"She's huge"
The discoverer of the ninth planet of the solar system about a new cosmic body
Photo: R. Hurt / Infrared Processing and Analysis Center / Courtesy of California Institute of Technology / AP
On the discovery of the ninth planet solar system two astronomers from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena became aware on January 20. One of them - a native of Russia Konstantin Batygin - told Lente.ru about the search for Planet X, the difficulties with the name of a new celestial body and the unsolved mysteries of the solar system.
"Lenta.ru": What is the planet you discovered?
: It does not fall into the category of dwarf planets. This celestial body is quite massive. Our model gives a mass of about ten Earth's, this planet is simply gigantic. It is now defined as a celestial object whose gravitational field dominates that part of the solar system.
In general, there is not even a question: is it a planet or not. We know about it because its gravity affects the orbits of distant objects in the Kuiper belt. The very mathematical modeling relies on this planet having enough mass to dominate the solar system gravitationally.
What about its physical properties?
Calculations, unfortunately, give us only the mass and General characteristics. We can only assume that it is similar in chemical composition to Uranus or Neptune. More precisely, we will say something when a device like New Horizons is sent to the planet. Although the flight is far, and it will take a very long time to wait.
Where did Planet X come from?
We believe that it formed in the first three million years of the solar system, that is, about 4.5 billion years ago, from about the same material as Uranus and Neptune. While the solar system was still shrouded in a gas cloud, this planet was gravitationally scattered into a longer orbit.
Were you guided by Chadwick Trujillo and Scott Sheppard's observations of trans-Neptunian object 2012 VP113 in 2004?
We relied on their work. What they found is called the perihelion argument of many orbits in the Kuiper belt. It turns out that this is only part of the story. The reality is an order of magnitude simpler and more fundamental: further orbits in the Kuiper belt look in approximately the same direction. Their physical orbits are almost the same. And it was this fundamental moment that led to the fact that we were able to calculate the orbit of "Planet 9".
Image: NASA / JPL-CALTECH
How fast do you hope to find a planet with the Subaru telescope? Your colleagues, such as Professor Hal Levison, are looking forward to direct observations.
In principle, we get results from one night of observations fairly quickly. The problem is that you need a lot of nights: you need to examine a fairly large part of the sky. So I think if we integrate, we have to spend two or three years to find the planet that we predicted.
Does this planet have moons?
We think so. My colleagues and I agree that there are no reasons that would prevent this. Can they be seen with a telescope? Probably. But it's difficult...
Have you thought about what to name the new planet?
Mike Brown and I (Mike Brown, co-author of Konstantin Batygin - approx. "Tapes.ru") we believe that it is better to entrust the world community. It's not for the two of us to decide. Again, we have not thought about this yet: we have a theoretical model, but the planet has not been found astronomically.
Could there be other planets in the solar system?
I guess, yes. There is nothing that contradicts such a possibility. But on this moment we do not have any data indicating that, besides the ninth planet, there is something else.
When will observational astronomy put an end to this story?
Good question. By the middle of the 20th century, it seemed that observational astronomy had completed its work in the solar system. It turned out that this was not the case.
In principle, the solar system is huge, the gravitational field of the Sun dominates very far: the dominant ends somewhere after a hundred thousand astronomical units, and we see small objects in the Kuiper belt at a distance of a maximum of eighty astronomical units. There is still a huge area unknown.
Three major telescopes are being built on Earth at once: the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) and the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). Will they be useful in such research?
The projects you mentioned are certainly important. However, to search for planets like ours, telescopes like Subaru, whose camera is made to cover most of the sky, are more suitable. The same TMT will be good for characterization and bad for search.
What if the discovery of the ninth planet is not confirmed?
The most dramatic precedent is the discovery of Neptune in 1846 by Urban Le Verrier, who used mathematical models similar to those we have today. But our model is an order of magnitude more detailed and complex: it uses supercomputers.
