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Post by auntym on Jan 20, 2016 15:13:37 GMT -6
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Post by auntym on Jan 21, 2016 14:59:12 GMT -6
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Post by casper on Jan 21, 2016 19:14:55 GMT -6
I thought pluto was planet nine. I wish they would make up their minds.
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Post by skywalker on Jan 22, 2016 19:28:48 GMT -6
So is this "planet nine" the same as the planet X and/or Niburu that the conspiracy theorists have been talking about for decades that the scientists all said did not exist? If it is proven to exist are all of the scientists going to admit they were wrong? I seriously doubt it.
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Post by auntym on Jan 23, 2016 14:47:06 GMT -6
iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/0004-6256/151/2/22;jsessionid=242A693D6AE8BEE7DA0515D6A72A32DC.c3.iopscience.cld.iop.org Fraser Cain @fcain
Here Is The Planet 9 Paper Everyone Is Freaking Out About. Enjoy: EVIDENCE FOR A DISTANT GIANT PLANET IN THE SOLAR SYSTEMby Konstantin Batygin1 and Michael E. Brown1 Published 2016 January 20 • © 2016. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved. • The Astronomical Journal, Volume 151, Number 2 AbstractRecent analyses have shown that distant orbits within the scattered disk population of the Kuiper Belt exhibit an unexpected clustering in their respective arguments of perihelion. While several hypotheses have been put forward to explain this alignment, to date, a theoretical model that can successfully account for the observations remains elusive. In this work we show that the orbits of distant Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) cluster not only in argument of perihelion, but also in physical space. We demonstrate that the perihelion positions and orbital planes of the objects are tightly confined and that such a clustering has only a probability of 0.007% to be due to chance, thus requiring a dynamical origin. We find that the observed orbital alignment can be maintained by a distant eccentric planet with mass gsim10 m⊕ whose orbit lies in approximately the same plane as those of the distant KBOs, but whose perihelion is 180° away from the perihelia of the minor bodies. In addition to accounting for the observed orbital alignment, the existence of such a planet naturally explains the presence of high-perihelion Sedna-like objects, as well as the known collection of high semimajor axis objects with inclinations between 60° and 150° whose origin was previously unclear. Continued analysis of both distant and highly inclined outer solar system objects provides the opportunity for testing our hypothesis as well as further constraining the orbital elements and mass of the distant planet.
1. INTRODUCTIONThe recent discovery of 2012VP113, a Sedna-like body and a potential additional member of the inner Oort cloud, prompted Trujillo & Sheppard (2014) to note that a set of Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) in the distant solar system exhibits unexplained clustering in orbital elements. Specifically, objects with a perihelion distance larger than the orbit of Neptune and semimajor axis greater than 150 AU—including 2012VP113 and Sedna—have arguments of perihelia, ω, clustered approximately around zero. A value of ω = 0 requires that the object's perihelion lies precisely at the ecliptic, and during ecliptic-crossing the object moves from south to north (i.e., intersects the ascending node). While observational bias does preferentially select objects with perihelia (where they are closest and brightest) at the heavily observed ecliptic, no possible bias could select only for objects moving from south to north. Recent simulations (de la Fuente Marcos & de la Fuente Marcos 2014) confirmed this lack of bias in the observational data. The clustering in ω therefore appears to be real. Orbital grouping in ω is surprising because gravitational torques exerted by the giant planets are expected to randomize this parameter over the multi-Gyr age of the solar system. In other words, the values of ω will not stay clustered unless some dynamical mechanism is currently forcing the alignment. To date, two explanations have been proposed to explain the data. Trujillo & Sheppard (2014) suggest that an external perturbing body could allow ω to librate about zero via the Kozai mechanism.1 As an example, they demonstrate that a five-Earth-mass body on a circular orbit at 210 AU can drive such libration in the orbit of 2012VP113. However, de la Fuente Marcos & de la Fuente Marcos (2014) note that the existence of librating trajectories around ω = 0 requires the ratio of the object to perturber semimajor axis to be nearly unity. This means that trapping all of the distant objects within the known range of semimajor axes into Kozai resonances likely requires multiple planets, finely tuned to explain the particular data set. Further problems may potentially arise with the Kozai hypothesis. Trujillo & Sheppard (2014) point