Astrophysicists are unsuccessfully looking for evidence of the existence of the Ninth planet, in the existence of which they fervently believe. And they themselves explain the reason for such a hunt for a phantom by the fact that it "scares the hell out of them."
Scientists have found "Planet X"
Most astronomers are still convinced that the discovery of Planet Nine in just one generation will force a rewrite school textbooks in astronomy, even for elementary grades. "Whenever we photograph a starry sky," University of Tokyo astronomer Surhud More told Quanta magazine, "it feels like there is Planet 9 in the frame."
So far, no telescope has been able to detect a hypothetical massive planet in the solar system beyond Pluto's orbit, but astronomers continue to amass evidence of its existence.
One of the authors of this hypothesis, astronomer from the California Institute of Technology Michael Brown (Michael Brown), says he feels "eternal optimist", as someone will soon find her, since there is every reason to believe that the Ninth planet exists, although it may and be invisible to today's observatories.
The first evidence for Planet 9 came to light in 2014, when two American astronomers, Chadwick Trujillo and Scott Sheppard, discovered that some of the distant Kuiper belt objects had a perihelion argument close to zero. Consequently, they cross the plane of the ecliptic from south to north at about the time of the perihelion passage. A little later, a similar hypothesis was voiced by Spanish astronomers from the University of Madrid.
Brown and his colleague, an American astronomer of Russian origin, professor of planetology at the California Institute of Technology, Konstantin Batygin, clarified two years later that the perturber (as they called it) has a mass of five to twenty times the mass of the Earth and follows an elliptical orbit a hundred or even a thousand times distant from the Sun than the Earth.
Despite its massiveness, it is very difficult to discern the ninth planet in the pitch darkness of cosmic depths, given the fact that there is a distance of 600 astronomical units between us and it. Recall that the astronomical unit, or its international designation AU, is the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
Nonetheless, Brown and Sheppard have led a team of astronomers who are still hoping to find Planet Nine with the Subaru optical telescope at the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii. Due to the increased angular resolution, the Subaru telescope has a wider field of view. Over the past two years, each team of astronomers has been trying to explore the starry sky for several weeks a year. In ideal weather, this would theoretically be sufficient time to cover most of the area of interest, but windy and cloudy nights have made adjustments to most of the scheduled observations.
If astronomers do manage to broaden their search, some chance will prevent the discovery of Planet 9. Perhaps this will be due to pollution of the Milky Way, or it will disappear into the light of a bright star. Worst of all, if it happens on that part of the orbit that is beyond the distance of 1000-AU. And then it will be completely useless to wait for her return. The ninth planet will return back in a thousand years.
Hence the need for backup plans to locate Planet 9. One idea is to look for thermal radiation from such a planet. Smaller and colder than a giant like Jupiter, astrophysicists believe Planet 9 will find itself in the millimeter portion of the spectrum, which lies between infrared light and microwaves.
According to Gilbert Holder, a cosmologist at the University of Illinois, current telescopes in Antarctica and Chile could detect Planet Nine today if they stray from their search. Nowhere in space is it possible to hide the Ninth Planet, the scientist believes.
Even before the completion of the NASA space probe Cassini, it was stated that the mysterious Cassini anomaly was not caused by any gravitational jerk of the supposed Ninth Planet, since no unexplained deviations from the orbit of the spacecraft were noticed. Astrophysicists believe that an undiscovered planet beyond Neptune's orbit would have impacted Saturn's orbit rather than Cassini.
Perhaps the "eternal optimists" are right in their own way. Even if Planet 9 does not exist, the hunt for it encourages other discoveries. In the spring of 2017, a team led by Sheppard announced the discovery of 12 new satellites of the gas giant Jupiter. Those who work alongside Brown have figured out the cause of the death of galaxies in the universe. Gas from 11 thousand galaxies in the Universe, which is a raw material for the production of new stars, is intensively "stretched" in every corner of the local Universe. There is a dark matter halo around every galaxy in the universe. When a galaxy passes through a massive halo, it can quickly lose significant amounts of gas filling it.
The true reasons why astronomers are so aggressively searching for Planet Nine were revealed by Sheppard himself: "Actually, we are trying to find something that really scares the hell out of us."
Several years ago, a huge number of posts about the mythical planet Nibiru appeared on the network. Thanks to the Sumerian epic, we learned that a certain planet revolves in the solar system, which has a very elongated and large orbit. Once every 10-15 thousand years, this planet invades near-earth space and causes a global catastrophe on our planet. For various peoples of the world, this catastrophe is reflected in mythology, in particular, by the Great Flood. Indeed, many data from archaeologists, hydrologists, geologists and other scientists show that about 12-13 thousand years ago, something happened that destroyed most of the flora and fauna of the Earth.