And Le Verrier's calculations were confirmed in one night of observations.
Do you maintain contacts with Russian colleagues?
I lived in Russia until 1994, after which I moved with my family to Japan and then to the USA. I am mainly a theorist, sometimes I communicate by e-mail with colleagues from Russia and Russians working in the US and other countries.
I don't read Russian media because I don't have enough time. I try to do only science. I can say that Russia remains strong in theoretical science: there are many good scientists. The story of Mikhail Lidov comes to mind, who in the 1950s calculated the effect now called the Lidov-Kozai resonance. People did not understand for a long time how important this effect is. Lidov was decades ahead of mankind, and there are still such scientists in Russia.
In January 2016, scientists announced that there might be another planet in the solar system. Many astronomers are looking for it, studies so far lead to ambiguous conclusions. Nevertheless, the discoverers of Planet X are confident in its existence. talks about the latest results of work in this direction.
On the possible detection of Planet X beyond the orbit of Pluto, astronomers and Konstantin Batygin from the California Institute of Technology (USA). The ninth planet of the solar system, if it exists, is about 10 times heavier than the Earth, and in its properties resembles Neptune, a gas giant, the most distant known planet revolving around our star.
According to the authors, the period of revolution of Planet X around the Sun is 15 thousand years, its orbit is highly elongated and inclined relative to the plane of the earth's orbit. The maximum distance from the Sun of Planet X is estimated at 600-1200 astronomical units, which brings its orbit beyond the Kuiper belt, in which Pluto is located. The origin of Planet X is unknown, but Brown and Batygin believe that this space object 4.5 billion years ago was knocked out of the protoplanetary disk near the Sun.
Astronomers discovered this planet theoretically by analyzing the gravitational perturbation it exerts on other celestial bodies in the Kuiper belt - the trajectories of six large trans-Neptunian objects (that is, located beyond the orbit of Neptune) turned out to be combined into one cluster (with similar perihelion arguments, ascending node longitude and inclination). Brown and Batygin initially estimated the probability of error in their calculations at 0.007 percent.
Where exactly is Planet X - it is not known what part of the celestial sphere should be tracked by telescopes - it is not clear. The celestial body is located so far from the Sun that it is extremely difficult to notice its radiation with modern means. And the evidence for the existence of Planet X, based on its gravitational influence on celestial bodies in the Kuiper belt, is only circumstantial.
Video: caltech / YouTube
In June 2017, astronomers from Canada, UK, Taiwan, Slovakia, USA and France searched for Planet X using the OSSOS (Outer Solar System Origins Survey) trans-Neptunian object catalog. The elements of the orbit of eight trans-Neptunian objects were studied, the movement of which Planet X would have to influence - the objects would be grouped in a certain way (clustered) according to their inclinations. Among the eight objects, four are considered for the first time, all of them are more than 250 astronomical units away from the Sun. It turned out that the parameters of one object, 2015 GT50, do not fit into the clustering, which cast doubt on the existence of Planet X.
However, the discoverers of Planet X believe that the 2015 GT50 does not contradict their calculations. As Batygin noted, numerical modeling of the dynamics of the solar system, including Planet X, shows that outside the semi-major axis of 250 astronomical units, there should be two clusters of celestial bodies whose orbits are aligned by Planet X: one is stable, the second is metastable. Although the 2015 GT50 object is not included in any of these clusters, it is still reproduced by the simulation.
Batygin believes that there may be several such objects. Probably, the position of the minor semiaxis of Planet X is connected with them. The astronomer emphasizes that since the publication of data on Planet X, not six, but 13 trans-Neptunian objects indicate its existence, of which 10 celestial bodies belong to a stable cluster.
