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Blobrana


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Planet X
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  Japanese scientists eye mysterious 'Planet X'

Scientists at a Japanese university said Thursday they believed another planet up to two-thirds the size of the Earth was orbiting in the far reaches of the solar system.
The researchers at Kobe University in western Japan said calculations using computer simulations led them to conclude it was only a matter of time before the mysterious "Planet X" was found.
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Ed ~ At least one Mars sized Kuiper Belt Object is statistically possible.



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Blobrana


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Tyche
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A planet-size object could be behind the odd departure of some comets from the Oort Cloud--and toward us.

What's nudging comets our way? Every so often a comet gets flung out of the Oort Cloud, a swarm of comets on the fringes of the solar system, and gets close enough to Earth for us to see it. But they don't seem to be scattered at random.
Jack Lissauer of NASA's Ames Research Centre at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Boston. Lissauer and his colleagues have long suspected a planet-size object, sometimes called Tyche, could be hiding in the Oort Cloud.
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penelopeB


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RE: Planet X
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What it may be. Its another disvocery that we can be proud of. Little by little, we can learn more about the space and the Solar System. A National Aeronautics and Space Administration space telescope might be able to verify the existence of a previously undiscovered huge planet far beyond Pluto. I read this here: A new giant planet dubbed Tyche could be sending comets our way. Comet trajectories show scientists that something unaccounted for factors in the equation. The presence of a huge planet in deep space would make the numbers add up. The planet, called Tyche by a team of astrophysicists, could show up in data from a National Aeronautics and Space Administration space telescope that scans the sky in infrared.

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Blobrana


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Tyche
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Is a Rogue Giant Orbiting Our Sun?

The argument Matese and his colleague Dan Whitmire have been making since the late 1990s is that some comets seem to be moving in toward the Sun from a skewed direction. They start out in the Oort Cloud, a vast collection of perhaps trillions of small, icy chunks that hover at the very outer edges of the Solar System. Every so often, a passing star or the tidal effect of the Milky Way itself jostles the cloud, sending some of the chunks sunward to light up the night sky as comets.
When Matese and Whitmire analysed the orbits of these Oort Cloud comets, about 20% of them seemed to come not from the random directions you'd expect, but from a narrower section of sky. This might suggest a giant planet, at least the size of Jupiter and maybe up to four times as big. Its size would not be its only remarkable feature; it's remote orbit would be another - a tidy trillion miles from the Sun, or more than a thousand times more distant than Pluto.
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Blobrana


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RE: Planet X
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UL Professors Comet Theory

Two UL Lafayette astrophysicists believe there's something in our solar system that's sending comets toward earth.
This NASA graphic shows 'the Oort Cloud,' which surrounds our solar system.
It contains billions of comets.  Scientists believe there's something four times as big as Jupiter that's pushing some of those comets our way.
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Blobrana


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Giant stealth planet may explain rain of comets from solar system's edge

Our sun may have a companion that disturbs comets from the edge of the solar system - a giant planet with up to four times the mass of Jupiter, researchers suggest.
A NASA space telescope launched last year may soon detect such a stealth companion to our sun, if it actually exists, in the distant icy realm of the comet-birthing Oort cloud, which surrounds our solar system with billions of icy objects.
The potential jumbo Jupiter would likely be a world so frigid it is difficult to spot, researchers said. It could be found up to 30,000 astronomical units from the sun. One AU is the distance between the Earth and the sun, about 150 million km.
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Blobrana


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Title: Cometary evidence of a massive body in the outer Oort cloud
Authors: J. J. Matese, P. G. Whitman, D. P. Whitmire

