The new ninth planet

[hangover]

Hey, I'm old school. Pluto was a planet when I was in school. If it looks like a planet...acts like a planet...and has a moon like a planet...it's still a planet. Science says it's too small to be a planet. Which is like saying midgets are too small to be people.

But scientists say they've discovered a new planet out beyond Pluto. It's ten times bigger than earth, so that qualifies it as a planet. It takes 20,000 years to circle the sun. No wonder it took so long to find it.

What if there are two more out beyond that one?

New planet may have been discovered, researchers say - CNN.com

 

[jon_berzerk]

possible thanks

 

[SixFoot]

Hey, I'm old school. Pluto was a planet when I was in school. If it looks like a planet...acts like a planet...and has a moon like a planet...it's still a planet. Science says it's too small to be a planet. Which is like saying midgets are too small to be people.

But scientists say they've discovered a new planet out beyond Pluto. It's ten times bigger than earth, so that qualifies it as a planet. It takes 20,000 years to circle the sun. No wonder it took so long to find it.

What if there are two more out beyond that one?

New planet may have been discovered, researchers say - CNN.com

There are definitely more. We understand the Universe a hell of a lot better than we do our own Sol System.

 

[waltky]

Granny says dat's prob'ly who's been flingin' dem space rocks at us...

Research hinting at ninth planet presented
Sat, Oct 22, 2016 - Astronomers on Wednesday presented new research on the possibility of a gigantic, unseen planet beyond Neptune, saying the hypothetical world might have set the solar system at a tilt.

Researchers first suggested a massive ninth planet in January, saying that although this putative world would be about 10 times the size of Earth, it could have escaped a telescope’s notice because of its extreme distance from the sun. According to their calculations, one year on this planet would last 17,000 years on Earth, and it would travel as far away as 150 billion kilometers from the sun, where it would take light a week to arrive. Astronomers at the California Institute of Technology presented new evidence at the annual meeting of planetary scientists of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena. “The search for planet nine is as much about understanding the effects of planet nine on the solar system, the physics of planet nine, as it is about understanding where it is,” Caltech astronomer Mike Brown said.

Brown said that his team had calculated how a hypothetical planet could be responsible for making the sun appear to tilt at an angle. Though the eight planets orbit in an essentially flat plane around the sun, the plane itself rotates at nearly a six-degree angle, making it look like the sun itself is angled. A giant planet with a strange orbit, about 30 degrees off the other planets’ plane, could account for that wobble, the scientists said. “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,” said Elizabeth Bailey, the study’s author.

“It’s such a deep-rooted mystery and so difficult to explain that people just don’t talk about it,” Brown said. “If you ask yourself where the sun is tilted in real life, there’s where we predict it should be,” he added, adding that the calculations of mass and orbital angle had results of six degrees. “The amazing thing is for these very standard [observations] it tilts it nearly exactly correctly,” Brown said. “At this stage we have so many lines of evidence that there’s a massive planet out there that if there’s not a massive planet out there, it has to be that there was one there yesterday and disappeared.”

Brown suggested that scientists might be able to locate the planet, if it exists, in the next few years, and that his team’s work would be published in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal. Another team of researchers, led by the University of Arizona’s Renu Malhotra, also shared new research suggesting a hypothetical planet, but said that it was by no means proof of the world. They found that the four objects with the longest-known orbits in the Kuiper Belt, a ring of rocks and dwarf planets, would be most easily explained by a mammoth new planet.

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[Old Rocks]

Hey, I'm old school. Pluto was a planet when I was in school. If it looks like a planet...acts like a planet...and has a moon like a planet...it's still a planet. Science says it's too small to be a planet. Which is like saying midgets are too small to be people.

But scientists say they've discovered a new planet out beyond Pluto. It's ten times bigger than earth, so that qualifies it as a planet. It takes 20,000 years to circle the sun. No wonder it took so long to find it.

What if there are two more out beyond that one?

New planet may have been discovered, researchers say - CNN.com

There are definitely more. We understand the Universe a hell of a lot better than we do our own Sol System.

Actually, no we do not. We are at the point understanding the universe that we were at prior to the first Voyager mission. And that was a pretty deep depth of ignorance.

