Scientists Found New Evidence for the Existence of Planet X!
Intro Among the solar system’s more intriguing
mysteries is whether a large, icy planet lives in the outer regions of our cosmic neighborhood,
well beyond the orbit of Neptune.
Often referred to as Planet X or Planet Nine, new reports state that scientists may have
finally found evidence of the elusive planet's existence.
Let's talk about some of these reports and what they mean for astronomers around the
world.
Planet X In the early 1900s, astronomers believed Planet
X could exist as it would explain the "wobbles" in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune.
The gravitational pull of another planetary body was thought to be responsible and so
when Pluto was discovered in 1930, scientists believed this was the 'ghost planet' they'd
been seeking, so the search was over.
However, the hunt restarted when further research revealed that Pluto was too small to affect
Neptune and Uranus.
Poor Pluto would later be demoted to a 'dwarf planet' – and whether it is a planet at
all is hotly debated.
Based on data collected from Voyager 2's flyby of Neptune in 1989, NASA announced that there
were no anomalies in the orbits of the outer planets at all; they were not rogue.
So, at this stage, it seemed that they had been searching for something that did not
exist.
In 1992, the Kuiper Belt was discovered and with its study came more signs that Planet
X may well exist.
This vast region of the solar system beyond Neptune is believed to contain hundreds of
thousands of icy bodies larger than 62 miles across, as well as a trillion or more comets.
Pluto is the best-known of the larger objects here, with Quaoar, Sedna, and Eris discovered
between 2002 and 2005 – and all four were classified as dwarf planets in 2006.
Scientists noted that Sedna travels in a long, elliptical orbit that takes 11,000 years to
complete.
What pulls Sedna in this direction?
Could it be another world with a strong gravitational pull?
New Findings In January 2015, Caltech astronomers Konstantin
Batygin and Mike Brown announced new research that provides evidence of a giant planet tracing
an unusual, elongated orbit in the outer solar system.
The prediction is based on detailed mathematical modeling and computer simulations, not direct
observation.
This large object could explain the unique orbits of at least five smaller objects discovered
in the distant Kuiper Belt.
Scientists state it's too early to say with certainty there's a so-called Planet X.
What we're seeing is an early prediction based on modeling from limited observations.
It's the start of a process that could lead to an exciting result.
The Caltech scientists believe Planet X may have a mass about 10 times that of Earth and
be similar in size to Uranus or Neptune.
The predicted orbit is about 20 times farther from our Sun on average than Neptune which
orbits the Sun at an average distance of 2.8 billion miles.
It would take this new planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make just one full orbit
around the Sun.
Astronomers, including Batygin and Brown, will begin using the world's most powerful
telescopes to search for the object in its predicted orbit.
Any object that is distant from the Sun will be very faint and hard to detect, but astronomers
calculate that it should be possible to see it using existing telescopes.
Ghost Planets For more than a century, astronomers have
mused about such a planet, erroneously believing that something hefty was perturbing Neptune's
orbit.
Astronomer Percival Lowell called the world Planet X and was so intent on finding it that
he left a million dollars to fund the continuing search after his death in 1916.
In 1930, the Lowell Observatory's Clyde Tombaugh found little Pluto instead.
The Caltech team based their prediction of Planet Nine's existence on how it perturbs
a group of Kuiper Belt Objects or KBOs.
These small, icy worlds beyond Neptune include a population of objects with extreme orbits
that take them at least 150 times farther from the sun than Earth's orbit.
In 2016, Batygin and Brown scrutinized six of those objects, whose oblong, tilted orbital
paths have confounded scientists for years.
The team concluded that an unseen planet about 10 times as massive as Earth must be gravitationally
shepherding the objects onto their catawampus trajectories.
The planet's estimated mass sits between Earth and Neptune, making it a type of world that
appears to be common throughout the galaxy, based on surveys of planets orbiting other
stars, yet is conspicuously absent in our solar system.
Soon after the announcement, though, astronomers began casting doubts on the Planet Nine hypothesis.
Chief among their concerns was that the peculiar clustering of orbits might not be clustering
at all.