Approximately 25% of the 82 new class I Oort cloud comets have an anomalous distribution of orbital elements that can best be understood if there exists a bound perturber in the outer Oort cloud. Statistically significant correlated anomalies include aphelia directions, energies, perihelion distances and signatures of the angular momentum change due to the Galaxy. The perturber, acting in concert with the galactic tide, causes these comets to enter the loss cylinder - an interval of Oort cloud comet perihelion distances in the planetary region which is emptied by interactions with Saturn and Jupiter. More concisely, the impulse serves to smear the loss cylinder boundary inward along the track of the perturber. Thus it is easier for the galactic tide to make these comets observable. A smaller number of comets are directly injected by the impulsive mechanism.
We estimate that the perturber-comet interactions take place at a mean distance of 25000 AU. The putative brown dwarf would have a mass of 3 x÷ 2MJupiter and an orbit whose normal direction is within 5° of the galactic midplane. This object would not have been detected in the IRAS database, but will be detectable in the next generation of planet/brown dwarf searches, including SIRTF. It is also possible that its radio emissions would make it distinguishable in sensitive radio telescopes such as the VLA.

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Blobrana


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Jovian Mass Solar Companion
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Title: Persistent Evidence of a Jovian Mass Solar Companion in the Oort Cloud
Authors: John J. Matese, Daniel P. Whitmire

We present an updated dynamical and statistical analysis of outer Oort cloud cometary evidence suggesting the sun has a wide-binary Jovian mass companion. The results support a conjecture that there exists a companion of mass ~ 1-4 M_Jup orbiting in the innermost region of the outer Oort cloud. Our most restrictive prediction is that the orientation angles of the orbit normal in galactic coordinates are centred on the galactic longitude of the ascending node Omega = 319 degree and the galactic inclination i = 103 degree (or the opposite direction) with an uncertainty in the normal direction subtending ~ 2% of the sky. A Bayesian statistical analysis suggests that the probability of the companion hypothesis is comparable to or greater than the probability of the null hypothesis of a statistical fluke. Such a companion could also have produced the detached Kuiper Belt object Sedna. The putative companion could be easily detected by the recently launched Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE).

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Blobrana


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RE: Planet X
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A substellar solar companion in the Oort cloud?

The following figure illustrates the scatter on the celestial sphere of outer Oort cloud comet aphelia directions  in galactic coordinates. The pronounced deficiencies at the galactic equator and at the galactic poles are characteristic of the galactic interaction which is minimal at these locations. But we also note an anomalous concentration of points along a "great circle" which passes near the galactic poles. In an article in the journal Icarus, we have suggested that there is statistically significant evidence that this concentration, amounting to an excess of approximately 25%, could be caused by a companion to the Sun which aids the galactic tide in making Oort cloud comets observable. The companion is estimated to have a mass of 3-5 MJupiter and a mean distance at the interaction site of 25000 AU. If there is no substantive inner Oort cloud, a closer orbit is possible. Its location along the great circle is not presently predictable and that will present a problem for detection, but it is potentially observable in the radio using the VLA and should also be observable in the infrared at 5 microns using the next generation of space telescopes such as Spitzer and SOFIA. An object with these properties would be readily seen by WISE (Ned Wright's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer), recently approved for a 2008 launch in NASA's Medium-class Explorer program of lower cost, highly focused, rapid-development scientific spacecraft. The estimated mass of the companion puts it below the nominal brown dwarf limit (~ 13 MJupiter ) where deuterium fusion can occur and would make it a planet in that context. However its location in the outer Oort cloud means that it is not possible that it formed in the protosolar planetary disk. The object could have been ejected from another stellar system and captured by the Sun in their complex star forming region.

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Blobrana


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An invisible star responsible for the extinction of dinosaurs may be circling the Sun and causing comets to bombard the Earth, scientists said.
The brown dwarf - up to five times the size of Jupiter - could be to blame for mass extinctions that occur here every 26 million years, The Sun reports.
The star - nicknamed Nemesis by Nasa scientists - would be invisible as it only emits infrared light and is incredibly distant.
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Ed ~ It should be noted that evidence, such as using pulsar timings, indicate that there is no PlanetX.

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