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Corresponding with the three-year anniversary of their announcement hypothesizing the existence of a ninth planet in the solar system, Caltech's Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin are publishing a pair of papers analyzing the evidence for Planet Nine's existence.
The papers offer new details about the suspected nature and location of the planet, which has been the subject of an intense international search ever since Batygin and Brown's 2016 announcement.
The first, titled "Orbital Clustering in the Distant Solar System," was published in The Astronomical Journal on January 22. The Planet Nine hypothesis is founded on evidence suggesting that the clustering of objects in the Kuiper Belt, a field of icy bodies that lies beyond Neptune, is influenced by the gravitational tugs of an unseen planet. It has been an open question as to whether that clustering is indeed occurring, or whether it is an artifact resulting from bias in how and where Kuiper Belt objects are observed.
To assess whether observational bias is behind the apparent clustering, Brown and Batygin developed a method to quantify the amount of bias in each individual observation, then calculated the probability that the clustering is spurious. That probability, they found, is around one in 500.
[...] The second paper is titled "The Planet Nine Hypothesis," and is an invited review that will be published in the next issue of Physics Reports. The paper provides thousands of new computer models of the dynamical evolution of the distant solar system and offers updated insight into the nature of Planet Nine, including an estimate that it is smaller and closer to the sun than previously suspected. Based on the new models, Batygin and Brown -- together with Fred Adams and Juliette Becker (BS '14) of the University of Michigan -- concluded that Planet Nine has a mass of about five times that of the earth and has an orbital semimajor axis in the neighborhood of 400 astronomical units (AU), making it smaller and closer to the sun than previously suspected -- and potentially brighter. Each astronomical unit is equivalent to the distance between the center of Earth and the center of the sun, or about 149.6 million kilometers.
-- submitted from IRC
The planet nine hypothesis (DOI: 10.1016/j.physrep.2019.01.009) (DX)
Orbital Clustering in the Distant Solar System (DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/aaf051) (DX)
Previously: CU Boulder Researchers Say Collective Gravity, Not Planet Nine, Explains Orbits of Detached Objects
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Saturday March 02 2019, @01:10AM (1 child)
Why bother? Why not just include Ceres? And Eris, and Makemake, and Haumea?
Why try to change the understanding of what a planet is for absolutely no good reason?
And good grief, just look at it! [futurecdn.net]
Define planet? I think I can do that pretty easily:
Admittedly that may not be a perfect set of criteria, but I submit that it is at least close. Much closer than the IAU's recent profound lapse of judgement.
We've had a solid understanding of these general ideas for a very long time, and recasting that understanding for absolutely no good cause at all is no more than an exercise in absurdity.
Pluto is a planet, and I'm pretty sure it will always be a planet, despite this unfortunate incident of IAU shills finding nothing more productive to do with their time.
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Diapers and Politicians should be changed often.
Both for the same reason.
(Score: 2) by dry on Saturday March 02 2019, @07:12AM
Pluto was always questionable as a planet. It's small, has a weird orbit and it seems that the only reason it was pushed to be a planet was some emotional Americans.
Anyways if you're going to insist it is a planet, it wouldn't be number nine, as we might as well reinstate Ceres and perhaps Vesta as planets.