out that the Kozai mechanism allows libration about both ω = 0 as well as ω = 180, and the lack of ω ~ 180 objects suggests that some additional process originally caused the objects to obtain ω ~ 0. To this end, they invoke a strong stellar encounter to generate the desired configuration. Recent work (Jílková et al. 2015) shows how such an encounter could, in principle, lead to initial conditions that would be compatible with this narrative. Perhaps a greater difficulty lies in that the dynamical effects of such a massive perturber might have already been visible in the inner solar system. Iorio (2014) analyzed the effects of a distant perturber on the precession of the apsidal lines of the inner planets and suggests that, particularly for low-inclination perturbers, objects more massive than the Earth with a ~ 200–300 AU are ruled out from the data (see also Iorio 2012). As an alternative explanation, Madigan & McCourt (2015) have proposed that the observed properties of the distant Kuiper Belt can be attributed to a so-called inclination instability. Within the framework of this model, an initially axisymmetric disk of eccentric planetesimals is reconfigured into a cone-shaped structure, such that the orbits share an approximately common value of ω and become uniformly distributed in the longitude of ascending node, Ω. While an intriguing proposition, additional calculations are required to assess how such a self-gravitational instability may proceed when the (orbit-averaged) quadrupolar potential of the giant planets, as well as the effects of scattering, are factored into the simulations. Additionally, in order to operate on the appropriate timescale, the inclination instability requires 1–10 Earth masses of material to exist between ~100 and ~10,000 AU (Madigan & McCourt 2015). Such an estimate is at odds with the negligibly small mass of the present Sedna population (Schwamb et al. 2010). To this end, it is worth noting that although the primordial planetesimal disk of the solar system likely comprised tens of Earth masses (Tsiganis et al. 2005; Levison et al. 2008, 2011; Batygin et al. 2011), the vast majority of this material was ejected from the system by close encounters with the giant planets during, and immediately following, the transient dynamical instability that shaped the Kuiper Belt in the first place. The characteristic timescale for depletion of the primordial disk is likely to be short compared with the timescale for the onset of the inclination instability (Nesvorný 2015), calling into question whether the inclination instability could have actually proceeded in the outer solar system. In light of the above discussion, here we reanalyze the clustering of the distant objects and propose a different perturbation mechanism, stemming from a single, long-period object. Remarkably, our envisioned scenario brings to light a series of potential explanations for other, seemingly unrelated dynamical features of the Kuiper Belt, and presents a direct avenue for falsification of our hypothesis. The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we reexamine the observational data and identify the relevant trends in the orbital elements. In Section 3, we motivate the existence of a distant, eccentric perturber using secular perturbation theory. Subsequently, we engage in numerical exploration in Section 4. In Section 5, we perform a series of simulations that generate synthetic scattered disks. We summarize and discuss the implications of our results in Sections 6 and 7, respectively. CONTINUE READING: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/0004-6256/151/2/22;jsessionid=242A693D6AE8BEE7DA0515D6A72A32DC.c3.iopscience.cld.iop.org
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Post by auntym on Jan 24, 2016 18:06:53 GMT -6
blogs.discovermagazine.com/outthere/2016/01/22/new-9th-planet/#.VqVmqB58e1t A Little Perspective on the New “9th Planet” (and the 10th, and the 11th)By Corey S. Powell / discovermagazine.com/authors?name=Corey+S.+Powell January 22, 2016 Planet 9 from Outer Space: The peculiar alignment and tilt of the six most distant objects in the solar system hint at the presence of an unseen massive planet orbiting far beyond Pluto. (Credit: Caltech/R. Hurt/IPAC) By now you’ve probably heard the announcement that astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown think they’ve tracked down “Planet 9,” a long-rumored large world orbiting in the distant wilderness of the solar system. Even if you haven’t heard, the news may sound familiar, since a confusingly similar but completely separate report made the rounds just a month ago. (Students of history will recall that Planet X stories also circulated in 2014 and 2006, and have been a staple of the astronomy hype machine all the way back to the discovery of Ceres in 1801.) The dreary truth is that the Batygin and Brown claim, while stronger than the ones that came before, is still soaked in uncertainty. But there’s another truth, far more exciting, that goes with it: The latest efforts to find Planet X are hugely revealing, even if these