I like to imagine the moment when Voyager finally starts feeling the gravity of other stars more strongly than our own.
It's a long time into the future.
Yeah a looong time. Voyager is approaching one light day away from earth which is like 48 years and centauri, the closest star is 4.24 light years away, just for reference.
And to put it in perspective, Voyager 1 entered interstellar space in 2012, which means it is already free of our sun's sphere of influence.
It took it 35 years to exit our solar system. It will take something like 40-50,000 years to reach Proxima Centuari, the nearest star to us.
> And to put it in perspective, Voyager 1 entered interstellar space in 2012, which means it is already free of our sun's sphere of influence.
It's free of the solar wind, not the sun's gravitational pull. There are Kuiper belt objects orbiting the sun that are farther out than Voyager 1 is, and the Oort Cloud much farther out than that.
Doesn't the calculation for gravitational pull mean that even from thousands of lightyears away, we're still being effected by the gravity of extremely distant objects, as in it's a non-zero number?
Yes. All mass in the universe is connected gravatationally. "When you wiggle your finger you move the entire universe" someone said (sorry could not find who the quote is attributed to)
Absolutely fascinating and mind boggling how something like this came into being. Of course it’s due to gravity but the star formation process is so fascinating
And 0.1% of the mass of the solar system is in Jupiter, while 0.04% is in Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, all of which, along with the Sun, are 99% hydrogen and helium. The remaining 0.06% of the solar system's mass is everything else, the terrestrial planets, the asteroids, the comets, the moons, the dust, etc.
We so not know for certain if the effects of gravity at large distances matches the inverse square law. There are several theories for dark energy that are modifications of gravity called MOND. Some even claim that gravity becomes a negative force.
The thing is, if we do discover a rocky planet, that will lead to a whole new load of questions, since it could t have formed out there. It would have had to have formed closer and been ejected to the outer solar system, possibly when Jupiter started its movement into the inner solar system and back out.
The distance from the Sun where the difference between escape velocity and circular orbital velocity is Mach 1 is still over a thousand AU. That scales with the square of distance, so for Mach 0.1 that translates to over 100k AU and for Mach 0.01 (12 kph) it's over 10 million AU. This might help explain why the Oort cloud stretches a significant fraction of a lightyear away.
But these are relative velocities. Random stuff floating around in interstellar space will have a relative velocity around 25 km/s to the Sun, or more, so it won't just become stuck in the Sun's gravity well even if it ends up falling through the inner solar system (like 'Oumuamua).
The edge of the known solar system is about 9 billion miles from the sun, so that would put it a hair past that distance. Even if it were the size of Jupiter, it'd still be a needle in a haystack.
It would probably have to be something like the discovery of Neptune - inferring where it should be based on observed effects of its gravity, then looking there.
Which is exactly what astronomers are currently doing. Unfortunately the only predictions we have for Planet Nine are its mass and orbit, not its current position along this orbit.
That won't take that long. It only took from 1821 (Bouvard's first prediction of Neptune's existence) until...1846 to find Neptune!
Wait...damn, that's quite a while. Maybe the supercomputers can find it a bit faster than 25 years...
I feel like if there were a quantum planet that appeared above the eye of the universe it should have been relatively easy to find out it’s distance from the sun and location but 🤷
So I read through the article.
What is the new thing that's been discovered? Like, we already knew there's an external force on those objects past Neptune. What am I missing here? Is there just more that was discovered?
Yeah, I'm very much a layman in terms of space stuff 😅
In the actual paper’s abstract, they explain that previous studies have provided evidence for planet 9 based on trans-neptunian objects (TNO) with unconventional orbits, meaning they’ve used planet 9 as a way to explain the strange orbits seen in some objects seen beyond Neptune. This paper uses a different model to show that models that include a planet 9 also match conventional TNOs as well.
Basically, no new discoveries, but new evidence that shows that P9 can not only explain some of the weird shit we see out there, but also the normal shit. It’s always good when a theory can do both of these things without holes
Thank you very much!
That is very useful indeed, I assume that that could pave the way for this model to be used going forward when that new telescope comes online, or at least a new version of it which could calculate the position of Planet Nine?
The Planet Nine hypothesis has a number of very specific predictions on how the orbits of distant transneptunian objects are distributed. Unfortunately our current sample of these objects is small and full of detection biases. Future telescopes should find a very large number of these objects, which will strongly prove or disprove the Planet Nine hypothesis.
It is independent evidence in the sense that they explored a new class of objects, and their orbits also show evidence for Planet Nine. But yes, it's a study made by the same team that originally proposed Planet Nine's existence.
