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+--- Thread: Maybe the elusive Planet 9 doesn't exist after all (/thread-8626.html)
Maybe the elusive Planet 9 doesn't exist after all - C C - May 31, 2020
https://www.universetoday.com/146283/maybe-the-elusive-planet-9-doesnt-exist-after-all/
EXCERPTS: Oh Planet Nine, when will you stop toying with us? Whether you call it Planet Nine, Planet X, the Perturber, Jehoshaphat, “Phattie,” or any of the other proposed names—either serious or flippant—this scientific back and forth over its existence is getting exhausting. Is this what it was like when they were arguing whether Earth is flat or round?
Though it’s never been observed, there’s been evidence that there’s another planet out there. That evidence is largely based on clustering of distant objects, way out in the reaches of our Solar System: Kuiper Belt Objects (KBO). KBOs are chunks of material that date back to the early days of the Solar System. They just never got swept up in planetary formation, and now there they are. They range in size from boulders up to larger objects 2,000 km (1200 miles) across.
Some of those KBOs have some puzzling orbits. They’re very elliptical, and tilted, just like Pluto. Those orbits have been presented as evidence of an undiscovered large planet out there, unseen, yet shepherding these KBOs on their unusual orbits with its great mass.
Samantha Lawler is an assistant Professor of Astronomy at the University of Regina, Canada. She’s studied distant KBOs and Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNO) in an effort to understand the processess, and possible large planets, that shape the distant Solar System. In a recent article at The Conversation, she outlined the current state of evidence regarding the existence of Planet Nine. According to Lawler, the astronomy community doubts that there is a Planet Nine.
[...] Lawler is part of a collaboration of scientists using the Canada-France Hawaii Telescope to look for KBOs. For five years they looked, and found more than 800 new ones. That doubled the number of KBOs with known orbits. In short, our understanding of the outer Solar System and its denizens just got a lot more detailed.
[...] Lawler says that all of the new observational evidence simply doesn’t add up to Planet Nine. “These simulations predict that there should be many KBOs with pericentres as large as the two outliers, but also many KBOs with smaller pericentres, which should be much easier to detect,” she writes. “Why don’t the orbit discoveries match the predictions? The answer may be that the Planet Nine theory does not hold up to detailed observations.”
“Many beautiful and surprising objects remain to be discovered in the mysterious outer solar system, but I don’t believe that Planet Nine is one of them,” Lawler concludes.
As for the name of this object, in the seemingly unlikely event that it is ever confirmed, some scientists have some strong ideas about that. In 2018, planetary scientist Alan Stern, who is the principal investigator for the New Horizons mission among other things, signed a letter along with 34 other scientists objecting to the very unscientific name of “Planet Nine.”
All those other names “should be discontinued in favor of culturally and taxonomically neutral terms for such planets, such as Planet X, Planet Next, or Giant Planet Five,” they wrote. I guess “Phattie” is out of the question... (MORE - details)
RE: Maybe the elusive Planet 9 doesn't exist after all - Catastrophe - Jun 25, 2020
Are we really sure what we are looking for? Will we recognise it if or when we do find it?
Are we getting ourselves into a semantic soliloquy? Much ado about nothing?
"Planet Nine is a hypothetical planet in the outer region of the Solar System. Its gravitational effects could explain the unusual clustering of orbits for a group of extreme trans-Neptunian objects (eTNOs), bodies beyond Neptune that orbit the Sun at distances averaging more than 250 times that of the Earth." (Wiki)
Why not perhaps 10 planets beyond 250 AU? 100 large asteroids or TNOs?
If we find a big object (barring some unexpected dark matter) how might we differentiate between a planet, an asteroid, a TNO? Remember the Pluto = planet fiasco?
Maybe the elusive Object 9 is something else. (Remember X is Latin numerically for ten).
RE: Maybe the elusive Planet 9 doesn't exist after all - C C - Jun 25, 2020
(Jun 25, 2020 12:44 PM)Catastrophe Wrote: Are we really sure what we are looking for? Will we recognise it if or when we do find it?
Are we getting ourselves into a semantic soliloquy? Much ado about nothing?
"Planet Nine is a hypothetical planet in the outer region of the Solar System. Its gravitational effects could explain the unusual clustering of orbits for a group of extreme trans-Neptunian objects (eTNOs), bodies beyond Neptune that orbit the Sun at distances averaging more than 250 times that of the Earth." (Wiki)
Why not perhaps 10 planets beyond 250 AU? 100 large asteroids or TNOs?
If we find a big object (barring some unexpected dark matter) how might we differentiate between a planet, an asteroid, a TNO? Remember the Pluto = planet fiasco?
Maybe the elusive Object 9 is something else. (Remember X is Latin numerically for ten).
The very name or order designation as such may be a curse.
Nine means "no" in German (nein). Which is part of the reason why Microsoft skipped over Windows-9 directly to Windows-10.