Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Possible New Ninth Planet


Well outside the orbit of Pluto lies the possibly of a new new ninth planet several times the
size of Earth.

Eccentricities in the orbits of several far flung ice planets indicated something very large well outside Pluto's orbit.

According to a recent National Geographic, the 
gravitational signature of a large planet is written into the peculiar orbits of the ice worlds called extreme Kuiper Belt Objects.  these worlds are tracing odd orbits around the sun that have puzzled scientists for years.

This evidence points towards seems to point to a planet even though one has yet to be seen.

Greg Laughlin of the University of California, Santa Cruz, If there is another world in the Solar
System, than this one is it.

For more information click on the national geographic link.

6 comments:

Mebbles said...

Hopefully we can actually get to see it soon; this is very interesting! I wonder what they'll name it?

Beam Me Up said...

If they started planning right now Mebbles I think you would have a good chance of seeing. Not a chance I on the other hand don't. Look how long it took to get a view of Pluto....

Finding it is paramount, then all bets are off!

kallamis said...

You mean 10th planet I believe. And it has a name. It has had it for a very long time. The ancients named it. It's called Nibiru.

Dave Tackett said...

It can't be the tenth planet. There are only two competing scientific defintions of planet. The original IAU definition which would have made all current dwarf planets full planets meaning this new planet would be at least the 14th planet (or as far down the list as 391st if its co-discover Mike Brown's list of dwarf planets is confirmed). The accepted definition demoted Pluto and by that definition it would be the 9th.

Nibiru (also spelled Neberu) is the Accadian and Babylonian term for crossing which applied to rivers as well as the equinox. They had no more of a concept of what a planet is than Ptolomy did with his crystal spheres. The Nibiru silliness began with Zecharia Sitchin, who makes even Erich von Däniken seem rational in comparison. The ancient Babylonians did not know it existed, there were no alien visitors from it, and it isn't going to collide or pass close to the Earth um.. 12 1/2 years ago or 3 years and 1 month ago or ever.

Beam Me Up said...

well dumbing it down a lot, at present we have no 9th planet, for Pluto was disallowed so to be incredibly simplistic, if the new planet has cleared all object (save moons)from its orbit which is roughly circular, and the body itself has a round cross section due to its own gravity.

Would this not be the ninth planet? What basically am I missing?

Dave Tackett said...

Yes. I was replying to K. with the earlier comments here. But you bring up something I had not thought of yet. With the clearing of the orbit requirement, it almost certainly can't be a planet. I had forgotten that much of the argument against the final definition by the IAU was that any planet (even Jupiter) couldn't clear its orbit of it was far enough away from the sun. And this new hypothetical "planet" is very far away.