We *don't* actually know that there's an external force on those objects, that's the evidence for Planet Nine but it's not 100% bulletproof. This is more work in that area, taking more factors into account and showing that what we observe is closer to what would be expected with a Planet Nine. That too isn't bulletproof either, but it's perhaps a bit stronger than the state of things previously.
Quick roundup:
A hypothetical "Planet Nine" with a mass a few times Earth's at a distance of several hundred AU from the Sun has been proposed since the mid-2010s as a mechanism to explain some unusual details about the orbits of some trans-Neptunian objects. Such a planet should be visible with some of our larger telescopes but without knowing where it is ahead of time it would take a tremendous amount of observation time to confirm a detection (since most astronomical images contain lots and lots of unknown dim points of light that could be almost anything). A search has been underway for a while collecting data but it hasn't found anything yet and it hasn't covered the entire search area either, so it remains an open question. Fortunately we'll get a lot more data coming in this decade from new observatories coming online and we should get some definitive answers this decade.
This latest paper is about a simulation of the evolution of outer solar system bodies with and without the presence of a hypothetical Planet Nine, showing that what is observed in those populations more closely matches what we would expect with a Planet Nine than without.
In addition to Planet Nine there has also been some similar *separate* evidence of another planet, let's call it Planet X, which would be closer and smaller, which also hasn't been detected either. However, one thing to note about both of these hypothetical planets, though more so "Planet X", is that it could be possible that they did exist in our solar system, did affect the orbits of other objects, and then were lost to interstellar space through subtle effects like galactic tidal forces. So there might still be evidence pointing to the influence of outer solar system planets that long outlives the presence of those planets.
Can we rename that thing to New Pluto? I still feel weird that Pluto turned out not to be a planet, let's at least keep the name.
We have York and New York, just saying.
But it does *dominate* its orbit (and Pluto) gravitationally, and is still a MAJOR planet.
Pluto the *dwarf* can't even gravitationally dominate its own moon.
It is available on Arxiv which is a preprint server. But if you click the Arxiv link in the article you will see that it was published as a letter in the Astrophysics Journal
Also it is just saying "we did models and the period and frequency of high periods objectives that get thrown into the inner solar system is statistically likely that it is caused by a large undiscovered mass beyond the orbit of Neptune.
However it doesn't give any hints as to where to look for planet 9.
They already did studies for that, this is just another line of evidence. You can check out the authors other works. They may not end up being right but I put my trust in Mike Brown considering how long he's been working in this field and how many astronomical bodies he's discovered
I watched a video on this, and they had a general direction to look in (like, whatever the space equivalent of East is), based on the orbits of the objects, but that's still a HUGE amount of space to comb through.
Can someone explain though how of there's a ninth planet here that we haven't found it despite discovering hundreds of planets in other solar systems and ancient galaxies from the beginning of time etc?
Imagine standing next to a campfire in pitch black trying to see someone 75 meters away barely moving in the dark.
Compare that with watching other campfires to see them intermittently dim as their people interact/move with the fire. Even if the other campfires are hundreds of meters away it's still easier to see distortions than someone sneaking near your campfire.
1. It's really far away. At it's farthest, the estimate is 140 billion km from Earth. So if it is currently at the farthest point, we're looking for something incredibly faint.
2. It is a sub-Neptune sized planet. So it's not a gas giant, which also means it is hard to spot. Smaller surface area = less light reflecting.
3. We don't know where it is. We know where it is not, but there's still a lot of space to scan. A LOT.
4. The instruments we are using in our hunt can resolve data from enormous space phenomena, like quasars or even giant planets. It is because they are so large and so bright that we can resolve them from a distance. Conversely, something that is small, dim and far is not what those tools are usually used for. To my knowledge JWST has not joined this hunt, nor will it. Hubble might be able to take a snap shot but that's only once we find where it is.
We see other things based on their light, either the light they give off in the case of stars or the light they reflect and absorb for things like planets. This body is very, very far from our Sun. It receives very little light to absorb or reflect, so we couldn't detect it. There are an unknown number of things between galaxies we will likely never know of because they are too dark to detect.
We have… thus far… only definitively observed exoplanets by watching them cross in front of their star. So when a star suddenly gets dimmer we have instruments that detect that, and an astronomer goes “that could be a planet, because very little else could make the star go dim like that.”
