If there’s the New Planet, a mysterious, large planet hiding on the dark edges of the Solar System, it may not be where we thought it might be.
According to astronomers looking for the hypothetical object, the new information being considered could mean that its orbit is significantly more elliptical than most recently predicted.
The hypothetical New Planet made a big entry in 2016, when astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Michael Brown of Caltech published an article in The Astronomical Journal. In it, they set out their case for an as yet undiscovered planet on the outside of the solar system. The evidence, they said, was found in other objects far beyond Neptune’s orbit.
These objects are called extreme transneptunian objects (ETNOs). They have huge elliptical orbits, which never cross closer to the Sun than Neptune’s orbit at 30 astronomical units and which move beyond 150 astronomical units.
Batygin and Brown found that these orbits have the same angle at the perihelion, the point of their orbit closest to the Sun. Astronomers performed a series of simulations and found that the gravitational influence of a large planet could group orbits in this way.
Since this paper fell, the theory has become very controversial, as many astronomers find the existence of the new planet unlikely, but so far we have no firm evidence in one way or another. The most conclusive way to resolve the debate is if we find that slippery, and a new update from Batygin and Brown could help us try to do just that.
Your new document has been accepted The Astrophysical Journal Letters, and is available on the arXiv prepress server.
The initial detection of a possible New Planet in 2016 was made based on only six ETNOs: these objects are, after all, very small and very difficult to detect. Over time, more ETNOs have been discovered (today we know about 19), which means we now have more data to analyze to calculate the characteristics of the planet.
In 2019, astronomers reviewed the available information and came to the conclusion that they had achieved some slightly incorrect things. According to the review, the mass of the planet was only five times the mass of the Earth, instead of the 10 they had initially calculated, and its eccentricity – which is elliptical – was less.
And now they have updated those calculations again.
“However,” they wrote in a post on the blog Find Planet Nine, “the question we asked ourselves during the heyday of the pandemic is different: are physics essential to our simulations? Through our continued and relentless investigation of the model, we found that the answer to this question is “yes.”
Their simulations, they said, meant that any object that moves beyond 10,000 astronomical units from the Sun is lost in space. What they didn’t take into account was that the Sun was not born in isolation, but probably in a large star-forming cloud heavily populated with other baby stars.
Under these conditions, the baby in the Solar System would have almost definitively formed an internal section of the Oort cloud, the shell of icy bodies surrounding the Solar System, about 2,000 to 100,000 astronomical units from the Sun. The formation of giant planets like Saturn and Jupiter would have thrown debris into interstellar space; but the gravitational perturbations of the passing stars would have pushed them towards the gravitational influence of the Sun, so that they end up forming the inner Oort cloud.
We tend to think of the Oort cloud as a kind of suspension, really not doing much of anything, but when Batygin and Brown did a lot of new simulations, considering these physics, they found that the objects in the inner region of the Oort cloud may move a bit.
“The new planet, however, is modifying this image qualitatively,” the researchers said.
“Due to the long-term gravitational attraction of the orbit of the new planet, the inner objects of the Oort cloud evolve on scales of a billion years and are slowly re-injected into the outer solar system. What happens to them?” ? We have simulated this process, taking into account perturbations of the canonical giant planets, the New Planet, the passing stars, as well as the galactic tide, and have found that these internal objects of the reinjected Oort cloud can easily mix with the census of distant Kuiper belt objects and even exhibiting orbital clusters. “
This means that some of the extreme transneptunian objects we found may have originated in the Oort cloud, which is really cool. However, team simulations also showed that the clustering of objects in the Oort cloud would be weaker than that of objects coming from the Kuiper belt, closer.
This suggests that a more eccentric orbit for the new planet would explain the data better than the orbit of the researchers ’2019 paper.
We shall not know exactly to what extent this orbit may be eccentric until further study of the grouped objects can be made, to determine which of them originated in the inner Oort cloud; however, there is a limit as to the eccentricity of the orbit that can occur before it is no longer consistent with our observations of the outer solar system.
Because the hypothetical planet is so far away and so weak, our chances of detecting it are really low, so this information can be used to refine models and stop us from looking for it in places where it might not be. , hopefully will lead to a detection of this elusive beast.
Although we never find it, the discoveries it has caused have been impressive. A whole bunch of new Jovian moons and superdistant dwarf planets is nothing to sneeze at.
The new Batygin and Brown document has been accepted The Astrophysical Journal Letters, and is available at arXiv.