SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS: More Planet X / Nibiru Memes - Giant FREE-FLOATING Exoplanet Without A Parent Star Is One Of The CLOSEST Such "ROGUE" Worlds To Earth Yet Seen; Within Relatively Close Proximity To The Sun; 4 To 8 Times More Massive Than Jupiter! [VIDEO]

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.


- SPACE.

 

SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS: More Planet X / Nibiru Memes - NASA Discovers FREE-FLOATING PLANET-SIZED OBJECT In The MILKY WAY GALAXY; The RED GIANT Is Believed To Be About 5 TO 10 TIMES THE MASS OF JUPITER!

 NASA/JPL Caltech

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.

 

SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS: More Planet X Memes - Is Mysterious "Planet Nine" Tugging On NASA's Saturn Probe?!

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.

COSMIC CATASTROPHISM: Signs In The Heavens And Monumental Earth Changes - Noted Astrophysicist Of The University Of Arkansas Links Periodic Mass Extinctions On Earth To PLANET X?!

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.

SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS: Planet X Memes - Scientists Find MORE EVIDENCE That A HIDDEN PLANET Is Sitting At The EDGE OF OUR SOLAR SYSTEM!

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

— Mike Brown (@plutokiller) March 24, 2016

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.