The newfound rogue planet 2MASS J1119–1137 belongs in the youngest group of stars in the solar neighborhood, known as the TW Hydrae association, which contains
about 2 dozen 10 million-year-old stars, all moving together through space. David Rodriguez, Jacqueline Faherty, Jonathan Gagne and Stanimir Metchev
April 25, 2016 - SPACE - A huge, newly discovered alien planet that zooms through space without a parent star is one of the closest such "rogue" worlds to Earth yet seen, astronomers say.
The exoplanet, known as 2MASS J1119–1137, is four to eight times more massive than Jupiter and lies about 95 light-years from Earth at the moment, a new study reports.
The newfound world is only slightly less bright than the giant rogue planet PSO J318.5−22, which was first spotted in 2013 and is located about 80 light-years from Earth's solar system, researchers said.
Kendra Kellogg, a graduate student at Western University in Ontario, Canada, and her colleagues detected, confirmed and characterized 2MASS J1119–1137 using NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer satellite and the Gemini South and Baade telescopes, both of which are in Chile.
WATCH: Astronomy team discovers free-floating, planet-like objects within relatively close proximity to the Sun.
The observations by these instruments allowed the researchers to determine that 2MASS J1119–1137, while flying freely, is associated with TW Hydrae, a group of about two dozen stars that are the youngest in the sun's neighborhood.
The TW Hydrae stars — and 2MASS J1119–1137 as well — are just 10 million years old, study team members said. (For perspective, Earth's sun is nearly 4.6 billion years old, and the Big Bang that created the universe occurred about 13.8 billion years ago.)
PSO J318.5−22 is just slightly older than 2MASS J1119–1137, having been born about 23 million years ago, researchers said.
Such rogue worlds may have formed around host stars, and then been booted out into space by gravitational interactions with neighboring planets in their natal systems, researchers say. Whatever their origins, they are ripe targets for further study; in our Milky Way galaxy, rogue planets actually may outnumber "normal" worlds bound to parent stars.
"Discovering free-floating planet analogs like 2MASS J1119–1137 and PSO J318.5−22 offers a great opportunity to study the nature of giant planets outside the solar system," Kellogg said in statement.
Rogues are "much easier to scrutinize than planets orbiting around other stars," she added. "Objects like 2MASS J1119–1137 are drifting in space all alone, and our observations are not overwhelmed by the brightness of a host star next door."
The new study will be published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
April 24, 2016 - SPACE - In 2011, astronomers reported our
galaxy is likely filled with roaming planets not attached to a host
star, and these worlds may in fact outnumber stars in the Milky Way.
Scientists have debated over whether these objects are true planets, or light stars known as brown dwarfs. Brown dwarfs form just like stars but don't have the mass to spark nuclear fusion at their cores. In a new study published by The Astrophysical Journal, scientists identified one of these objects that may give answers to where these roaming objects came from.
Discovering objects throughout the galaxy
Scientists used information from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) to identify the roaming, planetary-mass object inside a young star family, known as the TW Hydrae association. The newly found object, dubbed WISEA J114724.10-204021.3, or simply WISEA 1147, is believed to be between about 5 to 10 times the mass of Jupiter.
Since the object was discovered to be an affiliate the TW Hydrae group of very young stars, astronomers recognize that it is relatively young, around 10 million years old. Also, because planets need a minimum of 10 million years to develop, and even longer to get kicked out of a solar system, WISEA 1147 is probably a brown dwarf, the study team said.
"With continued monitoring, it may be possible to trace the history of WISEA 1147 to confirm whether or not it formed in isolation," study author Adam Schneider of the University of Toledo in Ohio, said in a NASA news release.
The study team said tracking the origins of free-floating objects and figuring out if they are planets or brown dwarfs is a struggle because they are so isolated.
A sky map taken by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE,
shows the location of the TW Hydrae family, or association, of stars,
which lies about
175 light-years from Earth and is centered in the Hydra
constellation. The stars are thought to have formed together around 10
million years ago.
NASA/JPL Caltech
"We are at the beginning of what will become a hot field – trying to determine the nature of the free-floating population and how many are planets versus brown dwarfs," said co-author Davy Kirkpatrick of NASA's Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) at the CalTech.
One method to detect close roaming objects is movement in relation to other stars over time. The closer an object, the more it will seem to move against a background of more remote stars. By examining information from both sky surveys taken approximately 10 years apart, closer items jump out.
The brown dwarf WISEA 1147 was brilliantly red in survey pictures where the color red was assigned to longer infrared wavelengths, meaning that it's dusty and young.
"The features on this one screamed out, 'I'm a young brown dwarf,'" Schneider said.