While some astronomers doubt Planet X, others are finding new evidence in its favor. Spanish scientists Carlos and Raul de la Fuente Marcos investigated the parameters of the orbits of comets and asteroids in the Kuiper belt. The detected anomalies in the movement of objects (correlations between the longitude of the ascending node and inclination) are easily explained, according to the authors, by the presence of a massive body in the solar system, the semi-major axis of the orbit of which is 300-400 astronomical units.
Moreover, in the solar system there may be not nine, but ten planets. Recently, astronomers from the University of Arizona (USA) discovered another celestial body in the Kuiper belt, with dimensions and mass close to Mars. Calculations show that the hypothetical tenth planet is at a distance of 50 astronomical units from the star, and its orbit is inclined to the ecliptic plane by eight degrees. The celestial body perturbs known objects from the Kuiper belt and, most likely, was closer to the Sun in ancient times. Experts note that the observed effects are not explained by the influence of Planet X, located much further than the "second Mars".
Currently, about two thousand trans-Neptunian objects are known. With the introduction of new observatories, in particular LSST (Large Synoptic Survey Telescope) and JWST (James Webb Space Telescope), scientists plan to bring the number of known objects in the Kuiper belt and beyond to 40,000. This will allow not only to determine the exact parameters of the trajectories of trans-Neptunian objects and, as a result, indirectly prove (or disprove) the existence of Planet X and the “second Mars”, but also directly detect them.
A new planet has been discovered in the solar system. This discovery was made by the astrophysicist of the California Technical University Konstantin Batygin. The author of the sensation admits that no one was specifically looking for the ninth planet. The discovery, which is destined to become the main thing in astronomy for two and a half centuries, as often happens, was made by accident.
The strange anomaly that led scientists to the discovery of the ninth planet
Konstantin was approached by his colleague, an astronomer from California, Michael Brown. He asked the astrophysicist to make calculations that would explain why some objects in the solar system behave in a strange way. It was about the Kuiper belt. This is the region farthest from the Sun. There is space debris left after: small asteroids, blocks of ice, star dust. It is from there that many comets come from that plow our system. Astronomers around the world have been following the Kuiper belt very closely for a long time, but only now an important discovery has been made.
If you examine the Kuiper belt, then this is a field of icy debris outside the orbit of Neptune. Most of them walk in very eccentric and elongated orbits, conditionally randomly oriented in space. But if you concentrate on the most distant orbits, those that are farthest away from the Sun at , you can see that they are all oriented in approximately the same direction and lie in approximately the same plane. It was this orbital alignment that seemed anomalous to scientists.
It was this anomaly that Konstantin Batygin was asked to explain from a mathematical point of view. The astrophysicist suggested that objects in the Kuiper belt are guided by an unknown large cosmic body. This gave astronomers their first clue in centuries. The atlas of the solar system, familiar to everyone, is incomplete. There must be another planet, and it's gigantic.
According to the new model, the ninth planet has a mass equal to ten or twenty Earth masses, that is, it is comparable in principle to Uranus and Neptune. Knowing only the mass, it is impossible to accurately judge its composition. However, one can compare it with other planets and assume that the ninth planet was formed from the same materials as other planets with a similar mass.
After analyzing the data on the mass and size of the ninth planet, Konstantin Batygin suggested that, most likely, this is a gas giant, exactly the same as Uranus and Neptune.
Sumerian reference to the ninth planet
The mention that in the solar system there is a planet with an irregular orbit, different from all the others, is found among the ancient Sumerians. It was called Nibiru. The planet Nibiru, judging by the legends of the Sumerians, entered the solar system at a fairly high speed. She moved along an elongated epileptic orbit, moving away from the Sun at a considerable distance, then returning. The circulation period was 3600 years. So it follows from the chronicle of the Sumerians.
Sumerian history is carved on clay tablets that are almost 6,000 years old. It follows from them that once, on the territory of Mesopotamia, a highly developed civilization suddenly arose. The Sumerians had very detailed knowledge of the cosmos. They believed that Nibiru was not a lifeless planet. It was inhabited by creatures similar to people - the Anunnaki. They arrived on Earth to. According to one version, the aliens needed the precious metal to save their planet, which was rapidly losing its atmosphere. Gold was crushed, turning it into virtually dust, and this allowed heat and light to linger on Nibiru, preserving the conditions for life.
