Skip to main content

CONSTRAINTS ON THE LOCATION OF A POSSIBLE 9TH PLANET

Image: The six most distant known objects in the solar system with orbits exclusively beyond Neptune (magenta) all mysteriously line up in a single direction. Such an orbital alignment can only be maintained by some outside force, Batygin and Brown say. Their paper argues that a planet with 10 times the mass of the earth in a distant eccentric orbit anti-aligned with the other six objects (orange) is required to maintain this configuration. Credit: Caltech

The astronomers have noticed some of the dwarf planets and other small, icy objects tend to follow orbits that cluster together. To explain the unusual distribution of these Kuiper Belt objects, several authors have advocated the existence of a superEarth planet in the outer solar system (planet Nine or planet X).


The prediction is based on detailed mathematical modeling and computer simulations, not direct observation. It has recently been proposed that a 10 Mearth object with an orbit of 700 AU semi major axis and 0.6 eccentricity can explain the observed distribution of Kuiper Belt objects around Sedna, a large minor planet in the outer reaches of the Solar System that was, as of 2015, at a distance of about 86 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun, about three times as far as Neptune.

Figure 1: Allowed zone for P9. The red zone (C14) is excluded by the analysis of the Cassini data up to 2014. The pink zone (C20) is how much this zone can be enlarged by extending the Cassini data to 2020. The green zone is the most probable zone for P9 (v ∈ [108◦:129◦]), with maximum reduction of the residuals at v = 117.8 ◦ (blue dot P9). The white zone is the uncertainty zone where the P9 perturbation is too faint to be detected. Credit: (Fienga et al. 2016)

In a recent paper (Fienga et al 2016) the authors try to obtain informations about the position of the planet X analyzing the Saturn orbit data obtained thanks to the tracking of the Cassini spacecraft during its exploration of the Saturnian system. According to their analysis the allowed zone for the actual position of the planet X are those shown in Figure 1.



  • Fienga et al. 2016 - Constraints on the location of a possible 9th planet derived from the Cassini data (arXiv)
  • Planet X - (NASA) (Wikipedia)

Comments

  1. SOME ONE PREDICT NEPTUNE MAKE THIS BUT IF SO NEPTUNE IS MOVING SO WILL NOT BE THERE AND ALL WILL BE A VERY BIG TIME COINCIDENCE IF NEPTUNE CREATE ALL THE ORBITS LIKE THOSE

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ORBITAL PERIODS OF THE PLANETS

For orbital period generally we refer to the sidereal period, that is the temporal cycle that it takes an object to make a full orbit, relative to the stars. This is the orbital period in an inertial (non-rotating) frame of reference (365,25 days for the earth).

ABOUT THE FORMATION OF THE COLD CLASSICAL KUIPER BELT

Image: The Kuiper Belt. Credit: NASA . The Kuiper belt is a circumstellar disc in the Solar System beyond the planets, extending from the orbit of Neptune (at 30 AU) to approximately 50 AU from the Sun. It is similar to the asteroid belt (the circumstellar disc located roughly between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter), but it is far larger-20 times as wide and 20 to 200 times as massive.

Fermi Bubbles

Image: A giant gamma-ray structure was discovered in 2010 by processing Fermi all-sky data at energies from 1 to 10 billion electron volts, shown here. The dumbbell-shaped feature (center) emerges from the galactic center and extends 50 degrees north and south from the plane of the Milky Way, spanning the sky from the constellation Virgo to the constellation Grus. Credits: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT/D. Finkbeiner et al. At a time when our earliest human ancestors mastered walking upright the heart of our Milky Way galaxy underwent a titanic eruption, driving gases and other material outward at 2 million miles per hour.