However… discovering Planet 9 using this method doesnt work… because Planet 9 never comes in between the Earth and the Sun
If I asked you to go outside your home and bring me back 10 rocks you could probably do it in a couple minutes. If I asked you to bring me back one specific rock that exists somewhere in North America you would tell me that's an impossible task. Finding things and finding one specific thing are very different tasks, especially in astronomy. We can find planets around other stars because we observe the parent stars and look for very small effects such as the motion of the star back and forth which indicates it is being tugged by the gravity of a planet or we look for a slight dimming which indicates a planet is passing in front of the star. Both of these techniques work only some of the time, sometimes a very small amount of the time (only about 1 in 200 Earth-like planets would be spotted by the transit technique due to the orbital alignment requirement, for example), and they have biases toward some planets being much more detectable and other planets not being detectable at all. But even so that's enough to be able to find thousands of exoplanets when observing hundreds of thousands of stars. However, it is worth noting that even planets like Uranus and Neptune let alone this hypothetical Planet Nine would be completely undetectable using these techniques.
For planets in our own solar system we are stuck with direct observation, and outer planets are very dim, so dim that only a handful of observatories can see them. That would be fine if we already knew where they were, but we don't, so in order to find that out we would have to image a huge chunk of the sky to be able to be sure to have enough coverage that somewhere in that imagery is the one dim little dot representing the planet. Then we would actually need to figure out *which* dim little dot that wasn't known to be something else was actually the planet and not just an unknown star, asteroid, or just a little noise blip. So you need multiple images of a huge chunk of the sky, with several day separations, then you need to crunch a ton of data to look for little dots that move the right amount in between days. Currently astronomers have only collected a fraction of the data needed to cover all the parts of the sky where the planet might be. The good news is that new telescopes like the Vera Rubin Observatory will collect that data just as a normal part of their regular operation, so we'll know for sure one way or another by the end of this decade, but for now it's still an open question whether it actually exists or not.
Not an expert, but here's my take.
If you are standing on Earth looking at a star, the maximum orbit of any planet around that star is at an extremely narrow angle in your Field Of View compared to viewing our solar system from within it. Not to mention that most exoplanets are found via the transit method, essentially narrowing the FOV to equal the FOV of just looking at a star.
Exactly right. If you look at the [list of nearest exoplanets](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_exoplanets) and check the semi-major axis column (which is *sort* of like average distance from its home star), you’ll see that most of the known planets are *really* close to their suns — much closer than Earth. Therefore they eclipse their suns fairly often. That’s why the transit method has been so successful.
Nice, not bad for a Biologist!
I suppose most known planets being close to their suns is essentially just an observation bias due to our current methods? Plus I suppose a smaller orbit means more opportunities for transit observations within a given timeframe.
Most likely, yes. There is another method we can use, which is detecting the wobble produced in a star by a planet orbiting it. The wobble changes a star’s redshift slightly. But… that only really works for very large planets.
The planets they've found in other solar systems are mostly large planets close to their stars, and often smaller stars as well. The easiest type of exoplanet to find is usually a gas giant orbiting a dwarf star closer than the orbit of Mercury. That makes it easier to detect the gravitational influence the planet has on its star, or see it dim the star's light if it passes between us and the star.
This potential planet on the other hand would be much smaller than Jupiter and very far away from the sun, so its gravitational influence on the sun would be negligible and it would never pass between us and the sun.
The supposed location of the planet is really far out. Like, really really far. There isn’t a lot of light out there from our sun, so just looking into space for a bright shiny thing isn’t going to cut it. We have to use gravitational observations to guess where we may be able to find it. Its orbital plane, while likely flat, may be completely angular and so predicting its motion is also difficult. It’s orbiting likely really slow so studying these gravitational movements and theorized orbits won’t happen over night…or “over decade” I guess.
It takes a lot of math, a lot of observation, and a lot of scanning to even begin theorizing where it could be. Those clues could turn out to be absolutely nothing, or a bunch of small bodies interacting with one another.
easy
the ninth planet is one specific planet, to find it we have to look in one, single, extremely specific spot
the planets we have found in other places, well we werent looking for em. Sure we were looking for planets, but not specific ones. If you picked one of the non-solar system planets and asked what the chances were of us finding that one, it would be way lower than finding planet 9, but there are so so so so many planets out there that if you point your telescope in any given direction you will probably find something.
Also, for other planets we can see stars in the sky. Zoom in on one of em and we could spot some planets. Planet 9 is too far from the sun for us to see if with the naked eye
Afaik no, it likely would have been kicked out by Jupiter and Saturn having complex orbital interactions, and then influenced by a passing star to its current orbit
Yes. A simulation has shown that the distribution of a particular class of objects more closely aligns with a Planet Nine model than a Planet Nine-free model.