After further evaluation, the astronomers discovered that this object is associated with the TW Hydrae group, which is around 150 light-years from Earth and just approximately 10 million years old. With an approximate mass between five and 10 times that of Jupiter, WISEA 1147 is one of the youngest and lightest brown dwarfs ever discovered. - Red Orbit.
Artist’s concept of “Planet Nine,” a hypothesized world about 10 times more massive than Earth that may orbit far from the sun. Credit: Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)
April 6, 2016 - SPACE - The
hunt is on to find "Planet Nine" — a large undiscovered world, perhaps
10 times as massive as Earth and four times its size — that scientists
think could be lurking in the outer solar system. After Konstantin
Batygin and Mike Brown, two planetary scientists from the California
Institute of Technology, presented evidence for its existence
this January, other teams have searched for further proof by analyzing
archived images and proposing new observations to find it with the
world's largest telescopes.
Just this month, evidence from the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn
helped close in on the missing planet. Many experts suspect that within
as little as a year someone will spot the unseen world, which would be a
monumental discovery that changes the way we view our solar system and
our place in the cosmos. "Evidence is mounting that something unusual is
out there — there's a story that's hard to explain with just the
standard picture," says David Gerdes, a cosmologist at the University of
Michigan who never expected to find himself working on Planet Nine. He
is just one of many scientists who leapt at the chance to prove — or
disprove — the team's careful calculations.
Researchers say an anomaly in the orbits of distant Kuiper Belt objects points to the existence of an unknown planet orbiting the sun. Credit: by Karl Tate, Infographics artist
Batygin
and Brown made the case for Planet Nine's existence based on its
gravitational effect on several Kuiper Belt objects — icy bodies that
circle the sun beyond Neptune's orbit. Theoretically, though, its
gravity should also tug slightly on the planets, moons and even any
orbiting spacecraft. With this in mind, Agnès Fienga at the Côte d'Azur
Observatory in France and her colleagues checked whether a theoretical
model (one that they have been perfecting for over a decade) with the
new addition of Planet Nine could better explain slight perturbations
seen in Cassini's orbit. Without it, the eight planets in the solar
system, 200 asteroids and five of the most massive Kuiper Belt objects
cannot perfectly account for it. The missing puzzle piece might just be a
ninth planet.
So
Fienga and her colleagues compared the updated model, which placed
Planet Nine at various points in its hypothetical orbit, with the data.
They found a sweet spot—with Planet Nine 600 astronomical units (about
90 billion kilometers) away toward the constellation Cetus — that can
explain Cassini's orbit quite well. Although Fienga is not yet convinced
that she has found the culprit for the probe's odd movements, most
outside experts are blown away. "It's a brilliant analysis," says Greg
Laughlin, an astronomer at Lick Observatory, who was not involved in the
study. "It's completely amazing that they were able to do that so
quickly." Gerdes agrees: "That's a beautiful paper."
The good news does not end there. If Planet Nine is located toward the constellation Cetus, then it could be picked up by the Dark Energy Survey,
a Southern Hemisphere observation project designed to probe the
acceleration of the universe. "It turns out fortuitously that the
favored region from Cassini is smack dab in the middle of our survey
footprint," says Gerdes, who is working on the cosmology survey. "We
could not have designed our survey any better." Although the survey was
not planned to search for solar system objects, Gerdes has discovered
some (including one of the icy objects that led Batygin and Brown to
conclude Planet Nine exists in the first place).
Laughlin thinks this survey has the best immediate chance of success.
He is also excited by the fact that Planet Nine could be so close.
Although 600 AUs—roughly 15 times the average distance to Pluto—does
sound far, Planet Nine could theoretically hide as far away as 1,200
AUs. "That makes it twice as easy to get to, twice as soon," Laughlin
says. "And not just twice as bright but 16 times as bright."
Mini-Neptunes like "Planet Nine" outnumber other types of planets found by astronomers. Credit: by Karl Tate, Infographics artist
And
the Dark Energy Survey is not the only chance to catch the faint world.
It should be possible to look for the millimeter-wavelength light the
planet radiates from its own internal heat. Such a search was proposed by
Nicolas Cowan, an exoplanet astronomer at McGill University in
Montreal, who thinks that Planet Nine might show up in surveys of the
cosmic microwave background (CMB), the pervasive afterglow of the big
bang. "CMB experiments have historically used solar system giant planets
to calibrate their instruments, so we know that current and planned CMB
experiments are sensitive enough to measure the flux from Planet Nine
if it is as bright as we think it is," Cowan says.
Already, cosmologists have started to comb through data from existing
experiments, and astronomers with many different specialties have also
joined in on the search. "I love that we can take this four-meter
telescope and find a rock 100 kilometers in diameter that is a billion
kilometers past Neptune with the same instrument that we are using to do
extragalactic stuff and understand the acceleration of the universe,"
Gerdes says.
