Hello Space Fans and welcome to another edition of Space Fan News.
Evidence for a ninth planet in our solar system.
Also, it is “brightest things in the sky week” as we look at the most luminous galaxy
in the universe rip itself apart, and astronomers record what is possibly the brightest supernova
ever seen.
This week astronomers at Cal Tech announced that our solar system may in fact have nine
planets after all, and no, it’s not about Pluto.
Researchers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown at Cal Tech have found there is evidence of
a ninth planet in our solar system.
This planet’s existence was inferred from simulations run through mathematical modeling
and computer simulations.
The planet, if it is confirmed to actually exist, has a mass about 10 times that of Earth
and orbits about 20 times farther from the sun on average than does Neptune (which orbits
the sun at an average distance of 2.8 billion miles).
So this thing would be pretty far out there.
In fact, it would take this new planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make just one full
orbit around the sun.
I want to emphasize that no one has actually observed this object yet.
It has only been inferred from models and simulations in an attempt to try and explain
a number of mysterious features of the field of icy objects and debris beyond Neptune known
as the Kuiper Belt.
Apparently something weird was going on with the orbits of some KBOs or Kuiper belt objects.
Six of the most distant KBO’s all follow elliptical orbits that point in the same direction
in physical space which astronomers on the team found surprising because the outermost
points of their orbits move around the solar system, and they travel at different rates.
What’s more the orbits of the six objects are also all tilted in the same way—pointing
about 30 degrees downward in the same direction relative to the plane of the eight known planets.
The probability of that happening randomly is about 0.007 percent.
So after eliminating other explanations like this effect being due to unseen and undiscovered
KBOs in the area, the team plugged in some numbers assuming there was a planet nearby.
They asked, what if there was a planet there?
Would the gravitational influence of an unseen planet explain what they were seeing?
That almost worked, but not quite so they tweaked things some more.
They found that if they ran their simulations with a massive planet, just like before, but
put it in an anti-aligned orbit—an orbit in which the planet's closest approach to
the sun, or perihelion, is 180 degrees across from the perihelion of all the other objects
and known planets—the distant Kuiper Belt objects in the simulation assumed the alignment
that is actually observed.
Talk about Just like Downtown, I want to re-emphasize that this planet has not actually been seen,
although this is a pretty compelling case for the existence of a planet, it still needs
to be confirmed.
This isn’t our first rodeo when it comes to finding unseen planets though.
Remember, Neptune was also predicted mathematically in 1846 before it was observed directly.
Iregularities in the orbit of Uranus suggested a planet like Neptune was out there, and it
turned out there was.
And Pluto, while not an actual planet, was called Planet X for years before it was actually
observed by Clyde Tombaugh.
So while the team is continuing to refine their simulations, they released this paper
this week to stimulate other astronomers and hopefully inspire them to start looking for
the planet through their telescopes and confirm its existence through observations.
I’ll let you know.
I would encourage you to go to the blog that the astronomers in this study began - findplanetnine.com
- to get a more complete picture of the story behind this currently theoretical planet.
Konstantin has a good post on the process they used to determine whether there might
be a planet there, and Mike has a post on whether the as yet unseen planet would be
classified as a planet under IAU guidelines, so go check it out.
Oh, and to all you NASA is hiding Nibiru from us conspiracy people: this is how you find
an actual planet that may actually exist.
And see?
NASA’s not hiding it, as if it even could.
Next, astronomers using ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter-submillimeter array have
used its unique capabilities to look inside one of the brightest objects in the universe
and trace the motion of ionised carbon atoms between the its component stars.
The object was discovered by NASA’s WISE and is known as W2246-0526.
It is a very bright quasar - among the brightest objects in the universe - but this one is
the brightest ever seen so far and belongs to a subclass of quasars known - I love this
- Hot DOG galaxies.
Hot DOG stands for Hot, Dust Obscured Galaxies and there are only about 3,000 of them known
to exist.
They are all extremely bright, even for a quasar.
But this one, W2246-0526, is the brightest of them all.
It is approximately 12.4 billion light years away; we’re seeing it when the universe
was only a little over a billion years old.
Shining with the combined luminosity of 350 billion suns, this galaxy is ripping itself
apart.
Astronomers using ALMA found large amounts of ionized carbon in a very turbulent state
throughout the entire galaxy.