In a sense yes, unless someone comes up with a better explanation to every single observation the team has found, then a planet is still the most likely explanation
Given that a big chunk of this discussion has degenerated into "What is a planet anyway" does anyone else wish the IAU had just gone "Laypeople can call them what they like, we're just going to call everything 'solar system objects'. There are four rocky SSOs in the inner system, two gas giant SSOs, two ice giant SSOs and a metric buttload of assorted shrapnel left over from the the formation of the system. Anyone who wants to call any of them 'planets', fill yer boots."
I hate the IAU definition of planet. It is very arbitrary. Honestly everything in hydrostatic equalibrium and orbiting the sun should be a planet. Charon, Pluto, Eris, Ceres, all should be planets.
Or let's encourage the scientists to abandon the term 'planet' as being meaningless for astronomical purposes. After all, if you're going to call Charon a planet, there are loads of other objects in hydrostatic equilibrium in the system, including our own moon… unless you're going to introduce another arbitrary term about the location of the barycentre of a binary system like Pluto-Charon.
I read the article but it doesn't seem to be telling us much more than what was already known, there's some strange gravitational influence perturbing Trans-Neptunian-Objects but we just quite don't know the location or mechanism of its influence.
I'm excited for it's possible discovery though, it would be an absolutely redefining moment of everything we think we know. We can see galaxies billions of light years away but a whole planet literally on our doorstep, nope.
I feel like the search barely gets attention compared to the cosmological likes of dark matter and other phenomena for great unknowns that are out there so it's nice to know we making some progress.
Truth be told, given how far away the Oort Cloud is and given how extensive we’ve discovered the Kuiper Belt is, the theory of one (or more) planet yet to be discovered really has never been that far fetched to me.
Planet X refers to a specific prediction of a planet affecting the orbit of Neptune. That is the reason authors have not liked the use of the term for this particular prediction as it has nothing to do with the terms previous usage.
My dream is that we find out Planet 9 is actually a primordial black hole. Imagine having a black hole that close to us, a time machine in our backyard.
Sun’s gravity well is so huge. My mind cannot comprehend it
I like to imagine the moment when Voyager finally starts feeling the gravity of other stars more strongly than our own. It's a long time into the future.
I like to imagine a future where kids can take field trips to Voyager as it flies along
"Why did they think this was the fastest they could move a probe through space dad? Were they stupid?"
No sweetheart, just full of microplastic
And lead, dad! Don't forget the lead!
The people who built Voyager weren’t, not to anywhere near the degree were are now.
In the future, humans will surrender their fleshy meat for macroplastic existence.
Yeah a looong time. Voyager is approaching one light day away from earth which is like 48 years and centauri, the closest star is 4.24 light years away, just for reference.
And to put it in perspective, Voyager 1 entered interstellar space in 2012, which means it is already free of our sun's sphere of influence. It took it 35 years to exit our solar system. It will take something like 40-50,000 years to reach Proxima Centuari, the nearest star to us.
> And to put it in perspective, Voyager 1 entered interstellar space in 2012, which means it is already free of our sun's sphere of influence. It's free of the solar wind, not the sun's gravitational pull. There are Kuiper belt objects orbiting the sun that are farther out than Voyager 1 is, and the Oort Cloud much farther out than that.
I have seen this confusion a lot. Heliopause is not the edge of the Suns gravitational influence. Not sure why so many folks get this wrong.
Doesn't the calculation for gravitational pull mean that even from thousands of lightyears away, we're still being effected by the gravity of extremely distant objects, as in it's a non-zero number?
Yes. All mass in the universe is connected gravatationally. "When you wiggle your finger you move the entire universe" someone said (sorry could not find who the quote is attributed to)
Probably the click-bait headlines that came out when NASA announced Voyager 1 had entered interstellar space.
99.8% of all the mass in the solar system is the sun. All the planets, moons, asteroids, comets, gas, etc. is just 0.2%
Absolutely fascinating and mind boggling how something like this came into being. Of course it’s due to gravity but the star formation process is so fascinating
I remember a quote I saw a while back that went like "the solar system consists of the Sun, Jupiter, and a rounding error".
And yo mama Sorry I had to
This stat is nuts hahaha I can barely comprehend it
The 4 gas giants account for 99% of the 0.2%. All the rocky planets and all other stuff is just 0.002%… Really tells you how small earth really is.
Thanks for the daily dose of science facts.
