New Planet Discovered

[johnnya24]

Now I feel really bad for Pluto. It gets demoted from planet status, then gets some well deserved time in the spotlight, and now is usurped again by its replacement.

#feelsbadman

Evidence suggests huge ninth planet exists past Pluto at solar system's edge

As science often does, it began with a “huh?” Some distant objects far beyond Pluto were behaving very oddly. The orbits of a handful of space rocks had aligned for no apparent reason. Though stumped at first, astronomers now have an explanation: a huge ninth planet at the edge of the solar system.

If the researchers have their sums right, the mysterious new world is 10 times more massive than Earth and up to four times the size. Nicknamed Planet Nine, it moves on an extremely elongated orbit, and takes a staggering 10,000 to 20,000 years to swing once around the sun.

The icy world, if it exists, has evaded detection because it is so far away. Scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) calculate that the closest it comes to the sun is 15 times the distance to Pluto. It then heads into uncharted territory, 75 times further out than Pluto, or about 93 billion miles from the sun. A ray of light would take a week to get there.

[johnnya24]

Apparently you can have something 2.37 light years away that can still orbit our sun. Damn, that's crazy.

Yeah ... weird. An ant can defy gravity by lifting an object 50x its body weight no problem ... and yet an object 10x the mass of the earth cannot escape the Sun's gravity despite being 93bn km away.

[Mithrandir]

I'm glad that someone else around here likes to nerd out on crazy astronomy stuff. I absolutely love reading about space and just how vast and amazing it all is. And here we are, tiny little ants in the corner of some random galaxy, concerning ourselves with all sorts of trivial nonsense.

That's called "life"

But I too love the crazy Astronomy stuff.

Last fall I had a former NASA astronomer come to the library and present a multi-media program and it was so damn cool. Pictures, crazy, facts, etc. People loved it. He also has his own homemade telescope to view the stars, planets, etc.

[Kevin Seitzer]

As far as I understand it, they haven't really discovered the planet yet. They have analyzed evidence from the orbits of other bodies that strongly suggests it should exist. Now they actually need to go discover it.

This is analogous to when perturbations in the orbit of Neptune suggested the existence of Pluto in the late 19th century, or perhaps 1909 when Lowell and company had isolated the coordinates where Pluto should be likely to be found, but it wasn't until 1930 that Pluto was actually discovered.

[johnnya24]

As far as I understand it, they haven't really discovered the planet yet. They have analyzed evidence from the orbits of other bodies that strongly suggests it should exist. Now they actually need to go discover it.

This is analogous to when perturbations in the orbit of Neptune suggested the existence of Pluto in the late 19th century, or perhaps 1909 when Lowell and company had isolated the coordinates where Pluto should be likely to be found, but it wasn't until 1930 that Pluto was actually discovered.

Well, I'm still holding out for alien superstructure. They're coming to mine our sun of its precious Sorium.

Apparently they should be able to see it with telescopes now that they know there is probably something there.

[Judge Jude]

9 posts in, and nothing about this being beyond Uranus

c'mon, RJ, you're better than that!

[GwynnInTheHall]

9 posts in, and nothing about this being beyond Uranus

c'mon, RJ, you're better than that!

I was waiting to deference Klingons.........

[Igor]

I wonder what the Revolution rate of planet #9 is? Shite compared to planet #1 anyway.

[johnnya24]

I wonder what the Revolution rate of planet #9 is? Shite compared to planet #1 anyway.

https://www.caltech.edu/news/caltech-researchers-find-evidence-real-ninth-planet-49523

In fact, it would take this new planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make just one full orbit around the sun.

[johnnya24]

I wonder what the Revolution rate of planet #9 is? Shite compared to planet #1 anyway.

https://www.caltech.edu/news/caltech-researchers-find-evidence-real-ninth-planet-49523

In fact, it would take this new planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make just one full orbit around the sun.

So since human civilization started, it's barely completed an orbit.

[rhd]

That picture is awesome!

BTW, have you seen the recent evidence that Pluto not only has lots of water (ice) on the surface but that there must be lots of liquid water below the surface because a large portion of the surface is ice w very few craters on it, unlike the rest of the surface, so water must have come up from below the surface during the last 10 mil years or so? Apparently there's lots of water elsewhere in the solar system on planets and moons.

[Fresno Bob]

nice shot

[rhd]

It does seem like if both the Earth and Moon are fully lit, the Moon should be casting a shadow on the Earth.

[Long John]

Bah. So there's a couple of extra floating bodies in a weird orbit. How do we know it's not orbiting around another sun in another solar system?

[johnnya24]

Cool picture ... and interesting timing.

Just a couple of days ago, researchers provided strong evidence to suggest that the moon was born out a head-on collision with another earth size planet (Theia). The previous theory suggested that Theia side swiped the earth, and the moon was the left over of that collision.

The fact that oxygen in rocks on the Earth and our Moon share chemical signatures was very telling, Young said. Had Earth and Theia collided in a glancing side blow, the vast majority of the Moon would have been made mainly of Theia, and the Earth and Moon should have different oxygen isotopes. A head-on collision, however, likely would have resulted in similar chemical composition of both Earth and the Moon.


“Theia was thoroughly mixed into both the Earth and the Moon, and evenly dispersed between them,” Young said. “This explains why we don’t see a different signature of Theia in the Moon versus the Earth.”

https://astronomynow.com/2016/01/29/moon-was-produced-by-head-on-collision-between-earth-and-forming-planet/