Official science and the governments of the world in every possible way denied information about Nibiru, while continuing to build super fortified bunkers throughout the earth. There is a lot of information on the net about the bunker under the Yamantau mountain, about the bunker under the Denver airport, etc. So what are the governments of the whole world afraid of?
And now - a sensation. Officially, with great fanfare, scientists have acknowledged that there may be a ninth planet in the solar system. Moreover, they recognized that the planet is huge, larger than the Earth and the period of its rotation around the Sun can range from 10 to 20 thousand years. Thus, information about Nibiru takes on a completely different meaning. What's this? An attempt to warn humanity?
Earlier this year, California Institute of Technology scientists Michael Brown and Konstantin Batygin provided compelling evidence that there is another planet in the solar system. It is located much farther than the rest and has not yet been seen through a telescope, but indirect evidence definitely speaks of its presence. In this article, we will share 9 facts that are already known about this new planet.
The new planet was discovered by the man who "killed" Pluto.
One of the discoverers of the new ninth planet, Michael Brown, is known as "the man who killed Pluto." It was on his initiative that Pluto was stripped of the official status of the planet. And in 2010, Brown even wrote the book How I Killed Pluto and Why It Was Inevitable. Many in the scientific world even joked that Brown's discovery of a new planet was an attempt to rehabilitate Pluto for “killing” Pluto, because the decision to deprive him of his planetary status was extremely negatively perceived by society.
Unlike Pluto and Eridu, which Brown also discovered, the new planet is supposedly a gas-ice giant and looks something like Neptune. Scientists believe that the new planet has a diameter of 2-4 times the Earth's diameter and a mass of about 10 Earth's, which puts it in this indicator between the terrestrial planets and giant planets.
She is very far away.
Neptune is the planet farthest from the Suns, located at a distance of 4.5 billion km. And the new ninth planet is 20 times further away. This is a lot, even by astronomical standards. For comparison: not so long ago NASA's New Horizons probe flew to Pluto, this journey took him 9 years. On the flight to the new ninth planet, he would have spent 54 years. And this is only in the best scenario, when the planet would be as close as possible to the Sun. It would take New Horizons about 350 years to reach the farthest point in its orbit.
It is the largest and longest orbit around the Sun.
Due to the fact that the new ninth planet is very far from the Sun around which it revolves, the period of its revolution is extremely long. Only according to the most modest calculations of scientists, a complete revolution around the star takes this planet from 10 to 20 thousand years. Just think about this figure. Even if the lowest limit of 10 thousand years is accurate, then the last time this planet was in the same place as now, when mammoths still walked on the earth, and the number of people around the world did not exceed 5 million. The entire history of mankind, from the earliest development of agriculture to the invention of spaceships, would fit in just one year on this planet.
The new planet may be the very "fifth giant".
Back in 2011, scientists, based on the structure of the Kuiper belt, began to suggest that a fifth giant planet most likely existed in our solar system. Such assumptions have been made in attempts to understand exactly how the complex of large icy asteroids in the Kuiper belt formed, which stick together and move in a strictly constant orbit. Having checked with the help of computer simulations about 100 possible scenarios for the development of events, scientists came to the conclusion that at the dawn of the inception of the solar system, it most likely had the fifth giant planet.
According to scientists, it was like this: about 4 billion years ago, a giant planet by the force of its gravitational field "pushed" Neptune out of its then occupied orbit next to Jupiter and Saturn. Neptune found itself "on the outskirts" of the solar system behind Uranus. During this "flight" Neptune took with him pieces of the primary matter of the solar system, which were then thrown by its gravitational forces outside its current orbit and formed the core of the current Kuiper belt. The whole question was, what kind of planet was it? Uranus, Jupiter and Saturn were not suitable for this role. Now, with the advent of the new ninth planet, something has begun to become clear. Scientists suggest that having done their "dirty work", she apparently flew into distant space, thrown out of the solar system by the forces of gravitational interaction with other planets.
The new planet could aid in interstellar travel.
The problem with space is that it is very, very large. Therefore, one of the biggest problems in interstellar travel is that we simply don't have enough fuel to keep the ship's engines running for many years. In the case of probes and interplanetary reconnaissance ships, scientists have long and quite successfully used such a trick as the "gravity assist", which allows the ship to accelerate due to the gravitational force of a large planet. For the Voyager and New Horizons probes, Jupiter was such a planet. But if (when) we want to explore interstellar space, then the new ninth planet can become such a planet for us. Problems can arise only if its density is less than the density of Neptune, then the increase in speed from such a maneuver around it will be extremely small. In any case, we will be able to find out about this only when we carefully study the new planet.
Conspiracy theories call it the "planet of death."