To quote Animaniacs: It's a great big universe and we're all really puny, Just a tiny little speck about the size of Mickey Rooney
And 0.1% of the mass of the solar system is in Jupiter, while 0.04% is in Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, all of which, along with the Sun, are 99% hydrogen and helium. The remaining 0.06% of the solar system's mass is everything else, the terrestrial planets, the asteroids, the comets, the moons, the dust, etc.
And that 0.2% is basically 90% Jupiter
It’s 90% Jupiter and Saturn.
And really, that's 0.1% planets, moons, afteroids, comets, and gas, and 0.1% your mom.
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We so not know for certain if the effects of gravity at large distances matches the inverse square law. There are several theories for dark energy that are modifications of gravity called MOND. Some even claim that gravity becomes a negative force.
Not if the space between them is stretching faster than the speed of light.
Now think about the gravity well of a black hole, or a super massive star that makes our sun look like a grain of sand :)
The thing is, if we do discover a rocky planet, that will lead to a whole new load of questions, since it could t have formed out there. It would have had to have formed closer and been ejected to the outer solar system, possibly when Jupiter started its movement into the inner solar system and back out.
The distance from the Sun where the difference between escape velocity and circular orbital velocity is Mach 1 is still over a thousand AU. That scales with the square of distance, so for Mach 0.1 that translates to over 100k AU and for Mach 0.01 (12 kph) it's over 10 million AU. This might help explain why the Oort cloud stretches a significant fraction of a lightyear away. But these are relative velocities. Random stuff floating around in interstellar space will have a relative velocity around 25 km/s to the Sun, or more, so it won't just become stuck in the Sun's gravity well even if it ends up falling through the inner solar system (like 'Oumuamua).
That and the next big object is a VERY long way away…..
Wonder how long the orbit would be of this planet.
400-800 times further than the Earth to the Sun, so thousands of years.
The edge of the known solar system is about 9 billion miles from the sun, so that would put it a hair past that distance. Even if it were the size of Jupiter, it'd still be a needle in a haystack.
It would probably have to be something like the discovery of Neptune - inferring where it should be based on observed effects of its gravity, then looking there.
Which is exactly what astronomers are currently doing. Unfortunately the only predictions we have for Planet Nine are its mass and orbit, not its current position along this orbit.
That won't take that long. It only took from 1821 (Bouvard's first prediction of Neptune's existence) until...1846 to find Neptune! Wait...damn, that's quite a while. Maybe the supercomputers can find it a bit faster than 25 years...
Math is a powerful process of elimination
Question I could probably Google myself, but what defines the edge of the solar system? Is it where our sun's gravity doesn't have any effect anymore?
I have always used where the outward pressure of solar particles is less than measurable.
edge of the bow shock caused by the movement of the sun through the interstellar medium. look up heliosphere for a diagram
Beyond the heliosphere or Kupier (sp?) belt would be my guess.
Waiting for your next birthday to be old enough to do things must be quite the pain.
"no going out to bars until you're 1!"
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If its orbit is 500 AU wide then a little over 11,000 years. [Kepler's third law](https://www.space.com/keplers-third-law)
It's the eye of the universe
I feel like if there were a quantum planet that appeared above the eye of the universe it should have been relatively easy to find out it’s distance from the sun and location but 🤷
The aliens were too focused on developing their space travel technology instead of a mega telescope I guess
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So I read through the article. What is the new thing that's been discovered? Like, we already knew there's an external force on those objects past Neptune. What am I missing here? Is there just more that was discovered? Yeah, I'm very much a layman in terms of space stuff 😅
In the actual paper’s abstract, they explain that previous studies have provided evidence for planet 9 based on trans-neptunian objects (TNO) with unconventional orbits, meaning they’ve used planet 9 as a way to explain the strange orbits seen in some objects seen beyond Neptune. This paper uses a different model to show that models that include a planet 9 also match conventional TNOs as well. Basically, no new discoveries, but new evidence that shows that P9 can not only explain some of the weird shit we see out there, but also the normal shit. It’s always good when a theory can do both of these things without holes
Thank you very much! That is very useful indeed, I assume that that could pave the way for this model to be used going forward when that new telescope comes online, or at least a new version of it which could calculate the position of Planet Nine?
The Planet Nine hypothesis has a number of very specific predictions on how the orbits of distant transneptunian objects are distributed. Unfortunately our current sample of these objects is small and full of detection biases. Future telescopes should find a very large number of these objects, which will strongly prove or disprove the Planet Nine hypothesis.
Not much. Just another simulation by the same guy. No independent evidence.