For hundreds of thousands of years, the Anunnaki developed the deposits on their own, but then, as the Sumerian chronicles tell, there was an uprising of workers. The work was too hard. I had to. But the anthropoid apes that then lived on the planet were too primitive even for such work. According to myths, the Anunnaki went to. By mixing the DNA of earthlings and their own, they got a completely the new kind. They created more so that a person could do more difficult work than a monkey.
On Sumerian clay tablets, this process is depicted as two snakes intertwined. This symbol is very reminiscent of, and maybe this Sumerian myth explains one of the biggest historical mysteries. Why still can not find an intermediate link between the monkey and modern man. If you believe the ancients, then it simply cannot be. and ape are actually genetically distant from each other.
After all, even on our own planet, we find life in the most unexpected places and types. In the ocean at a depth of thousands of meters live creatures that can withstand tremendous pressure. And recently, scientists from Princeton University discovered that underground, at a depth of almost three kilometers, life is teeming. Bacteria live there, which use uranium ore as. If we record such amazing phenomena on earth, then what can we say about deep space? On the ninth planet? There, for example, it does not have to be an atmosphere, or it can be liquid, or so dense that the pressure there will exceed all conceivable limits.
When it comes to, first of all, we mean intelligent life. Who said that all beings in the universe, endowed with intelligence, must necessarily be like us?
Our science under the word life understands only the protein-nucleic form, the main "highlight" in which is the cell. If this cell does not exist, then there is no life. But it is another matter if by life we understand something else. For example, Tsiolkovsky spoke about a radiant person. What it is? Reasonable, consisting of some kind of energy formations?
Perhaps someday we will be able to unravel these amazing mysteries of the universe, or perhaps we will never be allowed to do this ...
Scientists at the California Institute of Technology announced the discovery. Through the telescope new object so far no one has seen it. According to Michael Brown and Konstantin Batygin, the planet was discovered by analyzing data on the gravitational perturbation it exerts on other celestial bodies. The name has not yet been given to her, but scientists have been able to determine various parameters. It weighs 10 times more than the Earth. The chemical composition of the new planet resembles two gas giants - Uranus and Neptune. By the way, it is similar to Neptune in its size, and is even further from the sun than Pluto, which, due to its modest size, has lost its status as a planet. Confirmation of the existence of a celestial body will take five years. Scientists have booked time at a Japanese observatory in Hawaii. The probability that their discovery is wrong is 0.007 percent. The new planet, if the discovery is recognized, will be the ninth in the solar system.
The solar system appears to have a new ninth planet. Today, two scientists announced evidence that a body nearly the size of Neptune-but as yet unseen-orbits the sun every 15,000 years. During the solar system's infancy 4.5 billion years ago, they say, the giant planet was knocked out of the planet-forming region near the sun. Slowed down by gas, the planet settled into a distant elliptical orbit, where it still lurks today.
The claim is the strongest yet in the centuries-long search for a "Planet X" beyond Neptune. The quest has been plagued by far-fetched claims and even outright quackery. But the new evidence comes from a pair of respected planetary scientists, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, who prepared for the inevitable skepticism with detailed analyzes of the orbits of other distant objects and months of computer simulations. “If you say, ‘We have evidence for Planet X,’ almost any astronomer will say, ‘This again? These guys are clearly crazy.’ I would, too,” Brown says. Why is this different? This is different because this time we're right."
LANCE HAYASHIDA/CALTECH
Outside scientists say their calculations stack up and express a mixture of caution and excitement about the result. “I could not imagine a bigger deal if-and of course that’s a boldface ‘if’-if it turns out to be right,” says Gregory Laughlin, a planetary scientist at the University of California (UC), Santa Cruz. "What's thrilling about it is detectable."
