Scientists find new minor planets beyond Neptune.
Voyager 2 took this photo of Neptune in 1989.
Using data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES), scientists have discovered more than 300 trans-Neptunian objects — TNOs) – minor planets located in the far reaches of the Solar System. The published study also describes a new approach to finding objects of this type and may help in the search for a hypothetical Ninth Planet and other undiscovered planets. The work was led by PhD student Pedro Bernardinelli and Professors Gary Bernstein and Masao Sako.
Why scientists believe that the Ninth Planet does not exist.
The artist’s idea of the Ninth Planet as an ice giant, eclipsing the center of the Milky Way, with a sun-like star depicted on the background. Neptune’s orbit is shown as a small ellipse around the Sun.
It has been almost three years since one of the most interesting speculations concerning our own space court emerged: that far beyond the orbit of Neptune in our Solar System, there may be another planet even more massive than Earth. Unlike the tiny worlds previously discovered in the Kuiper Belt, such as Pluto or Eris, this may be a world larger than Earth, with a mass probably ten times that of Earth, and responsible for giving objects visible to us strange orbits.
As suggested by Konstantin Batygin and Michael Brown, additional evidence should speak in favor of its existence, some of which have begun to appear. However, most scientists disagree with this evidence. They claim that this data is biased. And if you take this into account, then no Ninth Planet is needed anymore.
New evidence for the existence of the ninth planet.
For several years, the scientific world has been talking about the possibility of the existence of a ninth planet in the Solar System (Pluto, sorry). Perhaps this object is located on the outer edge of the Solar system, much further away than the planets of the outer circle. So far, there is no direct evidence, but indirect evidence is gradually accumulating.
For the first time, scientists announced the possibility of the presence of a huge object in the Solar System in 2016. Then astronomers from the United States Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin for a long time observed asteroids and comets in the outer regions of the Solar System. It turned out that these objects behave somewhat strangely.
The secret of the ninth planet: scientists are getting closer to discovery.
Far beyond the eight planets of the Solar System, even beyond Pluto and the miniature dwarf planets, a significant new world may be lurking, dubbed the ” ninth planet.” Few discoveries can be as sensational as another planet orbiting the Sun, so this topic serves as the Holy Grail for astronomers – and in a few centuries, such a discovery has been made only a few times. So far, no one knows where this ephemeral world may be located, or even if it actually exists. But in the race for discovery, researchers are narrowing down the search space based on the influence of a celestial body on the Solar System, and the area of space where a planet should be searched has shrunk by about half compared to the state it was a few months ago. At the meeting of the American Astronomical Society of Planetary Sciences and the European Congress of Planetary Sciences, the scientists detailed their latest achievements in this field.
The tilt of the Sun’s rotation axis can be explained by the influence of an undiscovered planet in the Solar System.
Scientists have been discussing the possible presence of a ninth planet in the Solar System for a long time. Despite the fact that just a few months ago, the discovery of another planet was claimed by a group of scientists as a fait accompli, its presence has not yet been proven. Pluto, then the Kuiper Belt-it is now considered the edge of the Solar system, then there is only the Oort cloud.
Even if the ninth planet exists, it is still too difficult to detect it by direct observation. Most likely, it is very far from the Sun. But the planet can also be discovered by mathematical calculations, rather than by direct observation, as astronomers of the past and present have done more than once. The
mysterious Planet X could have been captured by the Sun from another star system.
In the work ” Is there an exoplanet in the Solar system?”, published on March 24 on the website astronomers from Lund University (Sweden) and the laboratory of the Bordeaux Observatory (France) have numerically confirmed the possibility that the 9th planet, whose existence is indirectly confirmed by some observations, could be captured from the surrounding space by the gravity of the Sun.
Thus, this planet (if it exists) you can call it an exoplanet – that is, a planet originating from another star system. When conducting computer simulations, the scientists used three assumptions.
— the captured planet had to participate in the formation of such orbits of our own planets as we observe today — the star whose planet we stole had to have a planet with an orbit of a large diameter (more than 100 au) — the capture of the planet had to take place from a distance of about 150 au, so as not to cause confusion in the bodies of the Kuiper belt.
New evidence for the existence of the ninth planet has been obtained.
Hey Planet Nine fans, a new eccentric KBO was discovered. And it is exactly where Planet Nine says it should be. pic.twitter.com/oZn0RDq8JF.
Astronomer Mike Brown, who at the beginning of the year spoke about obtaining indirect evidence of the existence of a ninth planet in our Solar System, announced the receipt of a new confirmation of its existence. In the Kuiper Belt, another object has been discovered, the behavior of which can be explained by the gravitational influence of Planet X.
In January 2016, Brown and his colleague Batygin published a paper in which they showed that the movement of six Kuiper Belt objects is best explained by the presence in the Solar System of a hitherto unknown planet with a mass of 10 Earth masses, located in an elongated orbit. Its orbit should change from 200 to 1200 AU.
Lecture ” Cold treasures of Distant Extraterrestrials»
2015 can be called the year of dwarf planets-the Dawn probe entered orbit around Ceres, New Horizons flew past Pluto. And the beginning of 2016 was marked by talk about the distant and mysterious ninth planet. It’s time to talk about the outer Solar system. This is the subject of my next lecture, “Cold Treasures of the Far Extraterrestrials”. It is distant and cold, but it holds a lot of interesting things. Methane rivers and icy shores, subglacial oceans with possible life, asteroid detectives, discoveries at the tip of a pen and the” eyes ” of automatons.
The Ninth planet: pros and cons.
On January 20, 2016, newspapers, magazines, blogs and news agency websites were covered with sensational news — scientists have discovered a new planet. Naturally, more serious and specialized publications expressed themselves much more cautiously — a new gas giant half the size of Neptune still exists only in the form of a computer model, which with a very high (but still not high enough to unequivocally declare the discovery) degree of confidence explains the anomalies in the orbits of several transplutonic objects.
The astronomers from the California Institute of Technology, Michael Brown and Konstantin Batygin, who published the article, constantly emphasize that they were initially very skeptical about their model. The idea of the existence of a large planet at a distance of several hundred astronomical units from the Sun with an orbital period of 10-20 thousand years originally arose as one of the ways to explain the anomalous cluster of six bodies outside the orbit of Pluto, including the planetoid Sedna. The probability of accidental occurrence of such a grouping is only 0.007%.
New indirect signs of the ninth planet of the Solar System have been discovered.
In general, I did not want to write anything on this topic. If you closely follow the news of astronomy, the ninth planet is “discovered” almost every year. And these are always initial observations, and indirect signs that do not find confirmation. But today’s news has spread to the top of the news and the headlines are thundering without alternative “The ninth planet has been discovered”. Not really. And now we’ll try to figure out what we found there.