particular ones don’t hold up. Reason #1: The competing claims starkly illustrate the difference between seeing and believing. The case for Planet 9 is much stronger than for the ones described in December, even though researchers have directly observed the earlier objects but have not seen Planet 9 at all. Better yet is reason #2: These stories keep popping up because overwhelming majority of the solar system is cloaked in darkness, and is just now coming into view. Even the latest maybe-planets turn out not to exist, it’s nearly certain that there are big, exotic things out beyond Pluto waiting to be found. On the Trail of Planet 9Since they haven’t been able to observe Planet 9 directly, Batygin and Brown have attempted to find it by following its gravitational shadow. There is a long and noble tradition of sleuthing out invisible objects by the way they pull at other, visible ones. In 1846, French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier deduced the existence of Neptune from deviations in the orbit of Uranus; Le Verrier concluded, correctly, that a then-unknown planet was responsible for the anomaly. Over the past two decades, astronomers have discovered hundreds of distant planets the same way, by noting how they pull on their parent stars. On the cosmic level, much of the evidence for dark matter in the universe comes from tracing its gravitational influence on bright galaxies. Planet 9 appears to have left its gravitational mark by scrambling the orbits of other, smaller bodies in the Kuiper Belt–the loose swarm of frozen objects (including Pluto) that orbit in the vast, distant zone beyond Neptune. My colleague Ethan Siegel very ably explains Batygin and Brown’s gravitational deductive process here; the research paper is here. Some breathless media reports notwithstanding, the evidence for Planet 9 is far from airtight, though it certainly is intriguing. If the planet real, it must be big, at least 10 times the mass of Earth, and would follow a huge looping orbit. Even at its closest point, it would lie perhaps five times as far from the sun as Pluto. It would be quite unlike anything else known in the solar system. There is a contentious question hanging about what to call such an object. In their paper, Batygin and Brown pointedly refer to it as a planet, but the current definition of planet—the one that got Pluto kicked out of the club— www.iau.org/public/themes/pluto/ requires that an object must have “has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit” in the solar system. It is not clear that Planet 9 would meet that standard, despite Brown’s confident statements to the contrary. (Irony alert: Mike Brown is the same astronomer who discovered Eris, the large Kuiper Belt object that prompted the new planetary definition and the demotion of Pluto. His Twitter handle is @plutokiller.) CONTINUE READING: blogs.discovermagazine.com/outthere/2016/01/22/new-9th-planet/#.VqVmqB58e1t
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Post by Deleted on Jan 25, 2016 22:55:12 GMT -6
Planet 9 appears to have left its gravitational mark Read more: theedgeofreality.proboards.com/thread/6215/planet#ixzz3yK5OOcuJ(from article directly above). it "left" its gravitational mark, as in we see what it does to other things near it OR it "left" its gravitational mark, AS IN, WE know where that mark is, and it is "leaving" - moving
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Post by Deleted on Jan 26, 2016 10:12:55 GMT -6
If it's there..wouldn't it be way too far away from the sun to be fuzzy and warm for life?
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Post by skywalker on Jan 27, 2016 20:44:06 GMT -6
Yes, it would be freezing cold...much too cold to support life.The big deal about it is that it was only recently discovered even though the conspiracy theorists have been talking about it for decades. They still haven't proven it yet though.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 19, 2016 22:29:27 GMT -6
IM GOING OUT ON A LIMB HERE..CRACK.... SMASH!
Isaac asimov <reading one of his books at a very young age> taught me -Bodes Law-. As simple as it is... It mathematically seemed too coincidental....even for a ten year old. Ill have to check with the formula to see how this unknown object calculates within D.. The distance..... Without checking 1st the est. D of their calculations. Will be Interesting to compare.... It may provide the mean distance to the object , Thus Providing astronomers one step closer to visual observation
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Post by lois on Feb 20, 2016 16:09:36 GMT -6
Cliff Paul put on FB about the passing of the space station tonight . But was 7:30 his Eastern time or mine or ours really?
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Post by Deleted on Feb 20, 2016 17:55:44 GMT -6
Cliff Paul put on FB about the passing of the space station tonight . But was 7:30 his Eastern time or mine or ours really? Saw that also...spaceweather.com says for my area .....7:24 coming from the WNW. Magnitude - 3. Thats pretty bright. Enjoy !
