Five years ago, a couple of astronomers he declared they had found evidence of another planet in our solar system, the so-called “Planet X”. Although now commonly known as the New Planet, the cosmic object — much larger than Earth and hidden somewhere in the outer limits of the solar system — is still very theoretical, although the same pair now has sharpened the probable orbit that this planet would take.
The new research comes from Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin of the California Institute of Technology. Brown is “the guy who killed Pluto and is proud of it,” like Gizmodo he described it in 2016. Currently hosted on the arXiv prepress server and accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, the research claims that if the New Planet existed, it is closer and brighter than previously thought.
Scientists suspected the existence of an unknown planet based on the clustering of objects in the Kuiper belt, a wide band of icy objects beyond Neptune’s orbit. If there were an unobserved planet hiding beyond the belt, it would be the most distant orbit of any planet around the Sun, taking thousands of years to make a revolution (compared to the 164-year orbit of Neptune, the longest of the known planets).
Just as Neptune was discovered in the 1840s when astronomers realized that Uranus was being dragged by some invisible object, a handful of objects in the Kuiper belt appear to be grouped in the same direction. space, which could be a random event, but which some astronomers believe is due to an undiscovered planet.
Other ideas have been raised; some I suggested that the New Planet is actually a ring of debris large enough to exert gravitational effects similar to a massive planet, while others suspect The New Planet is a primordial black hole, a theorized relic of the primitive universe, too small to detect by modern methods. Others still say that no such object exists.
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Michele Bannister, a planetary astronomer at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, told Gizmodo in 2017 that “The idea of Planet 9 is a fun idea, it’s exciting, but it takes some oxygen right now” and “We have this interesting problem … and the very bright solution right now is called Planet 9.”
The new research was more selective in the selection of Kuiper belt objects included to determine the mass, orbit, and gravitational influence of the new planet. Because some belt objects have orbits affected by Neptune’s gravity, their inclusion would distort the data. The final group of included objects (11 in total) was selected according to the strict criteria of the researchers. According to his analysis, the New Planet would be a little more than six times the mass of the Earth and would surround the Sun once every 7,400 years, as National Geographic reports.
The researchers also calculated the probability that the grouping of the orbits could be due to some other effect apart from a massive object. They determined that there was a 99.6% chance that some object was enveloping the orbits of the Kuiper belt. While it’s a small opportunity, it’s actually a big increase in the probability of a random hit (1 in 250) compared to the 1 in 10,000 odds the couple got in 2016, as points out NatGeo.
At the time, Brown and Batygin thought the planet was more massive (10 times the mass of Earth) and had a much longer orbit. 10,000 years) of what is described in the new article. His new assessment is that the New Planet should be closer to the Sun, in fact, close enough that the Vera Rubin Observatory, which is expected to have its first light in 2023. Fingers crossed.
More: when the hell will we find the new planet?