Batygin and Brown inferred its presence from the peculiar clustering of six previously known objects that orbit beyond Neptune. They say there's only a 0.007% chance, or about one in 15,000, that the clustering could be a coincidence. Instead, they say, a planet with the mass of 10 Earths has shepherded the six objects into their strange elliptical orbits, tilted out of the plane of the solar system.
The orbit of the inferred planet is similarly tilted, as well as stretched to distances that will explode previous conceptions of the solar system. Its closest approach to the sun is seven times farther than Neptune, or 200 astronomical units (AUs). (An AU is the distance between Earth and the sun, about 150 million kilometers.) And Planet X could roam as far as 600 to 1200 AU, well beyond the Kuiper belt, the region of small icy worlds that begins at Neptune's edge about 30 AU.
If Planet X is out there, Brown and Batygin say, astronomers ought to find more objects in telltale orbits, shaped by the pull of the hidden giant. But Brown knows that no one will really believe in the discovery until Planet X itself appears within a telescope viewfinder. "Until there's a direct detection, it's a hypothesis-even a potentially very good hypothesis," he says. The team has time on the one large telescope in Hawaii that is suited for the search, and they hope other astronomers will join in the hunt.
Batygin and Brown published the result today in The Astronomical Journal. Alessandro Morbidelli, a planetary dynamicist at the Nice Observatory in France, performed the peer review for the paper. In a statement, he says Batygin and Brown made a "very solid argument" and that he is "quite convinced by the existence of a distant planet."
Championing a new ninth planet is an ironic role for Brown; he is better known as a planet slayer. His 2005 discovery of Eris, a remote icy world nearly the same size as Pluto, revealed that what was seen as the outermost planet was just one of many worlds in the Kuiper belt. Astronomers promptly reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet-a saga Brown recounted in his book How I Killed Pluto.
Now, he has joined the centuries-old search for new planets. His method-inferring the existence of Planet X from its ghostly gravitational effects-has a respectable track record. In 1846, for example, the French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier predicted the existence of a giant planet from irregularities in the orbit of Uranus. Astronomers at the Berlin Observatory found the new planet, Neptune, where it was supposed to be, sparking a media sensation.
Remaining hiccups in Uranus's orbit led scientists to think that there might yet be one more planet, and in 1906 Percival Lowell, a wealthy tycoon, began the search for what he called "Planet X" at his new observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. In 1930, Pluto turned up-but it was far too small to tug meaningfully on Uranus. More than half a century later, new calculations based on measurements by the Voyager spacecraft revealed that the orbits of Uranus and Neptune were just fine on their own: No Planet X was needed.
Yet the allure of Planet X persisted. In the 1980s, for example, the researchers proposed that an unseen brown dwarf star could cause periodic extinctions on Earth by triggering fusillades of comets. In the 1990s, scientists invoked a Jupiter-sized planet at the solar system's edge to explain the origin of certain oddball comets. Just last month, researchers claimed to have detected the faint microwave glow of an outsized rocky planet some 300 AU away, using an array of telescope dishes in Chile called the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA). (Brown was one of many skeptics, noting that ALMA's narrow field of view made the chances of finding such an object vanishingly slim.)
Brown got his first inkling of his current quarry in 2003, when he led a team that found Sedna, an object a bit smaller than both Eris and Pluto. Sedna's odd, far-flung orbit made it the most distant known object in the solar system at the time. Its perihelion, or closest point to the sun, lay at 76 AU, beyond the Kuiper belt and far outside the influence of Neptune's gravity. The implication was clear: Something massive, well beyond Neptune, must have pulled Sedna into its distant orbit.
(DATA)JPL; BATYGIN AND BROWN/CALTECH; (DIAGRAM) A. CUADRA/ SCIENCE
That something didn't have to be a planet. Sedna’s gravitational nudge could have come from a passing star, or from one of the many other stellar nurseries that surrounded the nascent sun at the time of the solar system’s formation.
