"The Goblin Planet: The Key to Planet 9" On June 30, 2016, astronomers announced that
they had discovered a new planet beyond Pluto. The announcement came after years of searching
for this elusive world, which would have been impossible without NASA's New Horizons spacecraft.
The new planet is currently being called 'The Goblin' for its mysterious nature and lack of
an official name yet. But does it have anything to do with the formation of planets? Can this
discovery lead to the mysterious ‘Planet Nine’? Our solar system's furthest reaches are dark
and frigid, making exploration challenging from Earth. However, diligent studies are revealing
more and more evidence for a large planet that we have yet to see. The Goblin, an incredibly remote
dwarf planet, has been identified in studies that are redefining the solar system's furthest limits.
Astronomers discovered the finding while looking for Planet Nine, a hypothetical huge
planet thought to be orbiting far beyond Pluto in a mysterious area known as the Oort Cloud.
Planet Nine has yet to be directly observed, but The Goblin looks to be under the gravitational
pull of a massive unseen object, giving astronomers even more reason to believe in
the existence of planet 9. We've been searching for evidence of Planet Nine since the first
possibility of its existence came to light back in 1984—but we haven't found any yet. What if
there are other planets like this one out there? What if they have their own moons or rings? What
if they have atmospheres like our own Earth does? How might this planet be affecting life on Earth?
In 1984, while making about our solar system, scientists found out that over the past 250
million years, mass extinctions had happened on Earth every 26 million. But what could cause these
periodic extinction events? What might be pushing these outer objects of the solar system towards
the inner solar system? Nemesis, a hypothetical red dwarf star, was hypothesized to circle the Sun
at a considerable distance. The star would fling a flood of comets towards the inner Solar system
every 26 million years as it passed through its closest approach to the Sun. The end result? One
of those comets would hit Earth, causing a global extinction. However, the evidence faded with time,
and no companion star was discovered. The Nemesis theory is no longer alive.
Tyche, a new "Planet X," was hypothesized around the turn of the millennium.
Whereas Nemesis was the bringer of death, Tyche's effect was more subtle, resulting in a modest
increase in the frequency of incoming comets from specific areas of the sky and explaining apparent
anomalies in their distribution. Once again, observations soon weakened the case for Tyche.
To explain the distribution of tiny, icy bodies beyond Neptune, an unknown, distant
Earth-mass planet was hypothesized in 2008. Other scientists speculated that planet-mass objects
may have developed alongside the Solar System's outer planets before being spread outward but
never expelled. All of this leads us to Planet X's most recent form, known as "Planet Nine."
All of you may be surprised to know that we are still learning about our solar system.
There are a lot of questions to be answered and a lot of things that we do not know.
We cannot Even answer the question – many planets are there in the solar system? Take
Pluto for example. Pluto was classified as a dwarf planet, and there are even more
dwarf planets in our solar system. In fact the largest asteroid in our solar system, Ceres,
is now classified as a dwarf planet. The Goblin is also a dwarf planet, much smaller than pluto;
about a fifth of the diameter of Pluto and it is really very far out there. The actual name
of the dwarf planet is 2015 TG388, and it was found three years ago by a team
of astronomers using the Subaru telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The astronomers,
led by Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science, were studying large swaths of the
sky for small glimmers that may indicate the presence of new objects in the solar system.
This dwarf planet is in a highly elongated orbit; the closest it ever gets is approximately twice
as far away is Pluto, and the furthest it ever gets is nearly 2,300 times the distance between
the Earth and the Sun; it travels way, way, far out there.The orbit is so elongated that it takes
40,000 years to complete one orbit around the sun, which is really really incredible.
The discovery of these far away objects beyond the Kuiper belt isn’t surprising though. They are so
distant and faint that they move incredibly slowly and are very very hard to detect.
Now this discovery is interesting for a number of reasons. And the most interesting one of them is
that there might be something larger out there, something we haven’t discovered yet in our solar
system. We have been noticing weird objects like the Goblin planet for quite a time now.
