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+--- Thread: But what if hypothetical Planet 9 has moons? (astronomical betting / gambling games) (/thread-13652.html)
But what if hypothetical Planet 9 has moons? (astronomical betting / gambling games) - C C - Feb 13, 2023
https://www.sciencealert.com/but-wait-what-if-the-hypothetical-planet-nine-has-moons
EXCERPT: In recent years, evidence suggests that there might be something lurking on the outskirts of the Solar System – something large, and possibly very dark.
That large, dark thing has been named Planet Nine, its presence inferred by some peculiarly clustered orbits detected in small objects in the outer Solar System's Kuiper Belt. Something, some scientists believe, has caused a gravitational disruption that created these orbits.
[...] However, the outer Solar System is very far away, and objects in it are very hard to detect...
[...] But astronomer Man Ho Chan of The Education University of Hong Kong in China believes that we might still be able to locate it anyway.
[...] The smoking gun, he lays out in a paper uploaded to preprint server arXiv, and in press at The Astrophysical Journal, could be a bevy of moons attendant on the mysterious chunk of something.
"In this article, we show that the probability of capturing large trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) by Planet Nine to form a satellite system in the scattered disk region (between the inner Oort Cloud and Kuiper Belt) is large," Chan writes in his paper.
"By adopting a benchmark model of Planet Nine, we show that the tidal effect can heat up the satellites significantly, which can give sufficient thermal radio flux for observations, even if Planet Nine is a dark object." (MORE - missing details)