, scientists have reached the conclusion that Jupiter likely expelled another planet from the Solar System.