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Post Info TOPIC: Planet X
Blobrana


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RE: Planet X
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Title: Observational bias and the clustering of distant eccentric Kuiper belt objects
Author: Michael E. Brown

The hypothesis that a massive Planet Nine exists in the outer solar system on a distant eccentric orbit was inspired by observations showing that the objects with the most distant eccentric orbits in the Kuiper belt have orbits which are physically aligned, that is, they are clustered in longitude of perihelion and have similar orbital planes. Questions have remained, however, about the effects of observational bias on these observations, particularly on the longitudes of perihelion. Specifically, distant eccentric Kuiper belt objects tend to be faint and only observable near their perihelia, suggesting that the longitudes of perihelion of the known distant objects could be strongly biased by the limited number of locations in the sky where deep surveys have been carried out. We have developed a method to rigorously estimate the longitude of perihelion bias for Kuiper belt observations. We find that the probability that the 10 known Kuiper belt objects with semimajor axis beyond 230 AU are drawn from a population with uniform longitude of perihelion is 1.2%. Combined with the observation that the orbital poles of these object are also clustered, the overall probability of detecting these two independent clusterings in a randomly distributed sample is 0.025%. While observational bias is clearly present in these observations, it is unlikely to explain the observed alignment of the distant eccentric Kuiper belt objects.

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Blobrana


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Planet Nine
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Planet Nine: Astronomers want help from amateur stargazers

Astronomers at the Australian National University (ANU) want help in searching for a ninth planet thought to be orbiting our Solar System.
With a working title of Planet Nine, it is speculated to exist beyond Pluto.
Amateur stargazers have been promised input on naming the planet if they spot it on a website showing digital images of space.
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Blobrana


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Attention Earthlings: Help Wanted in Finding a New Planet

The pursuit of Planet Nine - a hypothesized Neptune-like giant that some scientists believe may be cruising along a remote orbit in our solar system - can now go door-to-door.
A new NASA-launched citizen science project seeks the public's help in reviewing more than a million animations to identify moving space objects that could be new discoveries. The effort benefited from data research on a cosmology project led by the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).
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Blobrana


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Posts: 131433
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RE: Planet X
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Title: Konstantin Batygin, Michael E. Brown
Author: Kosuke Namekata, Keisuke Isogai, Taichi Kato, Colin Littlefield, Katsura Matsumoto, Naoto Kojiguchi, Yuki Sugiura, Yusuke Uto, Daiki Fukushima, Taiki Tatsumi, Eiji Yamada, Taku Kamibetsunawa, Enrique de Miguel, William L. Stein, Richard Sabo, Maksim V. Andreev, Etienne Morelle, E. P. Pavlenko, Julia V. Babina, Alex V. Baklanov, Kirill A. Antonyuk, Okasana I. Antonyuk, Aleksei A. Sosnovskij, Sergey Yu. Shugarov, Polina Yu. Golysheva, Natalia G. Gladilina, Ian Miller, Vitaly V. Neustroev, Vahram Chavushyan, Jose R. Valdes, George Sjoberg, Yutaka Maeda, Hiroshi Itoh, Gianluca Masi, Raul Michel, Pavol A. Dubovsky, Seiichiro Kiyota, Tamas Tordai, Arto Oksanen, Javier Ruiz, Daisaku Nogami

The trans-Neptunian region of the solar system exhibits an intricate dynamical structure, much of which can be explained by an instability-driven orbital history of the giant planets. However, the origins of a highly inclined, and in certain cases retrograde, population of trans-Neptunian objects remain elusive within the framework of this evolutionary picture. In this work, we show that the existence of a distant, Neptune-like planet that resides on an eccentric and mildly inclined orbit fully accounts for the anomalous component the trans-Neptunian orbital distribution. Adopting the same parameters for Planet Nine as those previously invoked to explain the clustering of distant Kuiper belt orbits in physical space, we carry out a series of numerical experiments which elucidate the physical process though which highly inclined Kuiper belt objects with semi-major axes smaller than 100 AU are generated. The identified dynamical pathway demonstrates that enigmatic members of the Kuiper belt such as Drac and Niku are derived from the extended scattered disk of the solar system.

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Blobrana


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Planet Nine
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Title: Shaping of the inner Oort cloud by Planet Nine
Author: Erez Michaely, Abraham Loeb

We present a numerical calculation of the dynamical interaction between the proposed Planet Nine and an initially thin circular debris disk around the Sun for 4Gyr, accounting the secular perturbation of the four giant planets. We show that Planet Nine governs the dynamics in between 1000-5000AU and forms spherical structure in the inner part (~1000AU) surrounded by an inclined disk aligned to its orbital plane. This structure is the outcome of mean motion resonances and secular interaction with Planet Nine. We compare the morphology of this structure with the outcome from a fly-by encounter of a star with the debris disk and show distinct differences between the two scenarios. We predict that this structure serves as a source of comets and calculate the resulting comet production rate to be detectable.

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Blobrana


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Posts: 131433
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A New Planet in our Solar System? NASA Takes a Look

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Blobrana


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Scientists: Good Evidence for 9th Planet in Solar System

Scientists reported Wednesday they finally have "good evidence" for Planet X, a true ninth planet on the fringes of our solar system.
The gas giant is thought to be almost as big as Neptune and orbiting billions of miles beyond Neptune's path - distant enough to take 10,000 to 20,000 years to circle the sun.
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Blobrana


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Title: Are you there, Planet X? It's me, Voyager 1
Author: Lorenzo Iorio

We propose to use the navigation data of Voyager 1 collected during the latest three decades to put on the test the recently proposed hypothesis that one (or more) still unseen super-Earth(s) may lurk at about 200-250 Astronomical Units. Such a hypothetical body would perturb the range of Voyager 1 up to several hundreds of km over 30 years. Even if two-way coherent range and Doppler tracking were discontinued for Voyager 1 after the planetary flybys era due to cost reasons, it does not seems unrealistic to assume a ranging accuracy still better than 1 km. It would be fully adequate to put new, severe constraints on the existence of a hypothetical perturber with the physical and orbital characteristic recently suggested in the literature.

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Blobrana


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NASA's WISE Survey Finds Thousands of New Stars, But No 'Planet X'

After searching hundreds of millions of objects across our sky, NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has turned up no evidence of the hypothesized celestial body in our solar system commonly dubbed "Planet X."
Researchers previously had theorized about the existence of this large, but unseen celestial body, suspected to lie somewhere beyond the orbit of Pluto. In addition to "Planet X," the body had garnered other nicknames, including "Nemesis" and "Tyche."
This recent study, which involved an examination of WISE data covering the entire sky in infrared light, found no object the size of Saturn or larger exists out to a distance of 10,000 astronomical units (au), and no object larger than Jupiter exists out to 26,000 au. One astronomical unit equals 93 million miles. Earth is 1 au, and Pluto about 40 au, from the sun.
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Blobrana


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Sun May Still Have Low-Mass Solar Companion

Our sun may indeed have a far-flung gravitationally-bound companion - just not with the size or orbit that could have triggered periodicity in earths paleontological record, say astrophysicists now actively searching data from NASAs WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) spacecraft.
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