Scientists say they finally have “solid evidence” for Planet X, a true ninth planet on the fringes of our solar system.
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Dubbed Planet Nine, it has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbits about 20 times farther from the sun on average than does distant Neptune.
Brown and his co-researcher Konstantin Batygin annouced their research in a new paper in the “Astronomical Journal”.
“We could have stayed quiet and quietly spent the next five years searching the skies ourselves and hoping to find it. But I would rather somebody find it sooner, than me find it later”, astronomer Mike Brown told The Associated Press. “I don’t see any alternative explanation to that offered by Batygin and Brown”.
Once it’s detected, Brown insists there will be no Pluto-style planetary debate.
“If you ever say, ‘We think we have found evidence for Planet X, ‘ the first reaction of any astronomer is, ‘Oh, you’re one of those insane people.’ And that’s a perfectly reasonable reaction”, added Brown, who conversley holds that there is a 0.007 percent chance the cluster formation could be by coincidence.
Planet Nine has not actually been observed.
“This is a prediction”.
Such a remote super-Earth probably originated closer to the sun only to be kicked out by the other giant planets during the solar system’s formative years, Batygin and Brown suggest.
Brown said he walked down the hall to Batygin’s office, and “the two of us sat down and beat our heads against the wall for the last two years”.
In the depths of the solar system far beyond Pluto, an icy world 10 times heavier than Earth might circle the sun once every 20,000 years, astronomers reported on Wednesday.
Trujillo and Sheppard noted that several Kuiper belt objects had some similar orbital characteristics, and they laid out the possibility of a planet disturbing the orbits of these objects.
Pluto, at its most distant, is 4.6 billion miles from the sun. “No one really took it very seriously”, says Brown. His company Tethers Unlimited is part of a growing community of small space businesses in Greater Seattle.
They say they have identified six small bodies in distant, highly elliptical orbits, all of which loop outward in the same quadrant of the solar system.
The first indication of a hidden planet beyond Pluto had come a couple years earlier. “To date, none of those predicts have been borne out by discoveries”, Stern said in an email Wednesday. “Prediction is not discovery”.
Brown and Batygin initially set out to prove that Planet Nine didn’t exist. “I think this is actually right”.
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From the Cote d’Azur Observatory in Nice, France, planetary scientist Alessandro Morbidelli agreed that the evidence was stronger this time.