In the meantime Batygin and Brown are proposing a dedicated survey of their own. In a recent study
they searched through various sky maps to determine where Planet Nine
cannot be. "We dumpster-dived into the existing observational data to
search for Planet Nine, and because we didn't find it we were able to
rule out parts of the orbit," Batygin says. The zone where the planet
makes its farthest swing from the sun as well as the small slice of sky
where Fienga thinks the planet could be now, for example, have not been
canvassed by previous observations. To search the unmapped zones,
Batygin and Brown have asked for roughly 20 observing nights on the
Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. "It's a pretty big request
compared to what other people generally get on the telescope," Brown
says. "We'll see if they bite." If they do, Brown is convinced he will
have his planet within a year.
"I really want to see what it looks like," says Batygin, who adds that
his aspiration drives him to search for the unseen world. But Laughlin
takes it a step further: "I think [the discovery] would provide amazing
inspiration for the next stage of planetary exploration," he says. We
now have another opportunity to see one of the worlds of our own solar
system for the first time. "If Planet Nine isn't out there, we won't
have that experience again." - SPACE.
NOTE: Thanks to Joann Mckeon-Chan for contributing to this post.
This artwork shows a rocky planet being bombarded by comets. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
April 3, 2016 - SPACE - Periodic mass extinctions on Earth, as indicated in the global fossil
record, could be linked to a suspected ninth planet, according to
research published by a faculty member of the University of Arkansas
Department of Mathematical Sciences.
Daniel Whitmire, a retired professor of astrophysics now working as a
math instructor, published findings in the January issue of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
that the as yet undiscovered “Planet X” triggers comet showers linked
to mass extinctions on Earth at intervals of approximately 27 million
years.
Though scientists have been looking for Planet X for 100 years, the
possibility that it’s real got a big boost recently when researchers
from Caltech inferred its existence based on orbital anomalies seen in
objects in the Kuiper Belt, a disc-shaped region of comets and other
larger bodies beyond Neptune. If the Caltech researchers are correct,
Planet X is about 10 times the mass of Earth and could currently be up
to 1,000 times more distant from the sun.
Daniel Whitmire. Photo by Matt Reynolds
Whitmire and his colleague, John Matese, first published research on
the connection between Planet X and mass extinctions in the journal Nature in 1985 while working as astrophysicists at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Their work was featured in a 1985 Time magazine cover story titled, “Did Comets Kill the Dinosaurs? A Bold New Theory About Mass Extinctions.”
At the time there were three explanations proposed to explain the regular comet showers: Planet X, the existence of a sister star to the sun, and vertical oscillations of the sun as it orbits the galaxy. The last two ideas have subsequently been ruled out as inconsistent with the paleontological record. Only Planet X remained as a viable theory, and it is now gaining renewed attention.
Whitemire and Matese’s theory is that as Planet X orbits the sun, its tilted orbit slowly rotates and Planet X passes through the Kuiper belt of comets every 27 million years, knocking comets into the inner solar system. The dislodged comets not only smash into the Earth, they also disintegrate in the inner solar system as they get nearer to the sun, reducing the amount of sunlight that reaches the Earth.
In 1985, a look at the paleontological record supported the idea of regular comet showers dating back 250 million years. Newer research shows evidence of such events dating as far back as 500 million years.
Whitmire and Matese published their own estimate on the size and orbit of Planet X in their original study. They believed it would be between one and five times the mass of Earth, and about 100 times more distant from the sun, much smaller numbers than Caltech’s estimates.
Matese has since retired and no longer publishes. Whitmire retired from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2012 and began teaching at the University of Arkansas in 2013.
Whitmire says what’s really exciting is the possibility that a distant planet may have had a significant influence on the evolution of life on Earth. “I’ve been part of this story for 30 years,” he said. “If there is ever a final answer I’d love to write a book about it.”
About the University of Arkansas: The University of
Arkansas provides an internationally competitive education for
undergraduate and graduate students in more than 200 academic programs.
The university contributes new knowledge, economic development, basic
and applied research, and creative activity while also providing service
to academic and professional disciplines. The Carnegie Foundation
classifies the University of Arkansas among only 2 percent of
universities in America that have the highest level of research
activity. U.S. News & World Report ranks the University of
Arkansas among its top American public research universities. Founded in
1871, the University of Arkansas comprises 10 colleges and schools and
maintains a low student-to-faculty ratio that promotes personal
attention and close mentoring. - University of Arkansas.
There appears to be something very odd happening at the edge of our
solar system – and at least some scientists suggest that it is being
caused by a huge, mysterious planet.
