![]() But I’d also be perfectly happy if someone else found it. “But with the existence of the planet also explaining these perpendicular orbits, not only do you kill two birds, you also take down a bird that you didn’t realize was sitting in a nearby tree.”īrown and Batygin suggest that the unseen world coalesced along with the solar system’s four known giant planets – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune – and that it was kicked out into a stable but more distant orbit through gravitational interactions. “When the simulation aligned the distant Kuiper Belt objects and created objects like Sedna, we thought this is kind of awesome – you kill two birds with one stone,” Batygin said. That matches observations made in just the last three years. What’s more, the planet should kick still other objects into orbits in perpendicular planes. “Planet Nine” could explain the seemingly puzzling orbits traced by two of the distant worlds, known as Sedna and 2012 VP113 (which has been nicknamed “Planet Biden” in homage to a different kind of VP). This diagram was created using WorldWide Telescope. Astronomers say the gravitational influence of a world they call “Planet Nine” provides the best explanation for the effect. Moreover, the orbits have a similar tilt with respect to the solar system’s main plane. The orbits of six distant objects in the solar system point roughly in the same direction. That means the point of the planet’s closest approach to the sun would have to be placed diametrically opposite to the point of closest approach for the other six objects. The astronomers were able to tweak their orbital simulations to produce the arrangement if they added a large, distant planet with an “anti-aligned” orbit. ![]() The orbits are hard to explain, based on the gravitational interactions of the solar system’s large planets.īatygin and Brown noticed that the long axes of the orbits all pointed in roughly the same direction, and that the orbits all had the roughly same tilt with respect to the solar system’s main planetary plane. When they ran the numbers, the astronomers found the probability of such an arrangement occurring by chance was about 0.007 percent. The new evidence focuses on the orbits of six distant objects that had previously been detected in the Kuiper Belt. … Not one has panned out,” said Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute who is the principal investigator for NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto and beyond. “This is about the fifth or 10th prediction like this. Such claims have repeatedly been raised over the course of more than 30 years. … Not one has panned out.īatygin and Brown are by no means the first to predict the existence of a large world on the solar system’s edge. This is about the fifth or 10th prediction like this. It would take 10,000 to 20,000 years for the proposed planet to make a full orbit of the sun. In comparison, Neptune and Pluto come no closer than 30 AU. The proposed planet would have a mass about 10 times that of Earth, and should trace an eccentric orbit coming no closer to the sun than, say, 19 billion miles (200 astronomical units, where 1 AU equals the distance from Earth to the sun).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |