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posted by martyb on Monday June 26 2017, @12:06AM   Printer-friendly
from the warp-and...weft? dept.

Astronomers are inferring the existence of a "Planet Ten" (or actually the true "Planet Nine"?), a Mars-sized body in the Kuiper Belt, several times closer to the Sun than where the hypothetical Neptune-like Planet Nine is expected to be:

An unknown, unseen "planetary mass object" may lurk in the outer reaches of our solar system, according to new research on the orbits of minor planets to be published in the Astronomical Journal. This object would be different from — and much closer than — the so-called Planet Nine, a planet whose existence yet awaits confirmation.

In the paper, Kat Volk and Renu Malhotra of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, or LPL, present compelling evidence of a yet-to-be-discovered planetary body with a mass somewhere between that of Mars and Earth. The mysterious mass, the authors show, has given away its presence — for now — only by controlling the orbital planes of a population of space rocks known as Kuiper Belt objects, or KBOs, in the icy outskirts of the solar system.

[...] According to the calculations, an object with the mass of Mars orbiting roughly 60 AU from the sun on an orbit tilted by about eight degrees (to the average plane of the known planets) has sufficient gravitational influence to warp the orbital plane of the distant KBOs within about 10 AU to either side.

Also at New Scientist.

The curiously warped mean plane of the Kuiper belt

We estimate this deviation from the expected mean plane to be statistically significant at the ∼97−99% confidence level. We discuss several possible explanations for this deviation, including the possibility that a relatively close-in (a≲100~au), unseen small planetary-mass object in the outer solar system is responsible for the warping.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Monday June 26 2017, @03:20PM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday June 26 2017, @03:20PM (#531350)

    Your analogy is silly. Here's a better analogy:

    Personally, I live pretty close to a creek and a river (each less than a half-mile away as the crow flies), and about an hour's drive from a very large metro area. I also live close to some various little towns, rural roads, etc. Which do I know more about: places much close to me, such as someone's random trailer home in the woods, or some sunken fishing boat at the bottom of the river? Or how to get around that metro area that's over an hour away, and various points of interest there? The latter. There's nothing important to me about some old junk lying at the bottom of the river, or geographic features of the river bed, or some crappy little town 15 minutes away that has one shitty little grocery store and a gas station and maybe a cigarette shop, or various peoples' homes in the area scattered all over different rural roads. But going to the city, visiting cultural attractions there, getting around there, etc. is far more important to me, so that's where I concentrate my attention.

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