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Is Earth’s solar system home to eight planets – or nine?
The answer depends on who you ask. Ever since Pluto was demoted as a planet, a group of scientists still believe that there is a ninth planet somewhere. Evidence abounds in our solar system: The bizarre orbits of a group of distant objects near Pluto suggest something massive is disturbing them.
The challenge is that no one has been able to directly observe Planet Nine. That’s not entirely surprising: given its likely distance from our sun, it would be incredibly small.
But as with dark matter and dark energy, the inability to observe something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Now a new study is reexamining old observations and calculating new ones, suggesting that Planet Nine is more likely to be a real planet in a frigid, distant part of our solar system, but closer than previously thought. .
The study, published in the preprint arXiv last month and recently accepted for publication by the Astronomical Journal, suggests that there is only a 0.4% chance that Planet Nine is a statistical fluke. This recalculation is based on both more recent observations and ancient evidence that argued in favor of Planet Nine in the first place.
In addition to that calculation, the new study provides astronomers with a map of its orbit and some of the best places in the sky to look for it. Its orbit was inferred by examining how other objects in the Outer Solar System have their own orbits apparently disturbed by another massive object. The proposed new orbit suggests that the hypothetical planet is closer to the sun than previously believed, which could make it easier for astronomers to spot. The predicted mass has also been revised: Based on new observations, Planet Nine is expected to be only six times the mass of Earth, instead of 20 times its size.
“Being closer, even if it’s a little less massive, it’s a little brighter than originally expected,” study co-author Michael Brown, professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology. . “So I’m delighted that this helps us find him much faster.”
According to National Geographic, Brown estimates that Planet Nine is “in a year or two after being discovered.”
However, Brown admitted, “I’ve made this statement every year for the past five years. I’m super optimistic.”
Meanwhile, in a blog post, Brown further explained that several factors have changed since he and his colleagues first came up with the idea for Planet Nine. First, Brown argues that there is a better understanding of how Planet Nine might affect the objects around it. Second, he says scientists have a better understanding of the observations that have been made in recent years. Third, through various numerical simulations, Brown and his team “understand how changes to the parameters of Planet Nine affect the outer solar system.” And finally, thanks to a new mathematical model, scientists “now have probability distributions of all the parameters of Planet Nine”.
The new document is sure to spark some controversy in astronomical circles. Previously, speculation about what disrupted the orbits of distant transneptunian bodies focused on the existence of a massive object – although such an object does not necessarily have to be a planet.
In 2019, a separate article proposed a very different theory behind Planet Nine. Then astronomers asked: what if Planet 9 was not a planet at all, but rather a primordial black hole – as in, a hypothetical type of small black hole that formed shortly after the Big Bang, in beginning of the Universe, as a result of density fluctuations? Such a novel idea might have explained why powerful telescopes never detected as much as a theoretical distant planet flicker. Likewise, black holes do not emit visible light at all; on the contrary, they absorb all photons that pass their event horizon, while occasionally emitting energy in the (theorized but never directly observed) form of Hawking radiation.
However, Brown is hoping that the Vera Rubin Observatory, currently under construction atop a Chilean mountain, can discover Planet Nine when it becomes available to astronomers in 2023.
To the unknown, astronomers believe planet nine exists in part because a handful of Kuiper Belt objects appear to be clustered in the same orientation in space. It could be random, but the pattern observed in the orbits of these objects makes it more likely to be the result of the gravitational force of an elusive, massive object – hence, Planet Nine.
However, critics have often said that “observation bias” may be the truth behind Planet Nine. In Brown’s blog post, he admits that “the biases are real”, but also notes, “I’m here to show you that it doesn’t cause the clustering that we see.”
As Brown explains: “There is a lot of bias, and the observations are usually wrong. [sic] along the bias lines. But the bias clearly cannot explain the fact that the eye sockets are tilted and that they are tilted in one direction. ”
If discovered, it will be the first planet in our solar system to be discovered since Neptune in 1846. Similar to Planet Nine, astronomers discovered Neptune using mathematics after noticing that Uranus was slightly out of orbit by a unknown body. Astronomers were able to deduce the mass of the unknown planet and then where to look.
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