Since then, a handful of other icy objects have turned up in similar orbits. By combining Sedna with five other weirdos, Brown says he has ruled out stars as the unseen influence: Only a planet could explain such strange orbits. Of his three major discoveries-Eris, Sedna, and now, potentially, Planet X-Brown says the last is the most sensational. Killing Pluto was fun. Finding Sedna was scientifically interesting,” he says. "But this one, this is head and shoulders above everything else."
Brown and Batygin were nearly beaten to the punch. For years, Sedna was a lone clue to a perturbation from beyond Neptune. Then, in 2014, Scott Sheppard and Chad Trujillo (a former graduate student of Brown’s) published a paper describing the discovery of VP113, another object that never comes close to the sun. Sheppard, of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., and Trujillo, of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, were well aware of the implications. They began to examine the orbits of the two objects along with 10 other oddballs. They noticed that, at perihelion, all came very near the plane of solar system in which Earth orbits, called the ecliptic. In a paper, Sheppard and Trujillo pointed out the peculiar clumping and raised the possibility that a distant large planet had herded the objects near the ecliptic. But they didn't press the result any further.
Later that year, at Caltech, Batygin and Brown began discussing the results. Plotting the orbits of the distant objects, Batygin says, they realized that the pattern that Sheppard and Trujillo had noticed "was only half of the story." Not only were the objects near the ecliptic at perihelia, but their perihelia were physically clustered in space (see diagram, above).
For the next year, the duo secretly discussed the pattern and what it meant. It was an easy relationship, and their skills complemented each other. Batygin, a 29-year-old whiz kid computer modeler, went to college at UC Santa Cruz for the beach and the chance to play in a rock band. But he made his mark there by modeling the fate of the solar system over billions of years, showing that, in rare cases, it was unstable: Mercury may plunge into the sun or collide with Venus. "It was an amazing accomplishment for an undergraduate," says Laughlin, who worked with him at the time.
Brown, 50, is the observational astronomer, with a flair for dramatic discoveries and the confidence to match. He wears shorts and sandals to work, puts his feet up on his desk, and has a breeziness that masks intensity and ambition. He has a program all set to sift for Planet X in data from a major telescope the moment they become publicly available later this year.
Their offices are a few doors down from each other. "My couch is nicer, so we tend to talk more in my office," Batygin says. "We tend to look more at data in Mike's." They even became exercise buddies, and discussed their ideas while waiting to get in the water at a Los Angeles, California, triathlon in the spring of 2015.
First, they winnowed the dozen objects studied by Sheppard and Trujillo to the six most distant-discovered by six different surveys on six different telescopes. That made it less likely that the clumping might be due to an observation bias such as pointing a telescope at a particular part of the sky.
Batygin began seeding his solar system models with Planet X’s of various sizes and orbits, to see which version best explained the objects’ paths. Some of the computer runs took months. A favored size for Planet X emerged-between five and 15 Earth masses-as well as a preferred orbit: antialigned in space from the six small objects, so that its perihelion is in the same direction as the six objects' aphelion, or farthest point from the sun. The orbits of the six cross that of Planet X, but not when the big bully is nearby and could disrupt them. The final epiphany came 2 months ago, when Batygin's simulations showed that Planet X should also sculpt the orbits of objects that swoop into the solar system from above and below, nearly orthogonal to the ecliptic. "It sparked this memory," Brown says. "I've seen these objects before." It turns out that, since 2002, five of these highly inclined Kuiper belt objects have been discovered, and their origins are largely unexplained. "Not only are they there, but they are in exactly the places we predicted," Brown says. "That is when I realized that this is not just an interesting and good idea-this is actually real."
