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posted by cmn32480 on Saturday October 22 2016, @04:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the weebles-wobble-but-they-don't-fall-down dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The massive hypothetical object, which supposedly looms at the edge of our solar system, has been invoked to explain the strange clustering of objects in the Kuiper belt and the unusual way they orbit the Sun.

Now Planet Nine predictors Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown of Caltech, along with graduate student Elizabeth Bailey, offer another piece of evidence for the elusive sphere's existence: It adds "wobble" to the solar system, they say, tilting it in relation to the sun.

"Because Planet Nine is so massive and has an orbit tilted compared to the other planets, the solar system has no choice but to slowly twist out of alignment," lead author Bailey said in a statement.

Before we go any further, a caveat about Planet Nine: It's purely theoretical at this point. Batygin and Brown predict its existence based on unusual perturbations of the solar system that aren't otherwise easily explained. (This is the same technique scientists used to find Neptune.) But the history of astronomy is rife with speculation that is never borne out: The same guy who correctly predicted the existence of Neptune also believed that a planet he called Vulcan was responsible for the wobble of Mercury. That "discovery" caused the astronomy world to waste years looking for something that wasn't there. (Mercury's wobble was eventually explained by the theory of general relativity.)

But the evidence offered by Batygin and Brown is compelling. When the pair announced their find in January, planetary scientist Alessandro Morbidelli of the Côte d'Azur Observatory in Nice, France, told The Washington Post: "I don't see any alternative explanation to that offered by Batygin and Brown."

"We will find it one day," he added. "The question is when."

Planet Nine's angular momentum is having an outsized impact on the solar system based on its location and size. A planet's angular momentum equals the mass of an object multiplied by its distance from the sun, and corresponds with the force that the planet exerts on the overall system's spin. Because the other planets in the solar system all exist along a flat plane, their angular momentum works to keep the whole disk spinning smoothly.

Planet Nine's unusual orbit, however, adds a multi-billion-year wobble to that system. Mathematically, given the hypothesized size and distance of Planet Nine, a six-degree tilt fits perfectly, Brown says.


Original Submission #1; Original Submission #2

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday October 22 2016, @09:50PM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Saturday October 22 2016, @09:50PM (#417672)

    Wait a minute... so something that's only a mere 10x the mass of the Earth is supposed to be causing such an obvious effect, even though it's located so far away? TFS was talking about a "massive" planet. 10x Earth size is not "massive", it's kinda small. Jupiter is massive, and it's thousands of times the mass of the Earth. Earth, Mars, Venus, etc. are all very small planets when compared to Jupiter, Neptune, Saturn, and Uranus. When someone talks about a "massive" planet, that's what I think of. And I can't imagine how something the size of Jupiter could possibly go undetected unless it's several light-years away. But something 10x the size of Earth? That's easy to understand; we have a hard time resolving Pluto at this distance, and it's not even that far away compared to the other Kuiper Belt objects which have been detected in recent years.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Saturday October 22 2016, @09:56PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday October 22 2016, @09:56PM (#417677) Journal

    It's causing an obvious effect... on objects that weren't known to exist 5-20 years ago.

    Turn on your brain and give them some credit.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday October 22 2016, @10:03PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday October 22 2016, @10:03PM (#417680) Journal

    And I can't imagine how something the size of Jupiter could possibly go undetected unless it's several light-years away. But something 10x the size of Earth?

    10x mass != 10x "size". And it is an estimate, subject to change.

    WISE [wikipedia.org] has already looked for Neptune and Jupiter sized planets:

    WISE was not able to detect Kuiper belt objects, because their temperatures are too low. It was able to detect any objects warmer than 70–100 K. A Neptune-sized object would be detectable out to 700 AU, a Jupiter-mass object out to 1 light year (63,000 AU), where it would still be within the Sun's zone of gravitational control. A larger object of 2–3 Jupiter masses would be visible at a distance of up to 7–10 light years.

    Neptune is 17.147 Earth masses. Planet Nine is theorized to be a "mini-Neptune" of around 10 Earth masses and could be anywhere from 200 to 1200 AU away from the Sun. So it was probably not within WISE's abilities to detect.

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