This artistic rendering shows the distant view from Planet Nine back
towards the sun. The planet is thought to be gaseous, similar to Uranus
and Neptune.
Hypothetical lightning lights up the night side Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)
March 27, 2016 - SPACE - New evidence strengthens the idea that there is a mysterious planet hiding at the far edge of our solar system.
Objects have been spotted moving around unusually at the edge of our solar system. And the best explanation for the strange orbits is the mysterious Planet Nine, according to one of the scientists who has argued that the hidden planet exists.
In January, a pair of scientists argued that they had found another planet, based on calculations using objects at the distant end of our solar system.
By studying the orbit of six objects in the Kuiper Belt – a mysterious area thought to be filled of asteroids and other icy objects – they argued that they were being affected by something large and previously unknown.
WATCH: Evidence of a Ninth Planet.
Now Mike Brown, who made those original claims, says that he has tracked another object in that Kuiper Belt that is also moving unusually.
And its strange movement is exactly how what would be expected if Planet Nine is real, he claimed.
Hey Planet Nine fans, a new eccentric KBO was discovered. And it is exactly where Planet Nine says it should be. pic.twitter.com/oZn0RDq8JF
None of the claims has yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal or checked by other scientists.
But the Canada France Hawaii Telescope is currently conducting the Outer Solar System Origins Survey, looking far into our solar system, and so will be able to check the claims as more Kuiper Belt objects are discovered. - Independent.
March 27, 2016 - SPACE - In one of the latest SECCHI beacon images, a large planet-sized object can be clearly seen in the 4 o'clock position of the Sun. The object was revealed following the departure of a coronal mass ejection from the stellar sphere.
The video of the dark object was posted by YouTube Contributor MrMBB333. It's unclear when the telescope captured the event, but the video was uploaded online on March 27, 2016.
WATCH: Large planet-size object behind the Sun.
In early February of this year, French scientists said that they were one step closer to locating "Planet X," a
mysterious ninth planet, that exist in the outer reaches of our solar
system.
Using
mathematical modeling after studying data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft orbit Saturn, researcher Jacques Laskar and his colleagues calculated what
influence "Planet Nine" or the ninth planet, would have on the movement of other planets
as it passed nearby. They studied the orbit postulated by the US
astronomers, on the assumption that the planet would circle the Sun in a
lop-sided, highly elongated, oval loop.
Called extreme Kuiper Belt Objects, the misbehaving bodies trace odd
circles around the sun that have puzzled scientists for years.
The findings were published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
WATCH: Evidence of Planet X.
"We have cut the work in half," Laskar said. The researchers believe
the search can be further narrowed if Cassini's mission, which is due to
end next year, is extended to 2020.
The
French team's conclusions come just one month after California
Institute of Technology scientists Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown
predicted the existence of "Planet X" or "Planet Nine," which is thought to have a mass
10 times the size of Earth. The two scientists used mathematical
modeling and computer simulations to predict its existence, which is
thought to explain the strange clumping behavior of a group of dwarf
planets in the Kuiper Belt, a field of icy objects and debris beyond Neptune.
It’s tantalizing evidence that a ninth large planet might live in the solar system, though the world hasn’t been detected yet.
Although
Planet Nine's existence has yet to be confirmed, the discovery of
Neptune took place in a similar way in 1845, when French mathematician
Urbain Le Verrier noticed that the orbit of Uranus didn’t exactly follow
the orbit predicted by Newton’s law of gravity. In short, this is
because the yet-to-be-discovered Neptune had a gravitational pull on
Uranus.
Although Pluto was previously considered the
ninth planet, it was demoted to “dwarf planet” status about a decade
ago, as it possesses different characteristics than the other major
planets of the solar system. The charge to demote Pluto was led by the
same scientists who announced the possibility of Planet Nine's
existence.
According to NASA, SECCHI is a suite of 5 scientific telescopes that observe the solar
corona and inner heliosphere from the surface of the Sun to the orbit of
Earth.
These unique observations are made in stereo for NASA's Solar Terrestial
Relations Observatory
STEREO.
The suite has three main parts. The
SCIP (Sun Centered Imaging Package - three telescopes), the
HI (Heliospheric Imager - two telescopes) and the SEB (Secchi Electronics box).
The STEREO mission is the third in the line of Solar-Terrestrial Probes (STP) and is a strategic
element of the Sun-Earth Connections Roadmap. STEREO is designed to view the three-dimensional (3D)
and temporally varying heliosphere by means of an unprecedented combination of imaging and in situ
experiments mounted on virtually identical spacecraft flanking the Earth in its orbit.
