Space Sciences Planet 9 from outer space!

Second Summer

Second Summer

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The scientist who killed Pluto says there may be nine planets in the solar system after all.

Caltech astronomer Mike Brown and his astrophysicist colleague Konstantin Batygin say they’ve found compelling evidence that a giant planet orbits the sun in the dark, distant badlands far beyond Neptune.
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More: Astronomers' findings point to a ninth planet, and it's not Pluto

Amazing! This would be the long rumoured Planet X which astronomers in the past were searching for. When Pluto was first discovered it was thought that this "planet" could be it, but it was later found too lightweight (it's a dwarf planet after all!) to explain the orbital perturbations observed in the larger planets.
 
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Apparently it's too far away for humans to colonize when the inevitable happens and we destroy the earth. Unless we send babies there who will grow up en route and then have babies of their own en route who will be the colonizers once they're old enough.
 
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Wow how cool!!

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The four unknown objects were spotted in images of the southern sky captured recently by the SkyMapper telescope at Siding Spring Observatory in Australia. More than 60,000 people from around the world scoured these photos, making about 5 million classifications, said researchers with the Australian National University (ANU), which organized the citizen-science project.
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More: Where's Planet Nine? Citizen Scientists Spot 4 Possible Candidates (April 3, 2017)

It would be beyond awesome if Planet 9 were to be found with the help of citizen scientists!
 
I've been signed up with Zooniverse for years and they sent me a notice about helping to look through this data. I did a few and it was kind of exciting when you would spot the objects they think could point to another planet.

Zooniverse
 
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A couple of different views in the news lately about the existence of Planet 9. New Scientist reports that there may even be a planet 10:
Weird orbits hint ‘Planet Ten’ might lurk at solar system edge

... whereas Scientific American reports there are doubts about Planet 9:
Solar System Survey Casts Doubt on Mysterious "Planet Nine"

In any case, during the searches, several potential dwarf planets have been found in the Kuiper belt in the outer solar system, which sounds interesting enough in itself.
 
With the discovery of the dwarf planet The Goblin and its apparent orbit there is more evidence for the existence of Planet 9, or Planet X if you will:
Astronomers have found a dwarf planet out beyond Neptune called “The Goblin” because of its initial discovery around Halloween. The Goblin, officially named 2015 TG387, joins other small objects far out in our solar system, and it adds to a tantalizing theory about another much more massive “Planet X” hiding beyond Neptune.
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More: Is Planet X guiding dwarf planets around our solar system? (9. Oct. 2017)
 
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I'm now reading that many scientists doubt the existence of Planet 9, but that there appears to be quite a lot of debris - I guess asteroids and maybe even some dwarf planets - in the outer solar system, the so-called Kuiper belt, and that this can explain the observed disturbances of the orbits just as well as the hypothesis about Planet 9, if not better. It seems more plausible to me, although a tad less exciting than a big, mysterious planet.
 
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Whenever this thread comes up in the "recent posts" list, I misread it as "PLAN 9 from Outer Space", the classic (well, kind of) Science Fiction movie :D
 
Oh no, there might not be a planet 9 after all, but the explanation is nonetheless quite exciting:

But if this is the case, how do we explain the orbits? Well, a new paper has a potential solution: an alien star.

No, of course it's not there now. But once upon a time, billions of years ago, a massive object could have passed closely enough to gravitationally stir up the orbits of objects in the outer Solar System, causing the peculiar orbits.
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More: New Simulations Suggest Planet Nine Might Not Be a Planet at All (14. September 2024)

In 2015 it was discovered that Scholz's Star, a red dwarf with a brown dwarf companion, had passed through our solar system's Oort cloud only 70,000 years ago, during the time of the Neanderthals. Presumably, since it wasn't mentioned in the article, this star is too small to explain the perturbations in the orbits that have made us suspect the existence of Planet 9, so I guess astronomers now have their work cut out for them trying to identify other likely candidates.

Scholz's Star - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
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More planet 9 news:

The hypothesis in the article I linked to in my previous post is not mentioned specifically. But if I read between the lines, there seems to be an argument against it nonetheless:
The study tracks icy bodies subject to some kind of perturbation that’s injecting them into the orbit of Neptune before they leave the solar system entirely. “If you look at these bodies, their lifetimes are tiny compared to the age of the solar system,” Batygin said. “That means something is putting them there. And so what can it be?”
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In other words, it can't be explained by some force that worked on these bodies in the distant past, but rather it has to be something that's still there.

Anyway, we should know more once that new telescope at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory comes online late next year.
 
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