Well, unless we get lucky: http://news.softpedia.com/news/First-Exoplanet-in-Another-Galaxy-Found-113678.shtml
Very informative but more GQ.
Let me move it there.
That’s a one-time event. One explanation, and perhaps the most likely one, is that it was microlensing caused by a planet, but I’d want to see periodicity (which we’re almost certainly not going to get) before I’d call it a discovery of a planet. As it is, even if a planet is the most likely explanations, there are enough other explanations that it being a planet is probably still less than 50% probable.
Yes. It’s also how Pluto was found. And, additionally, why Pluto was considered much bigger than it is when it was discovered, and also why it was almost immediately granted planethood.
Turns out that Pluto is much too small to cause the observed perturbations in Neptune’s orbit. But Pluto happened to be there where they expected the big unknown planet to be, so the initial assumption was that Pluto was the big unknown planet. It took a long time to realize it was actually tiny, and I think the idea was that the Oort cloud and Kuiper belt objects would replace Pluto as the theoretical cause of Neptune’s orbital anomalies.
I’m not sure if new data has prompted this speculation about another planet, or if it’s the same old “Planet X” fad that comes back every ten years or so.
Name for the new planet, if found?
Why, Ceciladams, of course!
Yuggoth! Yuggoth! They have to name it Yuggoth!
Closely related but less serious thread: What should we call the new ninth planet? - In My Humble Opinion - Straight Dope Message Board
There seems to be a real push to grant this thing official planethood, assuming it’s found, on the basis that if the predictions are correct it would be massive and gravitationally dominant. But it’s already surmised that it would have an eccentric elliptical orbit and perhaps one that’s significantly out of the plane of the eight real planets, which suggests a different origin than the other planets. Wouldn’t it make more sense to consider it a kind of distant Kuiper Belt Object rather than a real planet?
Planet Nine from outer space.
Yes, I did think of that all by myself. Only to discover that the rest of the internet, obviously, was already all over it.
Why did they not call it Nibiru then?
It’s not from outer space - its in outer space.
If it was from, I’m sure we’d all be screaming in panic by now.
Science Friday on NPR had on the guys on who discovered it. They seems confident that it would be discovered within 5 years. They also noted that astronomers they know that were looking at certain regions of the sky are now reviewing their old data to see if they may have already taken a picture of it without realizing it. According to to them planet 9 is at its farthest from the sun and if it was visible, it would be so during a November evening.
Just a couple nitpicks here.
Actually planets are distinct from stars in that they don’t twinkle nearly as much. Stars are point sources of light, so any small variation in the atmosphere along their sight path will cause a twinkle. With planets, you can see their disk, so it takes a larger amount of atmospheric disturbance to cause them to twinkle.
That’s only because Jupiter is so bright. The Galilean moons are bright enough to be naked-eye objects. In fact they’re brighter than Uranus. [insert mooning joke here]
It’s mostly computer modelling based on the orbits of a half dozen or so of the most distant TNOs (which are called sednoids). It could be that the next sednoid or two discovered will not have a perihelion in the right range and totally trash this theory.
Planet Nine is postulated to be well beyond the Kuiper Belt, in the extreme range of the “scattered disk,” or the “detached” objects.
When the definition of planets was thrashed out a few years ago, nobody thought to put anything in there about inclination, or origin.
On the other hand, one can make a case that it hasn’t “cleared its orbit”, since its orbit covers such a vast amount of space, and the miscellaneous other junk in it, when added up, probably outmasses it by a considerable margin. So we could end up with the absurdity of a “dwarf planet” ten times the size of Earth.
I don’t know how we could make either that case, or the converse, with rigor.
For one, because it still hasn’t been found.
Not necessarily. It’s just that most of our methods for planet hunting tend to work better for planets that are closer to their respective stars.
Ia(umlaut)! Ia(umlaut)!
Um…that’s real little because…I’m worshipping all the way from Earth! Yeah…that’s the ticket!