The primary goal of the STEREO mission is to advance the understanding of the three-dimensional
structure of the Sun's corona, especially regarding the origin of coronal mass ejections (CMEs),
their evolution in the interplanetary medium, and the dynamic coupling between CMEs and the Earth
environment. CMEs are the most energetic eruptions on the Sun, are the primary cause of major
geomagnetic storms, and are believed to be responsible for the largest solar energetic particle events.
A planet larger than Earth could be hiding in the cold, dark depths
of the solar system. The presence of the planet, which would lie far
beyond Pluto, is betrayed by the curious orbits of a handful of distant
icy worlds.
February 24, 2016 - SPACE - French scientists say they may be one step closer to locating a
mysterious ninth planet, after cutting their search area in half. US
astronomers earlier said the solar system’s 'Planet Nine' might exist,
but conceded they had no idea where it could be.
After studying data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn, French researcher Jacques Laskar of the Paris Observatory stated on Tuesday that a ninth planet may indeed exist in the outer reaches of our solar system, but “not just anywhere,” AFP reported.
Using mathematical modeling, Laskar and his colleagues calculated what influence the ninth planet would have on the movement of other planets as it passed nearby. They studied the orbit postulated by the US astronomers, on the assumption that the planet would circle the Sun in a lop-sided, highly elongated, oval loop.
Called extreme Kuiper Belt Objects, the misbehaving bodies trace odd
circles around the sun that have puzzled scientists for years.
The findings were published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
At its most distant position from the Sun, the planet would be too far away for any effect on other planets to be detectable, which limits astronomers to a searchable zone which represents only about half of the 10,000-20,000-year orbit.
The team has, however, managed to reduce the search area by 50 percent, by eliminating two zones in which they say the modeling does not match reality.
WATCH: Evidence of Planet X.
"We have cut the work in half," Laskar said. The researchers believe the search can be further narrowed if Cassini's mission, which is due to end next year, is extended to 2020. However, scientists believe it will take years to find Planet Nine, if it exists at all.
The French team's conclusions come just one month after California Institute of Technology scientists Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown predicted the existence of Planet Nine, which is thought to have a mass 10 times the size of Earth. The two scientists used mathematical modeling and computer simulations to predict its existence, which is thought to explain the strange clumping behavior of a group of dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt, a field of icy objects and debris beyond Neptune.
It’s tantalizing evidence that a ninth large planet might live in the solar system, though the world hasn’t been detected yet.
Although Planet Nine's existence has yet to be confirmed, the discovery of Neptune took place in a similar way in 1845, when French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier noticed that the orbit of Uranus didn’t exactly follow the orbit predicted by Newton’s law of gravity. In short, this is because the yet-to-be-discovered Neptune had a gravitational pull on Uranus.
Although Pluto was previously considered the ninth planet, it was demoted to “dwarf planet” status about a decade ago, as it possesses different characteristics than the other major planets of the solar system. The charge to demote Pluto was led by the same scientists who announced the possibility of Planet Nine's existence. - RT.
January 20, 2016 - SPACE - A planet larger than Earth could be hiding in the cold, dark depths
of the solar system. The presence of the planet, which would lie far
beyond Pluto, is betrayed by the curious orbits of a handful of distant
icy worlds.
As described Wednesday in the Astronomical Journal, the gravitational signature of a large, lurking planet is written into the peculiar orbits of these farflung worlds. Called extreme Kuiper Belt Objects, the misbehaving bodies trace odd circles around the sun that have puzzled scientists for years.
It’s tantalizing evidence that a ninth large planet might live in the solar system, though the world hasn’t been detected yet.
“If there’s going to be another planet in the solar system, I think this is it,” says Greg LaughlinoftheUniversityofCalifornia,SantaCruz. “It would be quite extraordinary if we had one. Fingers crossed. It would be amazing.”
The team calculated that the planet, if it’s there, would be about 10 times as massive as Earth, or roughly three times larger. That makes it a super-Earth or mini-Neptune—a type of planet the galaxy is incredibly efficient at assembling, but which has been conspicuously absent from our own neighborhood.
And it’s really far away. Simulations suggest that the planet’s closest approach to the sun would be roughly 200 to 300 times farther out than Earth’s. Its most distant point? That’s way out in the hinterlands, between 600 and 1,200 times farther than Earth.
“This thing is on an exceptionally frigid, long-period orbit, and probably takes on the order of 20,000 years to make one full revolution around the sun,” says Caltech’s Konstantin Batygin,whoisonehalfoftheplanet-sleuthingteam.. Predicting Planet Nine
Batygin and his Caltech colleague Mike Browndidn’tsetouttofindevidenceforanew planetary neighbor—thathappenedbyaccident. In 2014, a different team had discovered an object called 2012VP113. Known colloquially as “Biden,” the new world’s orbit was enigmatic and similar to that of Sedna, another world discovered beyond Pluto.