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Post by lois on Feb 20, 2016 22:56:11 GMT -6
Cliff Paul put on FB about the passing of the space station tonight . But was 7:30 his Eastern time or mine or ours really? Saw that also...spaceweather.com says for my area .....7:24 coming from the WNW. Magnitude - 3. Thats pretty bright. Enjoy ! Paul caught up with me on FB and told me the time. My time was 6:33 to 6:38. It was right on time. I taped it all except it going into the Southeast. Homes were in my way. . Not too good film but I got it anyway. We were crystal clear tonight and the Moon was still in the East so it was no problem. Thank you Cliff for replying here. I could not find the Nasa thread.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 21, 2016 10:05:26 GMT -6
Yep. My son and I Saw it too lois. Second time this week.
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Post by auntym on Apr 5, 2016 12:03:43 GMT -6
www.newscientist.com/article/2082970-planet-nine-might-be-an-exoplanet-stolen-by-the-sun/4 April 2016 Planet Nine might be an exoplanet stolen by the sunThe hypothetical ninth planet at the fringes of our solar system might have been captured from a star passing by long ago The Pleiades star cluster: it might once have been the sun’s nursery, with planets ripe for the taking NASA Our solar system might harbour an alien interloper. The proposed Planet Nine lurking at the edge of the solar system could have been stolen from a passing star. In January, Konstantin Batygin and Michael Brown announced evidence for an unseen planet around 10 times Earth’s mass lurking in the fringes of the solar system. Other astronomers immediately came forward with suggestions for how so-called Planet Nine might have migrated from the inner solar system towards its outer edges. But one team now suggests just the opposite: that it was captured from a nearby star. The idea isn’t all that far-fetched. The sun was born in a reasonably large stellar cluster with roughly 1000 or maybe even 10,000 stars, says Alexander Mustill from the Lund Observatory in Sweden. In such a dense cluster, the sun would have had quite a few close encounters with other stars, potentially letting them swap planets from time to time. “It would be pretty wild – to pick up an alien planet and bring it along for the ride,” says Greg Laughlin at the Lick Observatory in California. Good odds To check just how wild, Mustill and his colleagues ran simulations of encounters between the solar system and any passing planetary systems. They found that if that a system happened to have a wide-orbit planet, the likelihood it would be captured by the sun is about 50 per cent. Those are pretty good odds, but they dropped when the team took into account whether the passing planetary system would have a wide-orbit planet in the first place. Also, it wasn’t enough to just capture a planet – their simulations only worked if they captured one that was exactly like Planet Nine. Overall, Mustill and his colleagues think the chance that Planet Nine is an exoplanet ranges from 0.1 to 2 per cent. “Although these probabilities seem low, you have to compare them to each other, and not absolutely,” says Mustill. “Because ultimately any very specific outcome is very unlikely.” The probability that evidence for Planet Nine’s existence is random chance is just 0.007 per cent at present, so the fact that the odds of it being an exoplanet are 15 to 300 times higher than that actually bodes well for the exoplanet scenario. Capture or exile?A fugitive on the run is just one way to explain Planet Nine, however. Batygin and Brown initially thought it was likely to be the core of a gas giant ejected from the inner solar system early in its formation. “My pet theory is it happened early and there was a lot of gas around in the solar nebula and that gas sort of slowed it down and kept it from being completely removed,” Brown says. This theory is relatively straightforward, says Scott Kenyon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The array of Jupiter-like exoplanets that orbit dangerously close to their host stars suggest that massive planets regularly migrate inward. “Whenever you scatter something inward, to conserve energy, you’re likely to scatter something else outward,” Kenyon says. And there’s one final option: the planet could have formed where we find it now. Although some have speculated that there wouldn’t be enough material to form a planet in the outer fringes of the solar system, Kenyon found that there could be enough icy pebbles to form something as small as Planet Nine in a couple of hundred million years. “I think it’s premature to say what’s most likely,” says Kenyon. A definitive answer will likely hinge on actually finding the unseen planet. References: arxiv.org/abs/1603.07247, arxiv.org/abs/1603.08008www.newscientist.com/article/2082970-planet-nine-might-be-an-exoplanet-stolen-by-the-sun/
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Post by swamprat on Apr 9, 2016 9:20:41 GMT -6
No, Planet Nine Won't Kill Us Allby Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer April 08, 2016
Don't believe the doomsday hype about the putative Planet Nine.
Yesterday (April 7), the New York Post published a video claiming that Planet Nine — a hypothesized world in the solar system's far outer reaches — could send asteroids and comets hurtling into Earth soon, with potentially devastating consequences.
"A newly discovered planet could destroy Earth as soon as this month," the New York Post said yesterday via its Twitter account, @nypost, by way of advertising the new video.
