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Medieval Records Could Point the Way to Planet Nine

posted by janrinok on Sunday May 06 2018, @01:46PM   
from the past-stars dept.

takyon writes:

Medieval astronomical records, such as the Bayeux Tapestry, could help narrow down the location (or at least infer the existence) of the hypothetical Planet Nine:

Scientists suspect the existence of Planet Nine because it would explain some of the gravitational forces at play in the Kuiper Belt, a stretch of icy bodies beyond Neptune. But no one has been able to detect the planet yet, though astronomers are scanning the skies for it with tools such as the Subaru Telescope on Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano.

Medieval records could provide another tool, said Pedro Lacerda, a Queen's University astronomer and the other leader of the project.

"We can take the orbits of comets currently known and use a computer to calculate the times when those comets would be visible in the skies during the Middle Ages," Lacerda told Live Science. "The precise times depend on whether our computer simulations include Planet Nine. So, in simple terms, we can use the medieval comet sightings to check which computer simulations work best: the ones that include Planet Nine or the ones that do not."

Also at Queen's University Belfast.

Related: "Planet Nine" Might Explain the Solar System's Tilt
Planet Nine's Existence Disfavoured by New Data
Study of ETNOs Supports Planet Nine's Existence
Passing Star Influenced Comet Orbits in Our Solar System 70,000 Years Ago

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Original Submission

• Re:Found it already (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @09:27PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @09:27PM (#676794)

  Stern, currently leading NASA's New Horizons mission, disagrees with the reclassification of Pluto on the basis of its inability to clear a neighbourhood. One of his arguments is that the IAU's wording is vague, and that—like Pluto—Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Neptune have not cleared their orbital neighbourhoods either. Earth co-orbits with 10,000 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), and Jupiter has 100,000 trojans in its orbital path. "If Neptune had cleared its zone, Pluto wouldn't be there", he has said.[6]

  However, Stern himself co-developed one of the measurable discriminants: Stern and Levison's Λ. In that context he stated, "we define an überplanet as a planetary body in orbit about a star that is dynamically important enough to have cleared its neighboring planetesimals ..." and a few paragraphs later, "From a dynamical standpoint, our solar system clearly contains 8 überplanets"—including Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Neptune.[3] Although he proposed this to define dynamical subcategories of planets, he still rejects it for defining what a planet essentially is, advocating the use of intrinsic attributes[7] over dynamical relationships.

  The whole way that reclassification mess went down was an ugly political mess and a stain on the image of science. You spend two years working on a new definition and go into the IAU meeting with the definition, have the vote scheduled on the last day when 95% of the attendees will have left, change the definition the night before, then require that only those in attendance are allowed to vote, who SURPRISE are mostly the dynamicists because they're sessions were the last ones at the meeting. So you (Brown and company) change the rules, stack the deck, have less than 5% of your membership vote on it, then claim victory and declare that "the IAU has decided". I don't even have a horse in that race and I find the whole thing very unappealing.

  Parent