Proof of a giant planet lurking on the edge of the solar system may just be a myth, according to a new study. “We can’t deny it yet,” said Kevin Napier, a physicist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. But there’s no reason to admit it either.
Planet 9 could cause meteor showers that would lead to mass extinctions on Earth. Photo: Janez Volmajer.
Previous research has suggested that some distant objects in the solar system are concentrated in an area of the sky as if controlled by the gravity of a giant planet, at least twice the mass of 10 times Earth. Astronomers call this invisible planet Planet Nine or Planet X.
Now, a new analysis of 14 of these distant objects shows there is no evidence to support such a cluster. This causes the fundamental reason for believing in Planet 9 to be refuted.
The size of some TNOs relative to Earth and the Moon. Photo: wiki
The idea of a distant planet hidden beyond Neptune sparked interest in 2014, when astronomers Chad Trujillo of Northern Arizona University and Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science reported a collection of bodies distant celestial bodies located in the solar system. They are called objects beyond Uranus (trans-Neptunian object) with strangely intertwined orbits.
In 2016, Caltech planetary scientists Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin used six objects beyond Neptune to predict what properties Planet 9 might have. The planet’s orbit is 500 to 600 times farther from the Sun than the Earth is not the Sun.
But previous studies were based on only a handful of objects, which may not be representative of everything, said Gary Bernstein, an astronomer at the University of Pennsylvania. The objects seem to only appear in certain regions of the sky because that’s where astronomers observe. He adds: “It is important to know what you cannot see, beyond what you have seen,” he added. To account for this uncertainty, Napier, Bernstein and colleagues combined the results of three surveys.
— The Dark Energy Survey, Outer Solar System Origin Survey, and Sheppard and Trujillo’s initial survey — to assess 14 objects beyond Neptune, more than double the 2016 study. All of these objects are located between 233 and 1,560 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. The team then ran computer simulations of about 10 billion hypothetical objects beyond Neptune, scattered randomly across the sky, and verified their positions. Is there a conflict with previous surveys?. And it happened. “We seem to only find what we need in the places we look,” says Napier. It’s like losing your keys at night and looking for them under a street lamp, not because you think they’re there, but because that’s where the light is. This new study essentially identified streetlights.
“Once you see the actual position of the streetlights, it becomes more evident that in the mission to explore these celestial bodies, there is a bias in the selection of sample objects,” Napier says. This means that objects are likely to be scattered randomly across the sky, just as they were when they clustered together.
“People on Twitter like to say this research is killing Planet Nine,” Napier said. I’d be careful to say that this research isn’t killing Planet Nine, but it isn’t doing it any good either.”
But he also adds that this result does not mean that Planet Nine has “strayed from home”.
Astronomer Samantha Lawler of the University of Regina in Canada, who was not involved in this new study, said there are other mysteries about the solar system that Planet X could give us an explanation for. A distant planet could explain why some distant objects in the solar system are tilted relative to those on larger planets, or could explain where the broom, aka centaur, protostars come from.
This is part of the intrigue offered by the theory of the existence of Planet X. “The whole explanation [Hành tinh X] lies in the convergence of these orbits,” she said. “If this gathering isn’t real, then there’s no reason to believe that a giant planet in the solar system resides somewhere far away that we haven’t yet discovered.”
Batygin, one of the authors of the 2016 study, wasn’t ready to give up. “I’m still pretty optimistic about the existence of Planet X,” he said. He compared Napier’s argument to seeing a pack of bears in the woods: if you saw a pack of bears to the east, you might think there was a bear cave there. “But Napier says the bears are all around us, because we haven’t checked everywhere,” Batygin said. “That kind of logical speculation is not something you can come up with.” Batygin adds that evidence of Planet X only appears in the orbits of objects that have been stable for the past billion years. But the new study is hampered by ‘heavy pollution’ from unstable objects – objects that may have been blown out of their place in the cluster by Neptune or may be on their way to being ejected from the solar system altogether. . “If you mix dirt with your ice cream sticks, you’ll almost always taste like dirt,” he said.
Lawler says there is no consensus among researchers of extra-Neptunian objects about which objects are stable and which are not. However, everyone agrees that to prove the existence or non-existence of Planet X, astronomers must discover more objects beyond Neptune. The Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile will find hundreds more objects once it becomes operational in 2023 (SN: 1/10/20). “There are always gaps in our understanding,” says Napier. “That’s why we keep looking.”