Sheppard, who with Trujillo had also suspected an unseen planet, says Batygin and Brown “took our result to the next level. …They got deep into the dynamics, something that Chad and I aren’t really good with. That's why I think this is exciting."
Others, like planetary scientist Dave Jewitt, who discovered the Kuiper belt, are more cautious. The 0.007% chance that the clustering of the six objects is coincidental gives the planet claim a statistical significance of 3.8 sigma-beyond the 3-sigma threshold typically required to be taken seriously, but short of the 5 sigma that is sometimes used in fields like particle physics. That worries Jewitt, who has seen plenty of 3-sigma results disappear before. By reducing the dozen objects examined by Sheppard and Trujillo to six for their analysis, Batygin and Brown weakened their claim, he says. "I worry that the finding of a single new object that is not in the group would destroy the whole edifice," says Jewitt, who is at UC Los Angeles. "It's a game of sticks with only six sticks."
(IMAGES) WIKIMEDIA COMMONS; NASA/JPL-CALTECH; A. CUADRA/ SCIENCE ; NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI; (DIAGRAM) A. CUADRA/ SCIENCE
At first blush, another potential problem comes from NASA’s Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), a satellite that completed an all-sky survey looking for the heat of brown dwarfs-or giant planets. It ruled out the existence of a Saturn-or-larger planet as far out as 10,000 AU, according to a 2013 study by Kevin Luhman, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University, University Park. But Luhman notes that if Planet X is Neptune-sized or smaller, as Batygin and Brown say, WISE would have missed it. He says there is a slim chance of detection in another WISE data set at longer wavelengths-sensitive to cooler radiation-which was collected for 20% of the sky. Luhman is now analyzing those data.
Even if Batygin and Brown can convince other astronomers that Planet X exists, they face another challenge: explaining how it ended up so far from the sun. At such distances, the protoplanetary disk of dust and gas was likely to have been too thin to fuel planet growth. And even if Planet X did get a foothold as a planetesimal, it would have moved too slowly in its vast, lazy orbit to hoover up enough material to become a giant.
Instead, Batygin and Brown propose that Planet X formed much closer to the sun, alongside Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Computer models have shown that the early solar system was a tumultuous billiards table, with dozens or even hundreds of planetary building blocks the size of Earth bouncing around. Another embryonic giant planet could easily have formed there, only to be booted outward by a gravitational kick from another gas giant.
It’s harder to explain why Planet X didn’t either loop back around to where it started or leave the solar system entirely. But Batygin says that residual gas in the protoplanetary disk might have exerted enough drag to slow the planet just enough for it to settle into a distant orbit and remain in the solar system. That could have happened if the ejection took place when the solar system was between 3 million and 10 million years old, he says, before all the gas in the disk was lost into space.
Hal Levison, a planetary dynamicist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, agrees that something has to be creating the orbital alignment Batygin and Brown have detected. But he says the origin story they have developed for Planet X and their special pleading for a gas-slowed ejection add up to "a low-probability event." Other researchers are more positive. The proposed scenario is plausible, Laughlin says. "Usually things like this are wrong, but I'm really excited about this one," he says. "It's better than a coin flip."
All this means that Planet X will remain in limbo until it is actually found.
Astronomers have some good ideas about where to look, but spotting the new planet won't be easy. Because objects in highly elliptical orbits move fastest when they are close to the sun, Planet X spends very little time at 200 AU. And if it were there right now, Brown says, it would be so bright that astronomers probably would have already spotted it.
Instead, Planet X is likely to spend most of its time near aphelion, slowly trotting along at distances between 600 and 1200 AU. Most telescopes capable of seeing a dim object at such distances, such as the Hubble Space Telescope or the 10-meter Keck telescopes in Hawaii, have extremely tiny fields of view. It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack by peering through a drinking straw.