There is so much wrong here. First of all, the Post's tweet, and the new 30-second video, describe Planet Nine as an officially discovered and confirmed world. This is not the case; astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, both of whom are based at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, inferred the planet's existence based on the strange orbits of a half dozen small objects in the Kuiper Belt, the ring of icy bodies beyond Neptune.
Astronomers are now actively hunting for Planet Nine — which Batygin and Brown think is about 10 times more massive than Earth, and orbits about 600 times farther from the sun than our planet does — but to date, it has not been detected.
Second, we have nothing to fear from Planet Nine, even if it does exist, according to Brown.
"Hey, so … fun fact? Planet Nine is not going to cause the Earth's destruction. If you read that it will, you have discovered idiotic writing!" Brown said yesterday via his Twitter account, @plutokiller. (Brown's Twitter handle references the fact that his discoveries of objects in the outer solar system helped demote Pluto to "dwarf planet" status back in 2006.)
The New York Post's misleading video may result from a conflation of Planet Nine with other hypothesized, undiscovered objects in Earth's neck of the cosmic woods — namely, Nibiru and Nemesis.
Nibiru is a proposed large planet that conspiracy theorists have predicted will crash into and destroy Earth. Many prognostications had the cataclysm occurring in 2012, to coincide with the supposed "Mayan apocalypse." There is no evidence that Nibiru exists, or that such an impact is imminent. (Some variations of the Nibiru myth call it Planet X, but this latter moniker can also refer to a large world whose existence was first postulated by astronomer Percival Lowell in the early 20th century, to explain perceived oddities in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. So it can get a bit confusing.)
Nemesis is a small star or brown dwarf (a "failed star" that's considerably larger than a planet) hypothesized to zoom through space not far from the sun. Nemesis' gravitational pull regularly jostles the faraway comet repository known as the Oort Cloud, the idea goes, sending comets barreling toward Earth — and thus explaining the perceived cycle of mass extinctions on our planet, which seem to occur every 26 million years or so.
The Nemesis hypothesis is more scientifically respectable than the Nibiru fairy tale. Again, however, astronomers have found no solid evidence that the supposed star/brown dwarf actually exists.
The New York Post wouldn't be the first outlet to lump Planet Nine in with Planet X, Nibiru and Nemesis. On Wednesday (April 6), Brown, motivated by what he read in a different Planet Nine news story, offered the following helpful hint via Twitter: "PSA: Planet Nine is not Planet X or Nibiru or Nemesis. All theories of 'a planet out there' are not the same theory!"
In other Planet Nine news: A new modeling study suggests that, if the putative world actually exists, it's likely about 3.7 times wider than Earth and is downright frosty, with a temperature of about minus 375 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 226 degrees Celsius).
www.livescience.com/54353-planet-nine-will-not-destroy-earth-nibiru.html
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Post by auntym on Apr 11, 2016 13:54:43 GMT -6
www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2016/04/nasa-contrary-to-reports-cassini-saturn-mission-not-effected-by-theorized-planet-9-gravitation.html NASA: "Contrary to Reports, Cassini Saturn Mission Not Effected By Theorized Planet 9 Gravitation"by The Daily Galaxy via www.nasa.gov/cassini and Caltech April 10, 2016 "Although we'd love it if Cassini could help detect a new planet in the solar system, we do not see any perturbations in our orbit that we cannot explain with our current models," said Earl Maize, Cassini project manager at JPL. Several recent news stories have reported that a mysterious anomaly in Cassini's orbit could potentially be explained by the gravitational tug of a theorized massive new planet in our solar system, lurking far beyond the orbit of Neptune. While the proposed planet's existence may eventually be confirmed by other means, mission navigators have observed no unexplained deviations in the spacecraft's orbit since its arrival there in 2004, according to mission managers and orbit determination experts at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Scientists have been looking for Planet X for 100 years. The possibility that it’s real got a big boost recently when researchers from Caltech inferred its existence based on orbital anomalies seen in objects in the Kuiper Belt, a disc-shaped region of comets and other larger bodies beyond Neptune. In January of 2016, Caltech researchers announced that they found evidence of a giant planet tracing a bizarre, highly elongated orbit in the outer solar system. The object, which the researchers have nicknamed Planet Nine, has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbits about 20 times farther from the sun on average than does Neptune (which orbits the sun at an average distance of 2.8 billion miles). In fact, it would take this new planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make just one full orbit around the sun. The researchers, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, discovered the planet's existence