Two astronomers at the California Institute of Technology in the United States have represented the probability distribution function of the orbit of the New Planet, a hypothetical planet that lies beyond Neptune in our solar system and could have a mass of six times the Earth. Caltech astronomers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin have been working for five years to find the New Planet, which astronomers can hardly find if there is, due to its distance from the Sun, 300 times the distance from the Sun to the Earth. Earth.
According to scientists, after five years of their proposal, they now know where to look in the sky to find the New Planet.
Astronomers say that despite having a general idea of the mysterious planet, “we could not make a complete assessment of the range of uncertainties about where the sky might be, how massive it might be, and how bright it might be. Now we can “, writes Brown in a statement published in a blog dedicated to the search for the mysterious world by astronomers.
In the outer solar system, beyond the orbit of Neptune, there is a circumstellar disk, of which Pluto is a part, which is believed to consist of more than 100,000 bodies in the solar system more than 100 kilometers in size. This disk is similar to the main asteroid belt and is known as the Kuiper belt.
According to scientists, the farthest objects in the Kuiper belt have anomalous orbits so that all their orbits point slightly in the same direction, indicating a gravitational signature that influences their orbits. Although the two astronomers proposed that the New Planet is behind the influence of this anomalous behavior, some other scientists question their proposal by saying that this anomalous behavior could be an observational bias.
The new paper, presented Aug. 22 for publication on Earth and planetary astrophysics, traces probable orbits along with making predictions about its properties.
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