… or Planet 9, or Planet Nine, or whatever you want to call it.
The people responsible for the cruel fate that was bestowed upon Pluto have now gone public with the fact that they strongly believe that there is a massive planet that exists far beyond the orbits of Neptune and Pluto.
So… is this speculative? Is it pretty strongly rooted in fact? How excited can I get about this? Are pants optional at this point? Would that lead me to be escorted out of work?
This would be one of the major scientific events of my lifetime, and I am 31. The Human Genome Project, privatization of space travel, FarmVille, and then… maybe this?
Mike Brown was just interviewed on the radio. He said he and his people spent the last two years trying to find out what’s causing some gravity weirdness that some other people noticed. He also said planets are not official until they are actually seen.
He hasn’t found anything…yet. What he and others have found are essentially anomalies that MIGHT mean there is a large object with relatively large mass moving around out there. This has been discussed in the past. I recall people speculating that our sun might have a companion, since binary (and more) stars seem to be the norm, while singletons are pretty rare. The idea was that there might be a brown dwarf out there on a very long elliptical orbit that every few tens of millions of years perturb comets and such in the Oort Cloud, flinging them into the inner solar system. I’m pretty sure this theory has been quashed, but I guess according to this data there might still be something large out there. Going to be pretty hard to find, since it won’t be giving off very much light, and it’s so far away that it would take years or even decades to get out there to explore with robotic probes or see even with large space borne telescopes. Cool though if it pans out.
The graphic on the linked page indicates to me that there’s a planet orbiting at around the distance of the aphelion of Sedna et al, not where the graphic indicates. All those bodies having similar aphelia seems to be a bit of a tell-tale.
We won’t really know until it moves in around our own moon, giving us only 15 minutes until it’s in range to find it’s critical weakness and save humanity!! :eek: I’m fairly sure that Bruce Willis and Will Smith (Mark Hamill being sadly too old…though Bruce and Will are getting a bit long in the tooth as well, I suppose) are on standby though just in case they are needed…
In my opinion there is nothing more fascinating than astronomy. Proven equations do not lie. If a brilliant mathematician tells me that something is not right with these orbits, I believe him. I do find it strange that an object the size of Neptune could hide from all the geniuses this world has ever seen but I try my best to always have an open mind and I understand that i am not a smart person. I fail at keeping an open mind repeatedly but I believe an open mind is the way to be.
From many other articles, they’re talking roughly 10 Earth Masses (Neptune is 17) at a distance of 200-250 AU (Neptune is at 30 AU).
Given that Pluto is at anywhere from 29.66 to 49.3 AU and it took New Horizons 9 years to get out there, we’d be talking 64 years(?) for an equivalent probe. Probably not do-able on current technology.
Space, as it turns out, is big. And the image you have in your head of the solar system from science books and posters dramatically, unbelievably inflates the size of the planets relative to the solar system to make them visible at all. On a to-scale wall poster showing the whole solar system, you’d barely be able to make out the Sun, much less something the size of Neptune.
These folks https://youtu.be/zR3Igc3Rhfg recently did a scale model in the desert; it’s interesting to watch to see the real scale of things.