Both Sedna and Biden took somewhat cattywampus paths around the sun, suggesting to scientists that a distant object’s gravity might be sculpting their peculiar orbits, as well as those of a handful of other distant worlds.
Brown and Batygin took a close look at six of these worlds and determined that their orbits clustered in a way that could not occur simply by chance. (“That probability clocks in at a whopping 0.007 percent,” Batygin says.) Then they simulated the outer solar system and tried to figure out how to generate the observed patterns.
Soon, Batygin and Brown could rule out gravitational effects intrinsic to the Kuiper Belt itself, meaning that they were looking for a single, cosmic sculptor.
They added a ninth large planet to the fray, and tweaked its orbit and mass. A ten-Earth-mass planet on an egg-shaped orbit easily explained mysterious features of Sedna’s and Biden’s orbits, as well as the paths taken by other extreme Kuiper Belt worlds.
It also explained a bizarre population of worlds that orbit the sun perpendicularly to the plane of the solar system. "We sort of stopped laughing at our own calculations at that point," Batygin says.
He and Brown suspect the planet formed much closer to the sun and was launched outward when the solar system was very young. Back then, he says, the sun was still snuggled into its native stellar cluster, and the surrounding stars would have helped corral the flying planet and kept it from escaping the clutches of the sun’s gravity. It’s a compelling tale, but not everyone is convinced it’s likely.
“I tend to be very suspicious of claims of an extra planet in the solar system,” says Hal Levison of the Southwest Research Institute. “I have seen many, many such claims in my career and all of them have been wrong.”
Finding Planet Nine
If this ninth large planet is out there, it’s so distant and so dim
that it isn’t surprising the world hasn’t been detected yet. “This thing
will be faint. Like, crazy faint,” says Laughlin, who calculated that
Pluto could be as much as 10,000 times brighter than the new planet.
At such extreme distances, even a relatively large planet wouldn’t have a heat signature detectable by currentsurveys,
and it wouldn’t reflect much sunlight. That means astronomers searching
for it not only need to use incredibly powerful telescopes, they need
to know where to look. In other words, it’s like looking for a single,
moving speck of light in a vast and nearly impenetrable sea of stars.
“We don’t know exactly where it is, or else we’d just point the telescope at it tomorrow and it would be right there. But the sky is really big and this thing might be pretty faint, depending on how far out it is,” says Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, who discovered Biden.
But that doesn’t mean scientists won’t try. Among others, the Subaru telescope in Hawaii is up to the task, and Batygin and Brown are already on the hunt. Trujillo says he and his colleagues plan to begin searching along the predicted orbit next month.
The Original Planet X
It’s not the first time scientists have suggested the presence of a large, faraway planet. Indeed, such predictions stretch back more than a century, though none has ever turned out to be right.
Perhaps the best known was that of Percival Lowell, who insisted that a world he called Planet X was waiting to be discovered beyond the orbit of Neptune. Lowell’s convictions triggered a decades-long race to find Planet X, and resulted in the discovery of Pluto in 1930.
But Pluto was too small to explain what Lowell believed were telltale oddities in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune; those turned out to be the result of inaccurate measurements, rather than the invisible tugs of a ninth large world. In the intervening 86 years, many more such predictions have been made. And failed.
Perhaps this one won’t fade into the cosmos.
“I consider that the Batygin and Brown paper is the first to convincingly show the existence of this planet and constrain fairly well its orbit,” says Alessandro Morbidelli of the Observatoire de la Cote d’ Azur.
November 11, 2015 - SPACE - Move aside, Sedna and 2012
VP113. There's a new most distant object in our solar system, and it
strengthens the hypothetical case for an unseen large planet at the
outer boundaries of our solar system.
The object, V774104, was announced today at the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in National Harbor, Maryland. Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institute characterized the potential planet as between 300 and 600 miles in diameter, on par with a medium-sized moon.
This makes it a likely dwarf planet, as it's roughly the size of Ceres in the Asteroid Belt.
At 103 astronomical units out (or 103 times the distance of the sun to the Earth), this is the most distant object ever recorded, besting Eris, Sedna, and 2012 VP113.
It also adds on to a case built on the discovery of the latter, whose unusual orbit points to the tug of a distant planetary-mass object.
Though previous surveys have ruled out anything above the size of Saturn, there still could be a Neptune-sized world or a super-Earth (or even two) farther out, too dark and distant to detect. For now, though, this is just speculation that can't be ruled out.
There's also the possibility that the objects were tugged into their present orbits by a passing star around the time of the formation of the solar system.
V774104 may be part of the Inner Oort Cloud, a region farther out than the Kuiper Belt where Pluto and Eris live. It's where most long-period comets are believed to have originated.
