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Today, physicist Eugene Bagashov explores a long-standing,
highly controversial hypothesis in astronomy,
the alleged existence of the so-called planet nine in our solar system.
Some astronomers have proposed that the gravitational influence of such a planet
outside the orbit of Neptune could explain some anomalies,
including the odd clustering of some trans-Neptunian objects.
Eugene will discuss the evidence for and against such a planet,
and how the data that supposedly supports planet nine's existence
might be better explained by Electric Universe concepts.
In the recent years there is an ongoing debate about the possible existence
of a relatively large planet in the solar system outside the orbit of Neptune,
so let's take a look at it in some more detail.
Now, of course there are some pretty radical hypotheses with regards to that
involving the so called planet X, Nibiru
or even the binary companion of the Sun called Nemesis and such,
but I won't be focusing on these
as to me a lot of it seems too controversial and based on little evidence.
I haven't yet seen any coherent and conclusive research done into these,
though if you are aware of it, please let me know.
Instead, I wish to focus on the most recent installment
involving the so called planet 9 proposed by Batygin and Brown in 2016.
And in particular, we'll take a look at their recent paper published in February.
Of course, the ideas that such an object might exist are not really new.
Essentially, right after the discovery of Neptune in 1846,
some people have hypothesized that other distant planets might also be somewhere out there.
Eventually in 1930, Pluto was discovered
but it was smaller than expected
so people weren't really satisfied and continued the search of larger bodies.
And with regards to the discovery of Neptune, I should make a digression here.
As you probably know, it is generally assumed
that Neptune's position was predicted by Urbain Le Verrier,
following from the observations of the perturbations in the orbit of Uranus.
The scientific public at the time was so fascinated by it,
that the other French scientist Francois Arago praised Le Verrier as,
"the man who discovered a planet with the point of his pen."
It was assumed to be a huge triumph of Newtonian mechanics
but unfortunately, if one looks at the actual prediction made by Le Verrier,
it is clear that the predicted orbit is so much different
with respect to the actually observed one,
that the following discovery was only possible with a great deal of luck.
His estimate for the mass of Neptune was also more than twice bigger than the actual one.
It was almost a coincidence that Neptune at that time
really was in the same region of the sky as predicted.
It just goes to show how effective the propaganda of Newtonian mechanics has been
and how deeply rooted it is in our modern culture.
The common narrative is that
we might easily calculate anything that happens in the solar system,
whereas if one starts working with these problems first hand
one immediately realizes how problematic it is.
Unfortunately, solar system is inherently chaotic
and it has been known from at least the very beginning of the 20th century.
Not only that, but even the exact solution
of Newtonian equations of motion for 3 and more bodies is impossible.
So much for the billions of years old clockwork solar system, I guess.
Finishing this argument, I just note that about a decade later,
Le Verrier a also predicted the existence of planet Vulcan,
this time somewhere between Mercury and the Sun.
I think it's worth noting here that such a planet has never been found
and would probably never be found because it's just not there.
So let us now examine the hypothesis proposed by Batygin and Brown.
They turn our attention to a class of relatively recently discovered objects
that have perihelion distance of over 30 astronomical units,
which is the orbit of Neptune, but semi-major axis of over 250 AU.
What they are seeing in their works is, that there is a peculiar asymmetry
in the arrangement of orbits of objects in the outer solar system.
Take a look at this picture,
where I've plotted the orbits of these objects to illustrate that.
As you might see, there is a noticeable accumulation
of the aphelia in the left side of the picture.
And even the two objects on the right
seem to have their orbits clustered around the same axis.
So the logic behind the argument is as follows,
we cannot explain such orbits through nebular hypothesis alone,
as all these objects are dynamically detached from the eight known major planets;
they're simply too far away to influence them and to cause such clustering.
As an example here, I've also added the orbit of Neptune with an orange circle.
See if you can even notice that at such a scale.
Therefore, the researchers conclude,
there might exist another body with the orbit mostly on the opposite side
― the hypothetical planet 9, the estimated orbit of which I've added in green.
As a rough intuitive approximation, one could think of that as a seesaw
where the authors propose to balance out many little kids on one side of the Sun
with a much heavier fat guy, the planet 9, on the other.
Then it would seem, in gravitationally centered dynamics
the picture would more or less make sense
and supposedly be stable on timescales of at least hundreds of millions of years.
Just to place it in context, the orbital periods of these detached objects
range from about 4,000 to about 85,000 years.
So following from this data, I wish to propose two alternative lines of thinking,
not involving Planet nine but more specific to the Electric Universe paradigm.
The first scenario would be to explain the observed asymmetry
and peculiar alignment of outer solar system bodies,
not through a constant long-term gravitational interaction with a single body
such as the planet nine,
but rather to a single catastrophic event that occurred in the past of the solar system.
Here different smaller branches of this scenario are possible,
but to name just a couple of them, I would mention
the entry and following capture of one or more of the giant planets into the solar system,
more or less in line with the Saturn mythology
and some alternative theories such as the Jupiter myth,
currently developed by Julian West and some other researchers.
Possible breakup of the hypothetical polar configuration of Earth, Mars, Venus, and Saturn,
is another possible example of such catastrophic event.
Indeed, one could imagine that a destructive event of such a scale
would significantly reorganize the whole system, and it's completely understandable
that for example, a giant planet such as Jupiter or Saturn
would cause significant disruption in its outer regions
had it had been passing through these areas sometime in the past.
