Caltech Researchers Find Evidence of a Real Ninth Planet
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I seem to remember, some years ago, talk of a tenth planet* which they thought had been discovered by changes to the orbit of Pluto or something and there being some joke about calling it Blondie but by google skills escape me and I can't find it. I do recall though that it was of a comparable size to pluto and not as large as this one.
That would be it, thanks. I have to admit I've stopped paying attention to scientific news not having read things like New Scientist and Scientific American for a decade or so so I'm a bit out of touch.
You're welcome. Regarding "Planet Nine", Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin created a web site / blog (The Search for Planet Nine) and since January 20 there's even a dedicated article on Wikipedia.
Somehow (don't ask me how b/c IDK) the Sumerian's knew about this planet and claimed it is where their gods came from. But, along with all of their other impressive astronomical knowledge, after extensive reading I was convinced they were right.
Do you have any reliable source? Because this seems to be a well-known myth (already debunked by astronomers and Sumerian scholars) created by the writings of Zecharia Sitchin, a self-proclaimed ancient languages scholar and author of books about alleged ancient extraterrestrial astronauts, whom he attributes the creation of Homo sapiens.
Do you have any reliable source? Because this seems to be a well-known myth (already debunked by astronomers and Sumerian scholars) created by the writings of Zecharia Sitchin, a self-proclaimed ancient languages scholar and author of books about alleged ancient extraterrestrial astronauts, whom he attributes the creation of Homo sapiens.
I'd have to go dig through storage and see if I still have my best book on the subject from about 30+ years ago. I can't remember the name of it for the life of me now.
It covered a lot of stuff other than this. It was all related to astronomy through out the ages. But it mostly about astronomy and ancient cultures from all over the world. And it wasn't any of Sitchin's stupid stuff. It was written like a text book; probably about 12th grade level. I have looked all over the net and can't find it for the life of me.
I couldn't find any reference on the web, other than stuff related to Sitchin and his epigones. Frankly, it is hard to believe that the Sumerians knew about this planet. Its presence cannot be inferred from the orbits of the inner solar system's objects, and the Kuiper Belt's objects that allowed this (thanks to computer simulations) are not even visible to the human eye, by far: their apparent magnitudes are fainter than 20, pretty faint even in the clear and dark Sumerian sky! Besides, the planet itself would have an estimated apparent magnitude of 17 at most while at perihelion, but since it is probably not there, according to the authors (it would have been detected in previous surveys), the magnitude might be fainter than 22.
Last edited by Philip Lacroix; 01-25-2016 at 02:59 PM.
All I can find on the web is a bunch of alien conspiracy junk.
I'll look for the book the next time I go to storage.
It talked about, and provided a lot of good evidence for, stuff that is not accepted in the main stream.
On this particular topic it built a good case, with evidence from several ancient cultures and some math work from IIRC the 17th and 19th centuries, for a planet that was ~10x earth mass that orbited ~90 AUs past pluto and did not orbit the sun; but rather orbited the gravitational center of the solar system.
you do know that the SSB is inside( or within 1 solar radii) the SUN right
gravitational center of the solar system = SSB
I mispoke. I haven't read up on the topic in a long time. The planet proposed by the book did not orbit the barycenter.
I wish I could find something in google on the topic other than stupid alien conspiracy crap. (I guess it just goes to show the net still isn't as good a library yet.)
I can see one diagram from the book clear as day: The planet it diagrammed had an elliptical orbit that was ~90 AUs past pluto, but I can't remember if that was perihelion or aphelion.
Any way, the diagrammed orbit was offset from the orbital plane of most of the rest of the solar system by ~45(?) degrees and the "center" roughly intersected the asteroid belt.
A second paper was announced by Batygin and Brown a couple of weeks ago (17.03.2016):
Quote:
At the time we published our paper on Planet Nine, we were working on a companion paper, that we had hoped to finish that same day, that would tell you where to look for Planet Nine. Finally, only two months later than anticipated, we have finally finished the paper.
We use an extensive suite of numerical simulations to constrain the mass and orbit of Planet Nine, the recently proposed perturber in a distant eccentric orbit in the outer solar system. We compare our simulations to the observed population of aligned eccentric high semimajor axis Kuiper belt objects and determine which simulation parameters are statistically compatible with the observations. We find that only a narrow range of orbital elements can reproduce the observations. In particular, the combination of semimajor axis, eccentricity, and mass of Planet Nine strongly dictates the semimajor axis range of the orbital confinement of the distant eccentric Kuiper belt objects. Allowed orbits, which confine Kuiper belt objects with semimajor axis beyond 230 AU, have perihelia roughly between 200 and 350 AU, semimajor axes between 300 and 900 AU, and masses of approximately 10 Earth masses. Orbitally confined objects also generally have orbital planes similar to that of the planet, suggesting that the planet is inclined approximately 30 degrees to the ecliptic. We compare the allowed orbital positions and estimated brightness of Planet Nine to previous and ongoing surveys which would be sensitive to the planet's detection and use these surveys to rule out approximately two-thirds of the planet's orbit. Planet Nine is likely near aphelion with an approximate brightness of 22<V<25. At opposition, its motion, mainly due to parallax, can easily be detected within 24 hours.
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