Instead, over the past five years, multiple teams using a variety of data sets have repeatedly
concluded that the evidence pointing to Planet Nine is nothing more than an observational
artifact.
Perhaps Planet Nine is an apparition, it's supposed gravitational handiwork, a false
signature created by a small number of misleading data points.
Astronomers are still working on resolving the controversy, and this latest analysis
from Brown and Batygin is one attempt to do that.
Refining the Search Brown and Batygin based their newest predictions
of Planet Nine’s size and orbit on a slightly different set of objects.
Some of the original KBOs remain in their data set, but the team added new ones and
threw out any objects whose orbits appeared to be influenced by Neptune’s gravity.
In the end, they worked with 11 KBOs.
The new study finds that there’s a 99.6 percent chance that the peculiar orbital alignments
of these objects are the work of an unseen planet and not random chance.
Batygin also ran a heap of simulations to predict the characteristics of whatever world
might be sculpting those 11 orbits—chiefly, its location and mass.
The result is the "treasure map" pointing to Planet Nine's orbit on the sky—although
the team still has no idea where the planet could be along that path.
Although it’s now estimated to be smaller—roughly five- or six-times Earth’s mass rather than
10—the planet is also apparently closer.
This means Planet Nine should be brighter in the sky, although Brown points out that
the planet’s estimated brightness is based on assumptions about its composition, which
could be wrong.
The new predictions bring the hypothetical world more in line with a similar claim made
by astronomers Chad Trujillo and Scott Sheppard.
In 2014, that team reported the discovery of an object called 2012 VP113, which they
jokingly nicknamed “Biden” after then U.S. Vice President Joe Biden.
They suggested that a faraway world five times as massive as Earth could be nudging Biden
and several other distant objects into clustered trajectories.
But despite the converging hypotheses, experts in the field are nowhere close to reaching
a consensus about Planet Nine’s existence.
Why is it Elusive?
The fact that scientists haven’t yet set eyes on Planet Nine could suggest that if
it exists, the world is positioned near the farthest reaches of its orbit, making it a
faint, slowly moving target that’s hiding in starlight.
Brown and Batygin, plus Sheppard and Trujillo, are using the powerful Subaru telescope situated
atop Hawaii’s Mauna Kea to hunt for the elusive planet.
But even with the sharpest tools in astronomers’ arsenal, the search is challenging.
At its surmised brightness and orbit, Planet Nine inconveniently blends into the glittering
masses of background stars—a world adrift amid the milky streamer of our galaxy in the
nighttime sky.
Sifting through starfields using Subaru isn't the only way astronomers could pin the planet
in the sky.
NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which is busy searching for planets orbiting
other stars, may catch sight of Planet Nine as it scans areas that include the planet's
supposed orbit.
In 2019, astronomers suggested that clever data processing could pull faraway solar system
objects from TESS observations—a technique that scientists are currently working on.
Many astronomers agree that planet hunters’ most likely chance of finding Planet Nine
is the Vera Rubin Observatory, currently under construction atop a Chilean mountaintop.
This 8.4-meter telescope with an enormous field of view will photograph the entire visible
sky every few nights.
Starting in 2023, the observatory will let astronomers track the movements of millions
of celestial objects, including space junk, asteroids, comets, spy telescopes, stars,
and maybe even Planet Nine.
Brown thinks the planet could turn up before fancy, next-generation telescopes come online—perhaps,
he says, the stealthy world is lurking in data that astronomers already have in hand.
An Intriguing Alternative There is an almost outrageously peculiar scenario
in which the planet may never be found.
This is if it is not a planet after all, but a black hole.
All of the evidence for there being an object is gravitational, and while we're most familiar
with the idea that planets exert a powerful gravitational pull, other more exotic celestial
objects can also generate it.
Some plausible replacements for planet nine include a small ball of ultra-concentrated
dark matter or a primordial black hole.
As black holes are among the densest objects in the Universe it's entirely possible one
could be warping the orbits of distant objects in the outer solar system, including the orbits
of Uranus and Neptune.
Outro That is all we have for you today.
If you enjoyed this video, you may also like this one about Vulcan: The Planet that Never
Was.
Do you think that Planet X exists or is it a black hole?
Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.