A dozen smaller objects were discovered along with the new object, but little else is known of it, including its orbit. It could be oblong, like that of Sedna, another Inner Oort Cloud object. That one comes as close as 86 AU and goes as far out as 937 AU, giving it one of the strangest orbits in our solar system.
If this newly discovered object ends up being an Inner Oort Cloud object, it could prove valuable in helping astronomers understand the solar system.
Sheppard and co-author Chadwick Trujillo plan on studying the object in more detail to correctly determine its orbit.
Trujillo already has a few new objects under his belt, having co-discovered Eris and two other dwarf planets, Makemake and Haumea, as well as Sedna. - Popular Mechanics.
June 17, 2014 - SPACE - The monsters are multiplying. Just months after
astronomers announced hints of a giant "Planet X" lurking beyond Pluto, a
team in Spain says there may actually be two supersized planets hiding
in the outer reaches of our solar system.
When potential dwarf planet 2012 VP113 was discovered in March, it joined a handful of unusual rocky objects known to reside beyond the orbit of Pluto. These small objects have curiously aligned orbits, which hints that an unseen planet even further out is influencing their behaviour. Scientists calculated that this world would be about 10 times the mass of Earth and would orbit at roughly 250 times Earth's distance from the sun.
Now Carlos and Raul de la Fuente Marcos at the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain have taken another look at these distant bodies. As well as confirming their bizarre orbital alignment, the pair found additional puzzling patterns. Small groups of the objects have very similar orbital paths. Because they are not massive enough to be tugging on each other, the researchers think the objects are being "shepherded" by a larger object in a pattern known as orbital resonance.
Planet shepherd
For instance, we know that Neptune and Pluto
are in orbital resonance – for every two orbits Pluto makes around the
sun, Neptune makes three. Similarly, one group of small objects seems to
be in lockstep with a much more distant, unseen planet. That world
would have a mass between that of Mars and Saturn and would sit about
200 times Earth's distance from the sun.
Some of the smaller objects have very elongated orbits that would take them out to this distance. It is unusual for a large planet to orbit so close to other bodies unless it is dynamically tied to something else, so the researchers suggest that the large planet is itself in resonance with a more massive world at about 250 times the Earth-sun distance – just like the one predicted in the previous work.
WATCH: Spanish astronomers discover two new planets in solar system.
Observing these putative planets will be tricky. The smaller bodies are on very elliptical orbits and were only spotted when they ventured closest to the sun. But the big planets would have roughly circular orbits and would be slow moving and dim, making them tough for current telescopes to see. "It's not at all surprising that they haven't been found yet," says Carlos.
"As there are only a few of these extremely distant objects known, it's hard to say anything definitive about the number or location of any distant planets," says Scott Sheppard at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC, one of the discoverers of 2012 VP113. "However, in the near future we should have more objects to work with to help us determine the structure of the outer solar system."
March 26, 2014 - SPACE - Astronomers have found a new dwarf planet far beyond Pluto's orbit,
suggesting that this distant realm contains millions of undiscovered
objects — including, perhaps, a world larger than Earth.
The newfound celestial body, called 2012 VP113, joins the dwarf planet
Sedna as a confirmed resident of a far-flung and largely unexplored
region scientists call the "inner Oort Cloud." Further, 2012 VP113 and
Sedna may have been pulled into their long, looping orbits by a big
planet lurking unseen in these frigid depths.
"These two objects are just the tip of the iceberg," study co-author
Chadwick Trujillo, of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, told Space.com.
"They exist in a part of the solar system that we used to think was
pretty devoid of matter. It just goes to show how little we actually
know about the solar system."
Probing the depths
For several decades, astronomers have divided our solar system into
three main parts: an inner zone containing the rocky planets, such as
Earth and Mars; a middle realm housing the gas giants Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune; and an outer region called the Kuiper Belt, populated by distant and icy worlds like Pluto.
The discovery of Sedna in 2003 hinted that this map is incomplete.
Sedna, which is about 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) wide, has an
incredibly elliptical orbit, coming no closer to the sun than 76
astronomical units (AU) and going all the way out to 940 AU or so at its
most distant point. (One AU, the distance from Earth to the sun, is about 93 million miles, or 150 million km.)
Both 2012 VP113 and Sedna are currently nearly as close as they can come to the Sun. Notice that both orbits have
similar perihelion locations on the sky and both are much more distant than the outer planets and the Kuiper Belt.
The discovery images of 2012 VP113, which has the most distant orbit known in our Solar System. Three images of the night sky, each taken about 2 hours apart, were combined into one. The first image was artificially colored red, second
green and third blue. 2012 VP113 moved between each image as seen by the red, green and blue dots. The background
stars and galaxies did not move and thus their red, green and blue images combine to show up as white sources.