through mathematical modeling and computer simulations but have not yet observed the object directly. Brown notes that the putative ninth planet—at 5,000 times the mass of Pluto—is sufficiently large that there should be no debate about whether it is a true planet. Unlike the class of smaller objects now known as dwarf planets, Planet Nine gravitationally dominates its neighborhood of the solar system. In fact, it dominates a region larger than any of the other known planets—a fact that Brown says makes it "the most planet-y of the planets in the whole solar system." "Although we were initially quite skeptical that this planet could exist, as we continued to investigate its orbit and what it would mean for the outer solar system, we become increasingly convinced that it is out there," says Batygin, an assistant professor of planetary science. "For the first time in over 150 years, there is solid evidence that the solar system's planetary census is incomplete." "An undiscovered planet outside the orbit of Neptune, 10 times the mass of Earth, would affect the orbit of Saturn, not Cassini," said William Folkner, a planetary scientist at JPL. Folkner develops planetary orbit information used for NASA's high-precision spacecraft navigation. "This could produce a signature in the measurements of Cassini while in orbit about Saturn if the planet was close enough to the sun. But we do not see any unexplained signature above the level of the measurement noise in Cassini data taken from 2004 to 2016." A recent paper predicts that, if data tracking Cassini's position were available out to the year 2020, they might be used to reveal a "most probable" location for the new planet in its long orbit around the sun. However, Cassini's mission is planned to end in late 2017, when the spacecraft -- too low on fuel to continue on a longer mission -- will plunge into Saturn's atmosphere. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2016/04/nasa-contrary-to-reports-cassini-saturn-mission-not-effected-by-theorized-planet-9-gravitation.html
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Post by auntym on Jun 14, 2016 11:51:43 GMT -6
www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2016/06/planet-nine-update-theres-not-one-planet-but-rather-several-beyond-pluto.html Planet Nine Challenged: "There's Not One Planet, But Rather Several Beyond Pluto"by The Daily Galaxy via Spanish Foundation for Sciene & Technology June 13, 2016 In the race towards the discovery of a ninth planet in our solar system, scientists from around the world strive to calculate its orbit using the tracks left by the small bodies that move well beyond Neptune. Now, astronomers from Spain and Cambridge University have confirmed, with new calculations, that the orbits of the six extreme trans-Neptunian objects that served as a reference to announce the existence of Planet Nine are not as stable as it was thought. At the beginning of this year, the astronomers K. Batygin and M. Brown from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech, USA) announced that they had found evidence of the existence of a giant planet with a mass ten times larger than Earth's in the confines of the Solar System. Moving in an unusually elongated orbit, the mysterious planet will take between 10,000 and 20,000 years to complete one revolution around the Sun. In order to arrive at this conclusion, Batygin and Brown run computer simulations with input data based on the orbits of six extreme trans-Neptunian objects (ETNOs). Specifically, these ETNOs are: Sedna, 2012 VP113, 2004 VN112, 2007 TG422, 2013 RF98 and 2010 GB174. Now, however, brothers Carlos and Raúl de la Fuente Marcos, two freelance Spanish astronomers, together with scientist Sverre J. Aarseth from the Institute of Astronomy of the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom), have considered the question the other way around: How would the orbits of these six ETNOs evolve if a Planet Nine such as the one proposed by K. Batygin and M. Brown really did exist? The answer to this important question has been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS). "With the orbit indicated by the Caltech astronomers for Planet Nine, our calculations show that the six ETNOs, which they consider to be the Rosetta Stone in the solution to this mystery, would move in lengthy, unstable orbits," warns Carlos de la Fuente Marcos. CONTINUE READING: www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2016/06/planet-nine-update-theres-not-one-planet-but-rather-several-beyond-pluto.html Evidence of a Ninth Planet caltech Published on Jan 20, 2016 Caltech's Konstantin Batygin, an assistant professor of planetary science, and Mike Brown, the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy, discuss new research that provides evidence of a giant planet tracing a bizarre, highly elongated orbit in the outer solar system. Read the Caltech News Story: www.caltech.edu/news/caltech-researchers-find-evidence-real-ninth-planet-49523
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Post by swamprat on Oct 5, 2017 18:45:11 GMT -6
The super-Earth that came home for dinner
Date: October 4, 2017
Source: NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory
It might be lingering bashfully on the icy outer edges of our solar system, hiding in the dark, but subtly pulling strings behind the scenes: stretching out the orbits of distant bodies, perhaps even tilting the entire solar system to one side.