These distant frozen planets are known as Kuiper Belt objects, and they frequently have extended
orbits that bring them near to the Sun—by close, I mean roughly the orbit of Pluto and then much,
much farther out into the solar system. We currently know of dozens of these objects,
and there are likely many more out there that we are unaware of.
The intriguing thing is that we started seeing how their orbits lined up in our solar system,
and there's a concept called perihelion, which is the closest pass an object makes to the Sun. And,
surprisingly, all of these objects scattered throughout the sky appear to have perihelions
(closest approaches to the Sun) that are perfectly aligned. Why does it matter? Thing is,
there is no reason for these objects and their orbits to be aligned in such a way. If they were
separate orbiting bodies, their closest approach to the Sun would not coincide. So the concept is
that there is a larger body out there someplace, like a planet, and as it orbits, it lines up and
shepherds all these smaller particles into its orbit. The evidence for this is rather
convincing. We don’t know of any other reason or theory that would explain these lined up orbits.
The story of this mysterious Planet nine started in 2003 with the discovery of
another dwarf planet called Sedna. Sedna too has a highly unusual orbit, and its orbital
distances fluctuated between 75 Astronomical Units to 936 Astronomical Units from the sun.
What might be causing these odd orbit fluctuations? Sedna is too far away for
the planets to disturb it - they cannot be held responsible. At its most distant, Sedna is still
just one-fourth the distance to the closest star - so close to the Sun that a passing star is quite
unlikely to perform the crime. To explain the strange orbit, numerous theories proposed that
Sedna was placed there when the Solar System was young. The Sun would have been immersed within a
stellar cluster at the time, and near interactions with other stars would have been more common.
If Sedna's orbit was the consequence of capture in the early days of the Solar
System, one may anticipate additional objects to have suffered the same fate.
According to the notion, Sedna might be one of a population of Sednoids orbiting in similar orbits.
Several additional Sednoids have been discovered in the last decade. Surprisingly,
all of their orbits appear to closely coincide in space. In other words, their orbits' long
axes all point in the same general direction. This isn't what you'd anticipate from people
born in the Sun's birth cluster. So, what may be the reason? Several scholars used Planets
Nine to explain Sedna's peculiar orbit. Now the obvious question is where is this planet nine?
Our best estimates put it at least three to six times the mass of the earth, something on the
order of size of the planet Neptune. So overall this is a big planet we are talking about and it
might seem a bit embarrassing that we have missed an entire giant planet in our own solar system.
With today’s technology we can detect exoplanets in distants star systems,
how come we missed this planet? The thing is, if it's actually that far away from us in its orbit
right now; even a large planet would appear tiny to even the most powerful telescopes, we could
have missed it. It would also be traveling so slowly that we may not detect it was a planet.
Perhaps others mistook it for a faraway star. So telescopes all around the world are examining the
sky for any signs of an object moving extremely slowly that may be proof of this massive planet.
These far-away dwarf planets like the Goblin and Sedna could help us understand what’s happening at
the edge of our solar system. Because The Goblin planet moves so slowly and has such a long orbital
period, it took the scientists several years of observations to acquire a decent orbit.
Researchers believe there are hundreds of tiny bodies like 2015 TG387 on the outside of the
Solar System, but their distance makes locating them challenging. These faraway objects are
like breadcrumbs pointing us in the direction of Planet X. The more we learn, the more we
will comprehend the outer Solar System and the hypothetical planet that we believe is driving
their orbits—a revelation that will change our understanding of the Solar System's development.
Scientists did computer simulations to see how different possible Planet X orbits might
impact 2015 TG387's orbit. A Super-Earth-mass planet in an extended orbit at several hundred
AU was included in the simulations. What is particularly intriguing about this conclusion
is that Planet X appears to affect the Goblin in the same manner that all other extremely distant
Solar System objects do. These simulations do not confirm the existence of another enormous
planet in our Solar System, but they do provide more evidence that something large may exist.
So what do you think about this strange dwarf planet? Could there be more strange objects
like this in our outer solar system? How soon could we find the Planet “nine”? Let
us know what you think in the comment section below and share the video with your friends!