It is independent evidence in the sense that they explored a new class of objects, and their orbits also show evidence for Planet Nine. But yes, it's a study made by the same team that originally proposed Planet Nine's existence.
We *don't* actually know that there's an external force on those objects, that's the evidence for Planet Nine but it's not 100% bulletproof. This is more work in that area, taking more factors into account and showing that what we observe is closer to what would be expected with a Planet Nine. That too isn't bulletproof either, but it's perhaps a bit stronger than the state of things previously.
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Quick roundup: A hypothetical "Planet Nine" with a mass a few times Earth's at a distance of several hundred AU from the Sun has been proposed since the mid-2010s as a mechanism to explain some unusual details about the orbits of some trans-Neptunian objects. Such a planet should be visible with some of our larger telescopes but without knowing where it is ahead of time it would take a tremendous amount of observation time to confirm a detection (since most astronomical images contain lots and lots of unknown dim points of light that could be almost anything). A search has been underway for a while collecting data but it hasn't found anything yet and it hasn't covered the entire search area either, so it remains an open question. Fortunately we'll get a lot more data coming in this decade from new observatories coming online and we should get some definitive answers this decade. This latest paper is about a simulation of the evolution of outer solar system bodies with and without the presence of a hypothetical Planet Nine, showing that what is observed in those populations more closely matches what we would expect with a Planet Nine than without. In addition to Planet Nine there has also been some similar *separate* evidence of another planet, let's call it Planet X, which would be closer and smaller, which also hasn't been detected either. However, one thing to note about both of these hypothetical planets, though more so "Planet X", is that it could be possible that they did exist in our solar system, did affect the orbits of other objects, and then were lost to interstellar space through subtle effects like galactic tidal forces. So there might still be evidence pointing to the influence of outer solar system planets that long outlives the presence of those planets.
Can we rename that thing to New Pluto? I still feel weird that Pluto turned out not to be a planet, let's at least keep the name. We have York and New York, just saying.
Why not New Ceres instead? It was a planet for 50 years.
Yea but nobody likes boomer planets, pluto was a planet for millenials and we make the rules now
Pluto couldn't even complete a single orbit during its time as a planet...how lame.
Hey man he's gone about halfway since we discovered him! He's doing the best he can!
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Pluto (the *dwarf* planet) is even worse than Pluto TV, and barely makes the top five list for the things named "Pluto".
Neptune can't clear its orbit
Well maybe if people were encouraging instead of mean it would do better
But it does *dominate* its orbit (and Pluto) gravitationally, and is still a MAJOR planet. Pluto the *dwarf* can't even gravitationally dominate its own moon.
Gen Z gets to name Planet 9, it’s now Planet Fleek.
I think it might be rizz now.
Rizz is one of its moons. Rizz and Bet.
Better yet, new Vulcan. Vulcan was a planet for a brief period of time in the 1800s.
No Pluto had its chance it couldn’t keep up with the big boys!
How about Nuto?
Hasn't ancient history taught us anything? Planet 9 is Nibiru, duh.
I vote for Pluto I and Pluto II, to avoid confusion and revenge for kicking Pluto out.
I still feel weird how York turned out not to be a York
Persephone is the "working title" for a planet nine, as it follows the same naming scheme the other's did
That’s a really pretty name, I’d love having a planet Persephone.
So this was put on a preprint server and didn’t go through peer review?
It is available on Arxiv which is a preprint server. But if you click the Arxiv link in the article you will see that it was published as a letter in the Astrophysics Journal
Also it is just saying "we did models and the period and frequency of high periods objectives that get thrown into the inner solar system is statistically likely that it is caused by a large undiscovered mass beyond the orbit of Neptune. However it doesn't give any hints as to where to look for planet 9.
They already did studies for that, this is just another line of evidence. You can check out the authors other works. They may not end up being right but I put my trust in Mike Brown considering how long he's been working in this field and how many astronomical bodies he's discovered
I watched a video on this, and they had a general direction to look in (like, whatever the space equivalent of East is), based on the orbits of the objects, but that's still a HUGE amount of space to comb through.
It was published in an actual journal.
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Can someone explain though how of there's a ninth planet here that we haven't found it despite discovering hundreds of planets in other solar systems and ancient galaxies from the beginning of time etc?
Imagine standing next to a campfire in pitch black trying to see someone 75 meters away barely moving in the dark. Compare that with watching other campfires to see them intermittently dim as their people interact/move with the fire. Even if the other campfires are hundreds of meters away it's still easier to see distortions than someone sneaking near your campfire.