 

[yiostheoy]

There are bigger bodies revolving around the Sun than Pluto which have not been called "planets".

If Pluto is going to be called a "planet" then these others need to be named "planets" also.

Or Pluto can remain de-classified as a "planet" and then they can continue to be called ice giants instead.

You cannot have it any other way however.

 

[frigidweirdo]

Hey, I'm old school. Pluto was a planet when I was in school. If it looks like a planet...acts like a planet...and has a moon like a planet...it's still a planet. Science says it's too small to be a planet. Which is like saying midgets are too small to be people.

But scientists say they've discovered a new planet out beyond Pluto. It's ten times bigger than earth, so that qualifies it as a planet. It takes 20,000 years to circle the sun. No wonder it took so long to find it.

What if there are two more out beyond that one?

New planet may have been discovered, researchers say - CNN.com

They haven't discovered it. They think it's out there based on theoretical stuff, but no one has seen it. Seeing as we've spotted planets in other solar systems, you'd think we'd have found all of those in our own.

 

[waltky]

possum wantin' Granny to get him a telescope fer his birthday...

Stargazers to join hunt for Planet 9
Wed, Mar 29, 2017 - A LAST-MINUTE GIFT: Amateur astronomers who discover a celestial body will be allowed to suggest a name, the only rule is, it cannot be your own name

Everyday stargazers will have a shot at naming a new planet by joining Australian astronomers in the hunt for a mysterious large orb believed to be circling the fringe of the solar system. Australian National University (ANU) researchers have invited the public to join them in the hunt for so called “Planet 9” by combing through a massive array of new pictures mapping the southern sky. They hope that eagle-eyed amateurs will help discover Planet 9, which is predicted to be four times as big as Earth with 10 times its mass, but has never been seen. In return, the planet’s finder has been promised input into the name put forward by the ANU team to the International Astronomical Union, which would make the final call.

ANU astrophysicist Brad Tucker said modern computers were no match for the passion of millions of people that would make possible the discovery of Planet 9 “and other things that move in space.” However, Tucker, who is leading the project, hinted that a break from planet naming tradition using ancient mythology would be in order. “I don’t want another Greek god, we have enough of those,” he said. “I’d want to think of something else.” Tucker hopes the lure of getting to name other objects in the sky that will inevitably be discovered during the search will pique public interest. “If you need a last minute birthday gift, or something like that, why not find an asteroid and name it after your wife?” he said.

The ANU on Monday launched online access to the first complete digital map of the southern sky. It is made up of hundreds of thousands of pictures taken by a robotic telescope called the SkyMapper at the university’s Siding Spring Observatory. Members of the public will be invited to scan time-lapse images for signs of new objects, in what Tucker likened to playing Where’s Wally?” on a grand scale. Similar searches of the vast majority of the northern sky have failed to turn up Planet 9. Chris Wolf, a coresearcher on the Planet 9 search and head of SkyMapper, said the 1.3m telescope was the only one in the world that mapped the whole southern sky. “Whatever is hiding there that you can’t see from the north, we will find it,” he said.

Tucker said Planet 9 was predicted to exist — and likely to show up in the southern hemisphere — because it would explain why Pluto, discovered in 1930, was a dwarf planet and had a “weird orbit.” “This is exactly how both Neptune and Pluto were discovered — mathematically it made the orbits of other planets make sense, and then they were found a bit later,” he said. “Planet 9 is predicted to be a super Earth, about 10 times the mass and up to four times the size of our planet. It’s going to be cold and far away, and about 800 times the distance between Earth and the sun. It’s pretty mysterious.”

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[Stasha_Sz]

Seeing as we've spotted planets in other solar systems, you'd think we'd have found all of those in our own.

Actually, it is not surprising at all that we have not discovered all of the planets in our solar system.

The primary method currently being used to spot extra-solar planets is the "transit" method. This involves observing a suspect star for a tiny loss of brightness as a planet transits across the face of the star relative to us. Since any additional planets in our solar system would be outsystem from our point of view, it would not transit the face of the sun, and therefore be unobservable by this method.

To spot those planets, one would have to fall back on radial velocity or astrometry methodology. These are more mathematical than observational, and is partially how we "know" there are more planet(s) out there somewhere...