If a planet is there, it's extremely distant and will stay that way (with no chance -- in case you're wondering -- of ever colliding with Earth, or bringing "days of darkness"). It is a possible "Planet Nine" -- a world perhaps 10 times the mass of Earth and 20 times farther from the sun than Neptune. The signs so far are indirect, mainly its gravitational footprints, but that adds up to a compelling case nonetheless.
One of its most dedicated trackers, in fact, says IT IS NOW HARDER TO IMAGINE OUR SOLAR SYSTEM WITHOUT A PLANET NINE THAN WITH ONE.
"There are now five different lines of observational evidence pointing to the existence of Planet Nine," said Konstantin Batygin, a planetary astrophysicist at Caltech in Pasadena, California, whose team may be closing in. "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."
Batygin and his co-author, Caltech astronomer Mike Brown, described the first three breadcrumbs on Planet Nine's trail in a January 2016 paper, published in the Astronomical Journal. Six known objects in the distant Kuiper Belt, a region of icy bodies stretching from Neptune outward toward interstellar space, all have elliptical orbits pointing in the same direction. That would be unlikely -- and suspicious -- enough. But these orbits also are tilted the same way, about 30 degrees "downward" compared to the pancake-like plane within which the planets orbit the sun.
Breadcrumb number three: Computer simulations of the solar system with Planet Nine included show there should be more objects tilted with respect to the solar plane. In fact, the tilt would be on the order of 90 degrees, as if the plane of the solar system and these objects formed an "X" when viewed edge-on. Sure enough, Brown realized that five such objects already known to astronomers fill the bill.
Two more clues emerged after the original paper. A second article from the team, this time led by Batygin's graduate student, Elizabeth Bailey, showed that Planet Nine could have tilted the planets of our solar system during the last 4.5 billion years. This could explain a longstanding mystery: Why is the plane in which the planets orbit tilted about 6 degrees compared to the sun's equator?
"Over long periods of time, Planet Nine will make the entire solar-system plane precess or wobble, just like a top on a table," Batygin said.
The last telltale sign of Planet Nine's presence involves the solar system's contrarians: objects from the Kuiper Belt that orbit in the opposite direction from everything else in the solar system. Planet Nine's orbital influence would explain why these bodies from the distant Kuiper Belt end up "polluting" the inner Kuiper Belt.
"No other model can explain the weirdness of these high-inclination orbits," Batygin said. "It turns out that Planet Nine provides a natural avenue for their generation. These things have been twisted out of the solar system plane with help from Planet Nine and then scattered inward by Neptune."
The remaining step is to find Planet Nine itself. Batygin and Brown are using the Subaru Telescope at Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii to try to do just that. The instrument is the "best tool" for picking out dim, extremely distant objects lost in huge swaths of sky, Batygin said.
But where did Planet Nine come from? Batygin says he spends little time ruminating on its origin -- whether it is a fugitive from our own solar system or, just maybe, a wandering rogue planet captured by the sun's gravity.
"I think Planet Nine's detection will tell us something about its origin," he said.
Other scientists offer a different possible explanation for the Planet Nine evidence cited by Batygin. A recent analysis based on a sky mapping project called the Outer Solar System Origins Survey, which discovered more than 800 new "trans-Neptunian objects," suggests that the evidence also could be consistent with a random distribution of such objects. Still, the analysis, from a team led by Cory Shankman of the University of Victoria, could not rule out Planet Nine.
If Planet Nine is found, it will be a homecoming of sorts, or at least a family reunion. Over the past 20 years, surveys of planets around other stars in our galaxy have found the most common types to be "super Earths" and their somewhat larger cousins -- bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.
Yet these common, garden-variety planets are conspicuously absent from our solar system. Weighing in at roughly 10 times Earth's mass, the proposed Planet Nine would make a good fit. Planet Nine could turn out to be our missing super Earth. ________________________________________ Story Source: Materials provided by NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Original written by Pat Brennan. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. ________________________________________ Journal Reference: 1. Konstantin Batygin, Michael E. Brown. EVIDENCE FOR A DISTANT GIANT PLANET IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM. The Astronomical Journal, 2016; 151 (2): 22 DOI: 10.3847/0004-6256/151/2/22
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