We could get closer to a full planetary cover again.
Our solar system has only eight known planets since Pluto was degraded, but evidence pointing to another candidate for the state of the New Planet has plagued astronomers’ cells for years, suspecting it is there. outside, which hides on the edges of our solar system. But we may have finally fixed the precise trajectory of the vanished cosmic body, according to a recent study shared on a prepress server.
The New Planet can run, but it cannot hide. Unless, of course, it doesn’t exist.
New Planet researchers are responding to criticism
All evidence for the New Planet comes from the gravitational pull it appears to have on other bodies in the outer solar system. If there is a planet, a gravitational anomaly makes sense and all astronomers have to do a bit of math on the affected oscillations of other nearby planets, to challenge the new one. This is how astronomer John Couch Adams and Urbain Le Varrier discovered Neptune, when they observed that Uranus exhibited a “pulling” motion of an invisible planet. But for the New Planet, no one has seen an unusual movement or a “stretch” in the trajectory of other planets. The only available gravitational evidence consists of an atypical grouping of small frozen bodies in the outer solar system, within the totality of Kuiper Belt (KBO) objects. If no planet existed beyond the Kuiper belt, the orbits of the KBOs would spontaneously be arranged within the orbital plane of the solar system. But that doesn’t happen.
Instead of standard random motion, astronomers observe clustered orbits of KBO, and while this could be a mistake, it is also very unlikely. In 2016, researchers analyzed the statistical distribution of KBOs and announced that the unusual behavior of the cluster was called an undetected outer planet. They even calculated that its mass was that of five earths, and about 10 times the distance of Neptune from the sun. The oldest study also specified which region of the sky probably hid the planet, but widespread searches found no new planets, leading to suspicion that it does not exist. The new study examines early 2016 work and considers some of the criticisms about the proposed ninth body.
The jury is still out on the new planet, whether it is real or not
One of the problems in locating a planetary body in the outer solar system lies in the inherent difficulty of locating anything out there. This forces astronomers to look where it is convenient, which means that clustered KBOs can be the result of biased data. The authors of the recent study explain this observational bias and concluded that clustered bodies are still an unusual phenomenon, with only a 0.4% chance of passing without a nearby body with significant mass, such as a planet. But most of all, the study’s authors further located the mysterious object when they repeated their calculations of the probable orbit of the new planet, which puts it closer to the sun than we thought.
If the New Planet is real, astronomers should detect it soon. But with many astronomers even more skeptical than not (some of whom even suspected it was a major black hole), the next few years will likely see it ruled out as a possible explanation for the KBO cluster or reveal historical data about a new one. ninth planet. Time will tell what the final verdict will be on the New Planet.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article had a title that was ambiguous about the way certain scientists talk about the new planet. This has been corrected to reflect that its existence is unknown.