The momentum and energy of the particles of light deposited in the gas are so great that
they are pushing the gas out in all directions.
The growing supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy is the likely engine
of this turbulence.
As the gravitational pull of the black hole attracts surrounding gas and other matter,
the material forms a structure around it called an accretion disk.
The friction from this disk produces the intense brightness, making the galaxy shine like a
combination of hundreds of trillion of suns.
The light from the blazingly bright accretion disc in the center of this Hot DOG doesn’t
escape directly, instead it is absorbed by a surrounding thick blanket of dust, which
re-emits the energy as infrared light.
This powerful infrared radiation has a direct and violent impact on the entire galaxy.
The region around the black hole is at least 100 times more luminous than the rest of the
galaxy combined, thus releasing intense yet localised radiation in W2246-0526 that is
exerting tremendous pressure on the entire galaxy.
Astronomers describe the turbulence in this galaxy as like a pot of boiling water being
heated up by a nuclear reactor in the center, but this boiling gas is not at the accretion
disk, it’s permeating throughout the entire galaxy.
The black hole's event horizon is thought to be one million times smaller than the galaxy
itself, yet the energy emitted by the black hole's swallowing of material affects gas
thousands of light-years away from it.
So, what’s going to happen to W2246-0526, the most luminous galaxy in the universe?
Astronomers say that a likely finale would be that the galaxy will blow out all of the
gas and dust that is surrounding it, and we would see the accretion disk without its dust
cover and lose it’s Hot DOG status, becoming just a regular-old run of the mill quasar.
Finally, astronomers are observing a ball of hot gas billions of light years away that
is radiating the energy of hundreds of billions of suns.
At its heart is an object a little larger than 10 miles across.
And the thing is, astronomers are not entirely sure what it is.
If it’s a supernova, as many are guessing, then it’s the brightest supernova we’ve
ever seen.
In a recent issue of the journal Science, astronomers report that the object at the
center could be a very rare type of star called a magnetar—but one so powerful that it pushes
the energy limits allowed by physics.
A magnetar is a neutron star with a very powerful magnetic field, more than a thousand trillion
times more powerful than the Earth’s magnetic field.
The one observed here would push the limits of the magnetic field strength to what’s
possible within the laws of physics, according to the astronomers using data from a project
that has the coolest acronym since SCExAO: The Automated All-Sky Survey for Supernovae
- that’s right, ASSASIN.
Astronomers are currently working on the possibility that this might be a supernova, but they aren’t
entirely sure.
Still, they’ve given the object the name ASAS-SN15lh because it was first found it
in 2015 by the supernova survey.
If it really is a magnetar, astronomers are saying it’s as if nature took everything
we know about magnetars and turned it up to 11, meaning this is one honking-bright thing.
Though ASAS-SN has discovered some 250 supernovae since the collaboration began in 2014, the
explosion that powered ASASSN-15lh stands out because of its sheer magnitude.
It is 200 times more powerful than the average supernova, 570 billion times brighter than
our sun, and 20 times brighter than all the stars in our Milky Way Galaxy combined.
That is so bright, that Astronomers aren’t sure how that’s even possible.
It takes a lot of energy to shine that bright, and that energy has to come from somewhere.
So, since they really aren’t sure what this thing is, astronomers are acknowledging that
this may lead to another whole new class of superluminous supernova.
Todd Thompson, professor of astronomy at Ohio State, offered one possible explanation.
The supernova could have spawned an extremely rare type of star called a millisecond magnetar,
a rapidly spinning and very dense star with a very strong magnetic field.
To shine so bright, this particular magnetar would also have to spin at least 1,000 times
a second, and convert all that rotational energy to light with nearly 100 percent efficiency,
It would be the most extreme example of a magnetar that scientists believe can be physically
possible.
If this is a magnetar, then astronomers conceded they’ve never seen anything like this before.
Luckily, the Hubble Space Telescope will come to the rescue later this year.
It will allow astronomers to see the host galaxy surrounding the object.
If the team finds that the object lies in the very center of a large galaxy, then it
may not be a magnetar at all, and the gas around it is not evidence of a supernova,
but instead some unusual nuclear activity around a supermassive black hole.
I’ll let you know.
Well, that’s it for this week Space Fans, thank you for watching, thanks to all of the
Patreon Supporters who are helping make SFN better, and as always, Keep Looking Up!