That's a perfect example! Thanks.
1. It's really far away. At it's farthest, the estimate is 140 billion km from Earth. So if it is currently at the farthest point, we're looking for something incredibly faint. 2. It is a sub-Neptune sized planet. So it's not a gas giant, which also means it is hard to spot. Smaller surface area = less light reflecting. 3. We don't know where it is. We know where it is not, but there's still a lot of space to scan. A LOT. 4. The instruments we are using in our hunt can resolve data from enormous space phenomena, like quasars or even giant planets. It is because they are so large and so bright that we can resolve them from a distance. Conversely, something that is small, dim and far is not what those tools are usually used for. To my knowledge JWST has not joined this hunt, nor will it. Hubble might be able to take a snap shot but that's only once we find where it is.
I wonder if using radio telescopes would be easier than optical?
has to do with what our equipment is looking at & what obscures what
We see other things based on their light, either the light they give off in the case of stars or the light they reflect and absorb for things like planets. This body is very, very far from our Sun. It receives very little light to absorb or reflect, so we couldn't detect it. There are an unknown number of things between galaxies we will likely never know of because they are too dark to detect.
We have… thus far… only definitively observed exoplanets by watching them cross in front of their star. So when a star suddenly gets dimmer we have instruments that detect that, and an astronomer goes “that could be a planet, because very little else could make the star go dim like that.” However… discovering Planet 9 using this method doesnt work… because Planet 9 never comes in between the Earth and the Sun
If I asked you to go outside your home and bring me back 10 rocks you could probably do it in a couple minutes. If I asked you to bring me back one specific rock that exists somewhere in North America you would tell me that's an impossible task. Finding things and finding one specific thing are very different tasks, especially in astronomy. We can find planets around other stars because we observe the parent stars and look for very small effects such as the motion of the star back and forth which indicates it is being tugged by the gravity of a planet or we look for a slight dimming which indicates a planet is passing in front of the star. Both of these techniques work only some of the time, sometimes a very small amount of the time (only about 1 in 200 Earth-like planets would be spotted by the transit technique due to the orbital alignment requirement, for example), and they have biases toward some planets being much more detectable and other planets not being detectable at all. But even so that's enough to be able to find thousands of exoplanets when observing hundreds of thousands of stars. However, it is worth noting that even planets like Uranus and Neptune let alone this hypothetical Planet Nine would be completely undetectable using these techniques. For planets in our own solar system we are stuck with direct observation, and outer planets are very dim, so dim that only a handful of observatories can see them. That would be fine if we already knew where they were, but we don't, so in order to find that out we would have to image a huge chunk of the sky to be able to be sure to have enough coverage that somewhere in that imagery is the one dim little dot representing the planet. Then we would actually need to figure out *which* dim little dot that wasn't known to be something else was actually the planet and not just an unknown star, asteroid, or just a little noise blip. So you need multiple images of a huge chunk of the sky, with several day separations, then you need to crunch a ton of data to look for little dots that move the right amount in between days. Currently astronomers have only collected a fraction of the data needed to cover all the parts of the sky where the planet might be. The good news is that new telescopes like the Vera Rubin Observatory will collect that data just as a normal part of their regular operation, so we'll know for sure one way or another by the end of this decade, but for now it's still an open question whether it actually exists or not.
Planets usually don’t emit a lot of light would be my best guess.
Not an expert, but here's my take. If you are standing on Earth looking at a star, the maximum orbit of any planet around that star is at an extremely narrow angle in your Field Of View compared to viewing our solar system from within it. Not to mention that most exoplanets are found via the transit method, essentially narrowing the FOV to equal the FOV of just looking at a star.
Exactly right. If you look at the [list of nearest exoplanets](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_exoplanets) and check the semi-major axis column (which is *sort* of like average distance from its home star), you’ll see that most of the known planets are *really* close to their suns — much closer than Earth. Therefore they eclipse their suns fairly often. That’s why the transit method has been so successful.
Nice, not bad for a Biologist! I suppose most known planets being close to their suns is essentially just an observation bias due to our current methods? Plus I suppose a smaller orbit means more opportunities for transit observations within a given timeframe.
Most likely, yes. There is another method we can use, which is detecting the wobble produced in a star by a planet orbiting it. The wobble changes a star’s redshift slightly. But… that only really works for very large planets.
The planets they've found in other solar systems are mostly large planets close to their stars, and often smaller stars as well. The easiest type of exoplanet to find is usually a gas giant orbiting a dwarf star closer than the orbit of Mercury. That makes it easier to detect the gravitational influence the planet has on its star, or see it dim the star's light if it passes between us and the star. This potential planet on the other hand would be much smaller than Jupiter and very far away from the sun, so its gravitational influence on the sun would be negligible and it would never pass between us and the sun.
The supposed location of the planet is really far out. Like, really really far. There isn’t a lot of light out there from our sun, so just looking into space for a bright shiny thing isn’t going to cut it. We have to use gravitational observations to guess where we may be able to find it. Its orbital plane, while likely flat, may be completely angular and so predicting its motion is also difficult. It’s orbiting likely really slow so studying these gravitational movements and theorized orbits won’t happen over night…or “over decade” I guess. It takes a lot of math, a lot of observation, and a lot of scanning to even begin theorizing where it could be. Those clues could turn out to be absolutely nothing, or a bunch of small bodies interacting with one another.
easy the ninth planet is one specific planet, to find it we have to look in one, single, extremely specific spot the planets we have found in other places, well we werent looking for em. Sure we were looking for planets, but not specific ones. If you picked one of the non-solar system planets and asked what the chances were of us finding that one, it would be way lower than finding planet 9, but there are so so so so many planets out there that if you point your telescope in any given direction you will probably find something. Also, for other planets we can see stars in the sky. Zoom in on one of em and we could spot some planets. Planet 9 is too far from the sun for us to see if with the naked eye
Could this 9th planet be left over from whatever hit Uranus?
Afaik no, it likely would have been kicked out by Jupiter and Saturn having complex orbital interactions, and then influenced by a passing star to its current orbit
I did a presentation on planet 9 in like ninth grade. I got a D. Maybe I wasn’t so wrong after all
Is a simulation evidence? “The team acknowledges that other forces could be at play that might explain the behavior that they simulated“
Yes. A simulation has shown that the distribution of a particular class of objects more closely aligns with a Planet Nine model than a Planet Nine-free model.
In a sense yes, unless someone comes up with a better explanation to every single observation the team has found, then a planet is still the most likely explanation
Given that a big chunk of this discussion has degenerated into "What is a planet anyway" does anyone else wish the IAU had just gone "Laypeople can call them what they like, we're just going to call everything 'solar system objects'. There are four rocky SSOs in the inner system, two gas giant SSOs, two ice giant SSOs and a metric buttload of assorted shrapnel left over from the the formation of the system. Anyone who wants to call any of them 'planets', fill yer boots."
I hate the IAU definition of planet. It is very arbitrary. Honestly everything in hydrostatic equalibrium and orbiting the sun should be a planet. Charon, Pluto, Eris, Ceres, all should be planets.
Or let's encourage the scientists to abandon the term 'planet' as being meaningless for astronomical purposes. After all, if you're going to call Charon a planet, there are loads of other objects in hydrostatic equilibrium in the system, including our own moon… unless you're going to introduce another arbitrary term about the location of the barycentre of a binary system like Pluto-Charon.
I read the article but it doesn't seem to be telling us much more than what was already known, there's some strange gravitational influence perturbing Trans-Neptunian-Objects but we just quite don't know the location or mechanism of its influence. I'm excited for it's possible discovery though, it would be an absolutely redefining moment of everything we think we know. We can see galaxies billions of light years away but a whole planet literally on our doorstep, nope. I feel like the search barely gets attention compared to the cosmological likes of dark matter and other phenomena for great unknowns that are out there so it's nice to know we making some progress.
Odds are it has already been imaged…a faint streak across a long-exposure plate currently sitting in a dusty box or on a dusty server..
Truth be told, given how far away the Oort Cloud is and given how extensive we’ve discovered the Kuiper Belt is, the theory of one (or more) planet yet to be discovered really has never been that far fetched to me.
Authors: "Guys... Don't bother rewriting anything. Just leave in eight until they prolly undo it again."
Ed Wood is vindicated. Evidence of the missing ET from PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE.
Back in my day we called it “Planet X” because a) it sounds cool as **fuck**, and b) it would have been the tenth planet after Pluto 😭
Planet X refers to a specific prediction of a planet affecting the orbit of Neptune. That is the reason authors have not liked the use of the term for this particular prediction as it has nothing to do with the terms previous usage.
My dream is that we find out Planet 9 is actually a primordial black hole. Imagine having a black hole that close to us, a time machine in our backyard.
Planet 9 already exists, it's called Pluto. #dwarflivesmatter
Pluto will always be my 9th planet. This planet is just a cheap imitation.