One telescope can help: Subaru, an 8-meter telescope in Hawaii that is owned by Japan. It has enough light-gathering area to detect such a faint object, coupled with a huge field of view-75 times larger than that of a Keck telescope. That allows astronomers to scan large swaths of the sky each night. Batygin and Brown are using Subaru to look for Planet X-and they are coordinating their efforts with their erstwhile competitors, Sheppard and Trujillo, who have also joined the hunt with Subaru. Brown says it will take about 5 years for the two teams to search most of the area where Planet X could be lurking.
Subaru Telescope, NAOJ
If the search pans out, what should the new member of the sun's family be called? Brown says it's too early to worry about that and scrupulously avoids offering up suggestions. For now, he and Batygin are calling it Planet Nine (and, for the past year, informally, Planet Phattie-1990s slang for "cool"). Brown notes that neither Uranus nor Neptune-the two planets discovered in modern times-ended up being named by their discoverers, and he thinks that that's probably a good thing. It's bigger than any one person, he says: "It's kind of like finding a new continent on Earth."
He is sure, however, that Planet X-unlike Pluto-deserves to be called a planet. Something the size of Neptune in the solar system? Don't even ask. "No one would argue this one, not even me."
MOSCOW, January 21 - RIA Novosti. Konstantin Batygin, who discovered at the "tip of the pen" the ninth planet, located 274 times farther from the Sun than the Earth, believes that it is the last real planet in the solar system, the press service of the California Institute of Technology reports.
Last night Russian astronomer Konstantin Batygin and his American colleague Michael Brown announced that they were able to calculate the position of the mysterious "planet X" - the ninth, or tenth, if you count Pluto - the planet of the solar system, 41 billion kilometers from the Sun and weighing 10 times more than the Earth.
“Although we were initially quite skeptical, when we found hints of the existence of another planet in the Kuiper belt, we continued to study its proposed orbit. Over time, we became more and more confident that it really exists. For the first time in the last 150 years, we have real evidence that we have completely completed the "census" of the planets of the solar system, "said Batygin, whose words are quoted by the press service of the magazine.
This discovery, according to Batygin and Brown, was largely due to the discovery of two other ultra-distant "inhabitants" of the solar system - dwarf planets 2012 VP113 and V774104, comparable in size to Pluto and removed from the Sun by about 12-15 billion kilometers.
Both of these planets were discovered by Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in the Hawaiian Islands (USA), a student of Brown, who, after their discovery, shared with his teacher and Batygin his observations, indicating oddities in the movement of Biden, as 2012 VP113 was called , and a number of other Kuiper objects.
Astronomers have announced the discovery of another contender for the title of the most distant inhabitant of the solar system - the dwarf planet V774104 with a diameter of 500-1000 kilometers, located 15 billion kilometers from the Sun.An analysis of the orbits of these objects showed that some large celestial body acts on them all, forcing the orbits of these small dwarf planets and asteroids to stretch in a certain direction, the same for at least six objects from the list presented by Trujillo. In addition, the orbits of these objects were inclined to the plane of the ecliptic at the same angle - approximately 30%.
This "coincidence," scientists explain, is like clockwork moving at different speeds and pointing to the same minute every time you look at it. The probability of such an outcome of events is 0.007%, which indicates that the orbits of the "inhabitants" of the Kuiper belt were not extended by chance - they were "conducted" by some large planet located far beyond the orbit of Pluto.
Batygin's calculations show that this is definitely a "real" planet - its mass is 5 thousand times greater than that of Pluto, which most likely means that it is a gas giant like Neptune. A year on it lasts about 15 thousand years.
It rotates in an unusual orbit - its perihelion, the point of closest approach to the Sun, is located on the "side" of the solar system, where the aphelion is located - the point of maximum removal - for all other planets.
Such an orbit paradoxically stabilizes the Kuiper belt, preventing its objects from colliding with each other. So far, astronomers have not been able to see this planet because of its remoteness from the Sun, but Batygin and Brown believe that this will be done in the next 5 years, when its orbit will be calculated more accurately.