Planet Nine Does Exist, NASA Evidence Suggests

[Confounding]

Well that's awesome. I assumed this was complete nonsense the first time I heard one of my conspiracy loving friends mention it. Looks like I might have some words to eat.

Planet Nine Does Exist, NASA Evidence Suggests

Planet Nine is out there, and astronomers are determined to find it, according to a new statement from NASA. In fact, mounting evidence suggests it's hard to imagine our solar system without the unseen world.

The hypothetical planet is believed to be about 10 times more massive than Earth and located in the dark, outer reaches of the solar system, approximately 20 times farther from the sun than Neptune is. While the mysterious world still has yet to be found, astronomers have discovered a number of strange features of our solar system that are best explained by the presence of a ninth planet, according to the NASA statement.

"There are now five different lines of observational evidence pointing to the existence of Planet Nine," Konstantin Batygin, a planetary astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, said in the statement. "If you were to remove this explanation and imagine Planet Nine does not exist, then you generate more problems than you solve. All of a sudden, you have five different puzzles, and you must come up with five different theories to explain them."

 

[TNHarley]

They can find planets and determine if they can possibly have life that is 500 light years away but not one in our own solar system?

 

[Confounding]

They can find planets and determine if they can possibly have life that is 500 light years away but not one in our own solar system?

Honestly that's why I thought it was bullshit for a long time. After giving some thought to how this happens, maybe it's because they aren't looking for those planets specifically; they just happen to find them in some piece of space they happen to point their telescope at. Also those planets are probably much closer to their stars, making them more illuminated. I imagine a dark planet 20 times further out than Neptune would be a bitch to look for, especially when there hasn't really been that much of a concerted effort to do so. It probably won't take much longer to verify this if it's true.

 

[Fort Fun Indiana]

They can find planets and determine if they can possibly have life that is 500 light years away but not one in our own solar system?

The first task is actually much easier than the second. In the first task, you train telescopes on a star, and then monitor it as it dims and brightens. In the second, you are looking for a tiny dot in nearly the entire sphere of space, by measuring its tiny effects on other tiny dots and using that to predict its location.