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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday June 27 2017, @07:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the searching-for-keys-near-the-streetlight dept.

Ethan Siegel at Starts With A Bang brings to attention the results of the Outer Solar System Origins Survey (OSSOS). The OSSOS project, which started in 2013 (before the Planet Nine hypothesis was proposed) to survey the minor planets of the outer Solar System, has discovered and determined the orbits of well over eight hundred trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) in its operation. They have recently published a paper that basically puts the kibosh on the Planet Nine hypothesis. Planet Nine was initially proposed to explain an apparent anomalous clustering of orbits of TNOs consistent with them being perturbed by a large planet, but the OSSOS results have found no such anomalous clustering, and are rather seeing a distribution consistent with uniform randomness.

From Forbes' Javascript-required article:

It was perhaps the most exciting idea to come out of science last year: that an undiscovered, giant world exists in our Solar System, far beyond the orbit of Neptune. This wouldn't be some tiny, frozen world like Pluto or Eris, smaller even than Earth's Moon, but a monstrous super-Earth, perhaps ten times as massive as our own world and almost as large as Uranus or Neptune in radius. As the months passed since it was first proposed by Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, they compiled additional evidence for it, and things were looking rosy. But a new study by Shankman et al. has turned the evidence on its head, disfavoring the planet's existence and uncovering a bias in the data itself.

[...] what they found was entirely consistent with no Planet Nine, and that the overall case for Planet Nine's existence was substantially weakened by their study. In particular, the clustering in the orientation of each orbit in space (defined by multiple variables, ω and Ω) that earlier studies, like Batygin & Brown and Trujillo & Sheppard, previously noticed simply doesn't exist in this new, unbiased study.

We find no evidence in the OSSOS sample for the ω clustering that was the impetus for the current additional planet hypothesis.

The data from this new study is quite clear that the previously observed correlation, which was the impetus for hypothesizing Planet Nine, doesn't persist into the new sample.

OSSOS also has a Frequently Asked Questions page about these findings. They don't entirely rule out the existence of a substantial (perhaps Mars-sized) planet in the outer reaches of the Solar System, but their data makes it highly improbable that a super-Earth on the scale of Uranus or Neptune might be out there.

Additional reading:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/new-haul-distant-worlds-casts-doubt-planet-nine


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday June 27 2017, @11:43AM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday June 27 2017, @11:43AM (#531861) Journal

    http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/new-haul-distant-worlds-casts-doubt-planet-nine [sciencemag.org]

    “I think it’s great work, and it’s exciting to keep finding these,” says Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., who was among the first to suspect a large planet in the distant solar system. But he says three of the four new objects do have clustered orbits consistent with a Planet Nine. The fourth, an object called 2015 GT50, seems to skew the entire set of OSSOS worlds toward a random distribution. But that is not necessarily a knockout blow, he says. “We always expected that there would be some that don’t fit in.”

    The OSSOS team says any apparent clustering in their new objects is likely to be the result of bias in their survey. Weather patterns and a telescope’s location, for instance, determine what areas of the sky it can look at and when. It is also harder to see faint solar system objects in bright areas on the sky like the galactic center.

    Such biases make OSSOS more likely to find objects in regions that support the Planet Nine hypothesis, says OSSOS team member Michele Bannister, an astronomer at Queen’s University Belfast in the United Kingdom. When the team corrects for that effect, the apparent clustering vanishes. By contrast, the OSSOS team says, many details of the surveys behind the original six objects are unpublished, making it impossible to understand their biases.

    That argument does not impress Mike Brown, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, who along with Caltech colleague Konstantin Batygin catapulted Planet Nine into the mainstream with their bold claim. “Their main conclusion is that their observations are hopelessly biased, and it’s true,” he says. “But they then kind of make the leap of faith that everybody else’s must be biased, too.” For Brown, any biases in the hodgepodge of surveys that found the earlier objects should average out. That would make the clustering real—whether caused by Planet Nine or not.

    Of course, Mike Brown and crew have identified a "small" patch of sky that they are imaging to look for the hypothetical planet. Completing that should take at most 2-3 years. If they come up empty, then they will have some explaining to do.

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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday June 27 2017, @02:43PM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday June 27 2017, @02:43PM (#531920) Homepage
    But science is fighting! It's also knowing when to stop fighting. Theories really do compete until there is a winner. Better to come up with a bogus theory, gather a whole bunch of data, share that data for others to use[*], and then admit you were wrong than to do nothing at all.

    [* This is the step that many of the less reputable so-called "sciences" unfortunately avoid, sometimes seemingly deliberately.]
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves