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posted by martyb on Tuesday June 05 2018, @01:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the Planet-Nine-from-Outer-Space dept.

Collective gravity, not Planet Nine, may explain the orbits of 'detached objects'

Bumper car-like interactions at the edges of our solar system—and not a mysterious ninth planet—may explain the the dynamics of strange bodies called "detached objects," according to a new study. CU Boulder Assistant Professor Ann-Marie Madigan and a team of researchers have offered up a new theory for the existence of planetary oddities like Sedna—an icy minor planet that circles the sun at a distance of nearly 8 billion miles. Scientists have struggled to explain why Sedna and a handful of other bodies at that distance look separated from the rest of the solar system. [...] The researchers presented their findings today at a press briefing at the 232nd meeting of the American Astronomical Society, which runs from June 3-7 in Denver, Colorado.

[...] [Jacob] Fleisig had calculated that the orbits of icy objects beyond Neptune circle the sun like the hands of a clock. Some of those orbits, such as those belonging to asteroids, move like the minute hand, or relatively fast and in tandem. Others, the orbits of bigger objects like Sedna, move more slowly. They're the hour hand. Eventually, those hands meet. "You see a pileup of the orbits of smaller objects to one side of the sun," said Fleisig, who is the lead author of the new research. "These orbits crash into the bigger body, and what happens is those interactions will change its orbit from an oval shape to a more circular shape." In other words, Sedna's orbit goes from normal to detached, entirely because of those small-scale interactions.

Also at Popular Mechanics, where Planet Nine proposer Konstantin Batygin disputes the findings:

Batygin, of Caltech, tells Popular Mechanics that any sufficiently strong gravitational encounter could detach an object from Neptune's embrace, but for the distant small bodies of the Kuiper belt to have done so through "self-gravity"—as the CU model proposes—there would need to be about five to ten times the mass of Earth in the outer parts of the Kuiper belt. There isn't.

"Unfortunately, the self-gravity story suffers from the following complications," Batygin says. "Both observational and theoretical estimates place the total mass of the Kuiper belt at a value significantly smaller than that of the Earth [only 1 to 10 percent Earth's mass]. As a consequence, Kuiper belt objects generally behave like test-particles enslaved by Neptune's gravitational pull, rather than a self-interacting group of planetoids."

Planet Nine.

Related: Planet Nine's Existence Disfavoured by New Data
Medieval Records Could Point the Way to Planet Nine
Another Trans-Neptunian Object With a High Orbital Inclination Points to Planet Nine
Outer Solar System Origins Survey Discovers Over 800 Trans-Neptunian Objects
LSST Could be the Key to Finding New Planets in Our Solar System


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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday June 05 2018, @06:02PM (1 child)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 05 2018, @06:02PM (#688959) Journal

    The problem here is that while one could plausibly find an image of Planet 9, it's quite difficult to show that "a collection of comets playing bumper cars out in the Oort cloud" exists.

    There math may be quite plausible (I don't know, and couldn't tell if they showed it to me), but that doesn't say that it's the correct answer, merely that it's one plausible scenario. And doesn't tell you how to check it.

    IOW, this theory is only falsifiable by finding proof for a different explanation for the data. You can't directly prove it wrong (unless the math is wrong, and even then...).

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by khallow on Tuesday June 05 2018, @11:20PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 05 2018, @11:20PM (#689072) Journal

    IOW, this theory is only falsifiable by finding proof for a different explanation for the data.

    One can still carefully measure the orbits of the many objects in question to see if there's any collective deviation that can't be explained by the known Solar System and interaction between Kuiper Belt objects. A large mass can't hide forever.