Planet IX, new possible planet in our solar system

great scott

Spoiler

 

Ronald Reagan was building a clone army.

 

They can all be identified by this:

 

hmmm, you may be onto something. Considering the observation that DaDakota made less than a year ago, I think it might be pulling the top banner out of of place.

<a href="http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=266597">The menu bar at the top is slightly off </a>

But, you will need a really BIG monitor to make your discovery.

 

Astronomers should be ashamed that there is this giant planet floating around out there and no one noticed until now. These guys probably surfing the bbs all day instead of working.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/science/is-pluto-a-planet.html

After you go through the little interactive series, there's a portion on Planet IX. Apparently the data analysis is almost complete.

Maybe there is something else (big) out there
The planet story might change again, and maybe very soon.

The existence of Neptune was predicted from slight perturbations in the orbits of Saturn and Uranus. Now something seems to be pushing some of the most distant ice balls, those orbiting far beyond Neptune and most of the Kuiper belt.

Dr. Brown, who upended the solar system once with the discovery of Eris, believes there is a big object — something big enough to justify the moniker of planet — in the distant solar system.

In 2016, he and a Caltech colleague, Konstantin Batygin, first published calculations that pointed to what they called Planet Nine. Others were skeptical. But the subtle clustering of orbits could just be a figment of statistics — based on observations of fewer than a dozen objects.


This artistic rendering shows the distant view from Planet Nine back towards the sun. An artist’s impression of Planet Nine. Image credit: Tom Ruen / ESO.
In a paper published last fall, they took into account more recent observations and argued that what they saw was almost certainly real, with only a 0.4 percent chance that it was the result of chance.

They also adjusted their predictions for the orbit and size: The hypothesized object is a bit closer to the sun and smaller than they had thought.

Even a bit closer is still far out — more than 60 times farther from the sun than Neptune.

Dr. Brown and Dr. Batygin now think Planet Nine is about six times the mass of Earth, at the lower end of their earlier estimate that it would be between five and 20 times the mass of Earth. But because it should be closer, it could be brighter and easier to spot.

“We now have basically a map on the sky of where to look, how bright it should be in different places,” Dr. Brown said.

But with this “treasure map,” combined with a computer program to sift through old images, “we can very systematically start to rule out the parts of the sky that we need to rule out until we're done.”

So far, searches of the sky have come up empty. Now he’s searching through old images of the sky that might have captured Planet Nine without its being recognized for what it was.

The analysis of the old data should be finished soon, perhaps within weeks. That should cover about three-quarters of the possibilities.

“If we find it, we are going to announce it as soon as we can,” Dr. Brown said. “There's no way that we could keep it secret for any amount of time.”

If Planet Nine does not show up, then more sky observations will be needed, probably by the powerful Vera Rubin observatory in Chile, which may begin observations this year.

Planet Nine, if it exists, would assuredly revive the debate over what a planet is.

Dr. Brown, who did not think Eris merited planethood, thinks Planet Nine would definitely qualify. It would be the fifth largest object orbiting the sun, after Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

This is not something “slightly, one centimeter larger than Pluto,” he said. “Let's all continue arguing about Pluto. This is kind of the thing that makes you realize why saying Pluto's not a planet was a good idea to begin with, because there still could be actual planets out there to be found.”​

They should name it Yuggoth.