I wouldn't even exclude some more complex electromagnetic interaction of these bodies
rather than just gravitational, if it indeed happened.
Other possibilities for such a catastrophe might include, for example,
an extremely powerful solar event
such as the Sun going Nova, as currently promoted by Ben Davidson.
The electromagnetic disruption from such an occurrence
could have thrown the other bodies in chaos
as it would cause the dramatic expansion of the heliosphere,
powerful plasma pressure, induced electric currents and magnetic fields,
all of which, depending on their magnitude, could have significantly altered their orbits
as the farther the object is, the weaker is its gravitational connection to the star,
so even modest changes in, say its speed, might alter its orbit by quite a lot.
Just as an example, I'll show one possibility that doesn't look improbable to me,
though would require significant non-gravitational interactions to take place.
Let's assume that proto-Jupiter or proto-Saturn was approaching the proto-solar system
on a hyperbolic trajectory, as shown in red on this picture.
Then it entered the heliosphere, the current extent of which is about 120 AU.
I've shown it here with the semi-transparent sphere.
And perhaps some sort of plasma interaction occurred,
or maybe the gravitational interaction with other already existing planets,
or maybe both, and our stray proto planet was captured.
But this event generated a lot of debris, some of which still had excess velocity,
so it continued to move in a much more elliptical orbit
thus generating the swarm of these objects with the farthest points from the Sun
located on the opposite side of the system.
Dynamically speaking, this scenario makes sense, I believe,
though it doesn't clearly explain how these three objects might have obtained their orbits,
the ones that I've redrawn in darker blue.
But perhaps, they're the result of some later interactions
which took place as our assumed proto planet was settling in the lower orbit.
And the second scenario that I'd like to propose
would be the influence from larger scale plasma structures around the solar system,
such as the hypothetical Birkeland current
or a field aligned current in a more standard plasma physics terminology,
that the solar system is supposedly traveling along.
So it is not impossible in my opinion that if such a current exists,
it might significantly alter not only the orbits of the inner solar system objects
but perhaps even more so the very distant objects,
which again are traveling slower and are more loosely bound to the Sun in the first place.
And as you could have already seen, these objects having the semi-major axis
of their orbits a few hundreds astronomical units or even more than a thousand,
spend almost all their time outside of the solar plasma bubble, the heliosphere,
thus being directly exposed to the interstellar magnetic fields and currents.
With regards to this scenario, I would so far mark only one observation.
As Batygin and Brown indicate in their papers,
the average of these objects' perihelia longitudes corresponds to 73 degrees.
I've plotted that direction with a brown arrow.
You can clearly see how the absolute majority of them cluster around this axis.
And perhaps the most interesting thing is that it is almost exactly
the direction of the interstellar plasma wind that's ramming into the solar system,
moving in a direction with the longitude of 75 degrees.
I have indicated it with a purple arrow.
Yet, this is not all there is.
The ecliptic plane, which is roughly the plane of motion of planets,
crosses the solar equator at exactly the same line with a longitude of 75 degrees.
We cross that line each year roughly on December 6th and June 6th,
and during the December crossing we observe the so called helium cone,
the flux of neutral helium from the interstellar wind
that is getting focused by gravitational attraction from the Sun.
If I now plot the solar equator plane, shown by the orange plane here,
one could see that the orbits of these distant objects
seem to cluster more or less close to it and in a pretty symmetric manner.
And even that is not all.
The orbit of the closest planet to the Sun, Mercury,
has its semi-major axes pretty well aligned with the same direction.
Mercury's perihelium is at 77 degrees longitude,
only two degrees away from the interstellar wind direction
and the crossing line of the ecliptic and solar equator.
In my opinion, this might indicate something important
though it is not clear yet what exactly is going on.
But it almost seems like the whole system,
from the Sun itself and the closest planet to the very far away objects,
is organized in some manner that might be directly related to
larger scale plasma structures and phenomena in interstellar space around us.
To conclude that consideration, I'd note that in my opinion
the general question of dynamical stability of gravitational systems needs revision.
So far, the best idea astronomers have come up with
is that resonances keep such systems stable,
so over a significant amount of time one would find only system with some resonances,
because the other ones would either disintegrate or reorganize
in order to demonstrate such resonances.
But perhaps the resonances themselves do not occur randomly
but are associated with some external influence,
which in the case of solar system might be related to our interstellar environment,
the plasma currents, and magnetic fields,
or even larger scale structures, the Galactic spiral arms, etc.
And perhaps the laws of Kepler at large distances need revision too,
to include the electromagnetism into account,
in the light of the non-detection of dark matter and such.
Remembering the case of Le Verrier and Neptune, perhaps it would be too optimistic
to rely on gravitational only model to find the planet 9.
That way or another, I also wish to note that the very existence of Planet nine
and even Planet ten and eleven and more,
does not directly contradict the Electric Universe paradigm.
I'm more than sure that as our equipment gets better and better
and more and more time is being devoted to looking at the sky by various observatories,
would find many more objects somewhere out there.
The purpose of this video was only to indicate
that it is possible to reinterpret the data
that is used to predict the existence of this particular version of Planet nine
as proposed by Batygin and Brown, within other scenarios,
perhaps more interesting from the Electric and Plasma Universe perspectives.
These outer objects that have been considered above,
indeed serve as our probes into the nearby interstellar space
and thus perhaps we might make some conclusions from their behavior
and better understand how cosmic bodies behave in general.