It's time to get used to the fact that every time after the discovery of new objects in our solar system, various adherents of conspiracy theories begin to call these objects the harbingers of an imminent apocalypse. Usually such a role is assigned to comets and asteroids. But these guys also could not pass by the discovery of a new ninth planet. Almost immediately after the announcement of scientists, various Internet prophets proclaimed that the new planet is the very planet "Nibiru". It is assumed that "Nibiru" is a mythical planet that the secret government knows about, but carefully hides this fact from people, because one day "Nibiru" will pass very close to the Earth, which will provoke devastating earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, which in the end will lead to the apocalypse.
And it really may turn out to be a "planet of death."
No, of course, next to the Earth, this new ninth planet is unlikely to ever pass, this is absolutely fantastic. However, there are, albeit not great, but still real chances that she may be indirectly guilty of the apocalypse. The fact is that the enormous gravitational force of this planet for gravitational maneuver can be used not only by probes and spaceships. The same can happen with an asteroid. Using its gravity, the new ninth planet can literally "launch" a huge rock at us, from which we cannot dodge. Of course, the likelihood that this will happen in such a huge space is negligible, but still it is.
It may not exist at all.
And this is perhaps the most important thing to know about the new ninth planet. Nobody has seen this planet yet. Astronomers only assume the existence of this planet, based on statistical anomalies of the orbits of minor planets that have developed over billions of years. That is, according to the behavior of neighboring objects, which are affected by some gravitational force, scientists suggest that this force may come from a large planet. Only visual detection can confirm its existence. However, given the fact that the planet is moving very slowly and is far from Earth, this makes it very difficult to find. Brown and Batygin have already booked time with the Japanese Subaru telescope at the observatory in Hawaii. According to Brown, the survey of more
Two American astronomers, one of whom is a native of Russia, stunned the scientific world on Tuesday after the sensational news spread around the media: they discovered the ninth planet on the outskirts of the solar system! The first news about this was published by the California Institute of Technology, where both scientists work - and Mike, and later - the authoritative scientific journals Science and Nature.
“It will be the real ninth planet. Since ancient times, only two valid planets have been found, and this will be the third. This is a significant part of our solar system that went undiscovered, and it's amazing, ”says Brown.
It is reported that the planet was found by mathematical analysis of the perturbations experienced by many icy bodies from the so-called Kuiper Belt - a huge region of space beyond Pluto's orbit. Calculations have shown that the planet revolves around the Sun at a distance of 20 orbits of Neptune, its mass is 10 times the mass of the Earth.
Due to such a distance from the Sun, the planet is not visible and makes a complete revolution around the Sun in 10-20 thousand years.
“Although initially we were skeptical that this planet could exist, as we continued to explore its orbit, we became more and more confident that it really is there,” Batygin said.
The calculated mass of the object leaves no doubt that it can be safely attributed to the planet, because it is 5 thousand times heavier than Pluto! Unlike a huge number of small objects in the solar system, such as dwarf planets, the ninth planet is gravitationally dominant in the extended region of the Kuiper Belt, where it rotates. Moreover, this area is much larger and space, which is dominated by all the other known planets of the solar system.
This, in Brown's words, makes it "the most planetary of the planets in the solar system."
Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin
The work of scientists, which may become epoch-making, entitled "Evidence for a Distant Giant Planet in the Solar System" is published in the journal Astronomical Journal... In it, the authors find an explanation for many of the previously discovered features in the motion of icy bodies in the Kuiper Belt.
The search for the planet began in 2014, when a former student of Brown published an article claiming that 13 of the most distant Kuiper Belt objects have similar oddities in their movement. Then a version of the existence of a small planet nearby was proposed. Brown then did not support this version, but continued the calculations. Together with Batygin, they began a one and a half year project to study the orbits of these bodies.
Caltech / R. Hurt (IPAC)
Pretty soon Batygin and Brown realized that the orbits of six of these objects pass close to the same region of space, despite the fact that all orbits are different. “It's as if you looked at six clocks on six hands that move at different speeds, and at that moment they would show the same time. The likelihood of this is about 1/100, ”explains Brown. In addition, it turned out that the orbits of all six bodies are inclined at an angle of 30 degrees to the plane of the ecliptic. “Actually, this could not be accidental. So we started looking for what formed these orbits, ”the astronomer explained.
Almost by accident, scientists noticed that if a heavy planet was included in the calculations,
whose perihelion is 180 degrees from the perihelion of these six bodies (that is, the Sun itself is between them), then its disturbances will just explain the observed picture.
“It was a healthy reaction - such a geometry is impossible, orbits cannot be stable for a long time, because in the end it will lead to collisions of objects,” Batygin said. However, the mechanism known in celestial mechanics as the resonances of mean motions does not allow this to happen: objects, approaching, exchange energy and fly away.