Credit: Scott S. Sheppard: Carnegie Institution for Science
That puts Sedna in the far outer reaches of the solar system. For
comparison, Pluto's orbit takes it between 29 and 49 AU from the sun.
And now astronomers know Sedna is not alone out there. Trujillo and
Scott Sheppard, of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington,
D.C., discovered 2012 VP113 using the Dark Energy Camera, which is
installed on a 4-meter telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American
Observatory in Chile.
Follow-up observations by the 6.5-meter Magellan Telescopes at Las
Campanas Observatory, also in Chile, helped Trujillo and Sheppard
determine details of 2012 VP113's orbit and learn a bit more about the
object.
The body comes no closer to the sun than 80 AU, and it gets as far away as 452 AU. About 280 miles
(450 km) wide, 2012 VP113 is large enough to qualify as a dwarf
planet if it's composed primarily of ice, researchers said. (By
definition, dwarf planets must be big enough for their gravity to mold
them into spheres; the mass required for this to happen depends upon the
objects' composition.)
The inner Oort Cloud
Objects as distant as Sedna and 2012 VP113 are incredibly difficult to
detect; astronomers really only get a chance when the bodies near their
closest approach to the sun.
Based on the amount of sky the scientists searched, Trujillo and
Sheppard estimate that about 900 bodies larger than Sedna may exist in
this faraway realm, which the astronomers dub the inner Oort Cloud. (The
true Oort Cloud is an icy shell around the solar system that begins perhaps 5,000 AU from the sun and contains trillions of comets.)
Astronomers are discovering trans-Neptunian objects belonging to the
Oort Cloud,
the most distant region of Earth'ssolar system. Credit: By Karl Tate, Infographics Artist
These images show the discovery of the new inner Oort cloud object 2012 VP113 taken about 2 hours apart on UT
November 5, 2012. The motion of 2012 VP113 clearly stands out compared to the steady state background stars
and galaxies.Credit: Scott S. Sheppard: Carnegie Institution for Science
The total population of objects in the inner Oort Cloud, in fact, may exceed that of the Kuiper Belt and the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, researchers said.
"Some of these inner Oort Cloud objects could rival the size of Mars
or even Earth," Sheppard said in a statement. "This is because many of
the inner Oort Cloud objects are so distant that even very large ones
would be too faint to detect with current technology."
The study was published online today (March 26) in the journal Nature.
Planet X?
Astronomers don't know much about the origin or evolutionary history of
Sedna and 2012 VP113 at this point. The objects may have formed closer
to the sun, for example, before getting pushed out by gravitational
interactions with other stars — perhaps "sister stars" from the sun's
birth cluster, researchers said. Or inner Oort Cloud objects may be
alien bodies that the sun plucked from another solar system during a
stellar close encounter.
It's also possible that 2012 VP113 and its neighbors were knocked from
the Kuiper Belt to the inner Oort Cloud when a big planet was booted
outward long ago. This planet may have been ejected from the solar
system entirely, or it may still be there in the extreme outer reaches,
waiting to be discovered.
The dwarf planet 90377 Sedna, artist's illustration pictured, was
discovered in 2003. It has a similar orbit to the newly
discovered 2012
VP113. The Carnegie study indicates the potential presence of an
enormous planet, up to
10 times the size of Earth, is possibly
influencing the orbit of these two dwarf planets
Dr Linda Elkins-Tanton, of the Carnegie Institution said: 'This is an
extraordinary result that redefines our
understanding of our solar
system,' stock illustration pictured. The dwarf planets sit at the
very
edge of the system in a region known as the Oort cloud
Indeed, certain characteristics of the orbits of Sedna, 2012 VP113
and several of the most distant Kuiper Belt objects are consistent with
the continued presence of a big and extremely faraway "perturber,"
researchers said. It's possible that a planet roughly 10 times more
massive than Earth located hundreds of AU from the sun is shepherding
these bodies into their current orbits.
Such supposition is far from proof that an undiscovered "Planet X"
actually exists, Trujillo stressed. But he did say that the door is
open, noting that an Earth-mass body at 250 AU from the sun would likely
be undetectable at present.
"It raises the possibility that there could be stuff out there of
significant mass, Earth-mass or larger, that we don't know about," he
said.
The picture should clear up as more inner Oort Cloud objects are found,
allowing astronomers to put more constraints on the origin and orbital
evolution of these frigid, distant bodies.
"I think it's a little hard to draw firm conclusions from two objects,"
Trujillo said. "If we were to have 10 inner Oort Cloud objects, then we
could really start saying detailed things about the formation
scenarios." - SPACE.