For every four revolutions of the ninth planet, there are nine revolutions of those very objects, and they never collide. As often happens in astronomy, the hypothesis was confirmed when the hypothesis predicted by it was confirmed. It turned out that the trans-Neptunian object Sedna, discovered in 2003 by Brown, Trujillo and Rabinowitz, and another similar object 2012 VP113 do slightly deviate their orbits where predicted. But the main assumption, which came true, is the existence, thanks to a heavy planet in the Kuiper Belt, of objects whose plane of rotation is completely perpendicular to the plane of the solar system.
It turned out that over the past three years, astronomers have found at least four such objects, whose orbits correspond to predictions.
Where did the planet hidden in the depths of the Kuiper Belt come from? Scientists believe that the solar system originally had four cores that formed Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. "However, there could have been five," says Brown. This fifth protoplanet, getting too close to Jupiter or Saturn, could be thrown into a distant eccentric orbit.
According to scientists, if the planet is now close to its perihelion, you can look for it in past sky surveys. If she managed to leave, she can be caught by telescopes such as 10-meter instruments at the Keck Observatory,
after all, the planet never approaches the Sun at a distance closer than 200 orbits of the Earth.
There is no consensus among scientists about the discovery. , a body dynamics specialist from Nice, is confident that this planet exists. But not everyone thinks so. “I've seen many, many statements like this in my career. And they all turned out to be wrong, ”said Hal Levison, a planetary scientist at the Boulder Institute, Colorado.
Until 2009, Pluto was considered the ninth planet of the solar system, discovered in 1930 also thanks to the analysis of the disturbances it creates. Pluto was demoted to a dwarf planet by the decision of the International Astronomical Union. Recently, some astronomers have created a movement to return it to planetary status following the discoveries made by the New Horizons probe.
One of the first interviews Konstantin Batygin gave to the correspondent of Gazeta.Ru.
- Constantine, the search for bodies in the Kuiper Belt is not a very popular topic among astronomers, how many people are doing this?
- There are a little over a hundred people in the world, I think. It turned out that the most distant objects in the solar system, in physical space, look in the same direction. And the only theoretically correct model that we were able to construct is one where their orbits are held by the gravity of one planet.
- What are the prospects for finding the planet using telescopes?
- I think it is realistic to do this in the next two to five years. This requires knowledge of the orbit and sufficient observation time on telescopes. Knowing the orbit is what we have been doing in this article. To find it, you need to know where to look. At the moment, we only know the closest part of it.
- I know that you were born in Moscow. How did you end up in the USA?
- We lived in Russia until 1994, in Moscow I finished 1st grade. We moved to Japan, lived there for six years, where I studied from 3rd to 6th grade, and missed the second grade because I was too tall. Then he studied at the Russian school at the embassy in Tokyo. Moved to California in 1999 where I graduated from high school, university and graduate school at Caltech.
- Good luck, we hope that your discovery will be confirmed, and we will see your name in the textbooks!
- Thank you.
> Planet X
Ninth planet- a mysterious object of the solar system: description, detection, search for Planet 9, last news, scientific research, influence on the Kuiper belt.
Scientists at Caltech have obtained evidence hinting at the presence of Planet X. This is a hypothetical body, whose size is comparable to Neptune, and whose orbital path is extremely elongated and located beyond the border of Pluto. It is 10 times the mass of Earth and lives 20 times longer from the Sun than Neptune. An orbital route can take 10,000-20,000 years to pass.
So far, all this is only a theory, because it was not possible to fix the object directly. But mathematical calculations could explain the orbits of other objects in the Kuiper belt.
Exploring Planet Nine
In January 2015, Caltech scientists Konstantin Batygin and Michael Brown announced the presence of a hypothetical giant planet with an unusually elongated orbital passage in external system... Their assumption was based on a detailed mathematical and computer model.
The presence of such a large object could explain the unique orbits in the Kuiper belt. It is too early to talk about its real existence, but the mathematical calculations look convincing.
The planet is capable of 10 times the mass of the earth, and converges in size with Neptune or Uranus. It lives 20 times farther than Neptune and spends about 10,000-20,000 years on an orbital passage (Neptune has 165 years).
When Planet Nine was discovered
Planet X has not yet been recorded in direct observation, so scientists argue about its existence. The prediction is based on a mathematical model.
Name of the Ninth Planet
The authors named it Planet Nine, but in fact, the name will be given to whoever sees it in a direct view. Also called Planet X. If the world is noticed, then the name must be approved by the IAS. Traditionally, options are chosen among the Roman divine pantheon.
Where did the Planet Nine hints come from?
While exploring the Kuiper belt, scientists noticed that some objects follow orbital paths that are grouped together. A closer look has shown that a large planet may be lurking outside of Pluto. It is her gravity that is capable of influencing other bodies.
Batygin and Brown plan to use powerful telescopes to find the planet. But at such a distance, all bodies will be weak, and the search will become more difficult.