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Their site at http://www.findplanetnine.com/p/blog-page.html http://www.findplanetnine.com/p/blog-page.html addresses the areas the Tyche survey and other surve
by mutagen 11y ago
Their site at http://www.findplanetnine.com/p/blog-page.html http://www.findplanetnine.com/p/blog-page.html addresses the areas the Tyche survey and other surveys cover.
My TLDR:
* The WISE survey might only find Planet X at it's nearest approach. Kevin Luhman has redone the survey using the most sensitive WISE bands that only cover a narrow area of the sky and hasn't found Planet X.
* They reviewed the Catalina Sky Survey and eliminated most of the areas they'd expect Planet X.
* The Pan STARRS site survey didn't find Planet X.
Conclusion: Planet X is at aphelion, difficult to find with the Milky Way as a (stunning) backdrop.
I just found their paper: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/0004-6256/151/2/22 http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/0004-6256/151/2/22
I wonder how their conclusions match with David Nesvorny's paper predicting a 5th planet having been ejected from the Solar System: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1109.2949v1.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1109.2949v1.pdf
- rplnt 11y ago> Planet X is at aphelion, difficult to find with the Milky Way as a (stunning) backdrop. I would have assumed that planets are easier to detect when they have a backdrop? That the light can be blocked, partially blocked, bent, .. Isn't that the case?
- static_noise 11y agoI'm not sure if you're referring to the tansit technique where a planet passes in front of a star multiple times which allows to determine the size and distance from the detectable dips in brightness. This technique wouldn't work well with a backdrop since it never passes in front of the same star twice. I'm also not sure if we can resolve the planet optically i.e. 1) it will always be smaller than a pixel of the telescope sensor 2) the pixels of the telescope sensor always collect light from the backdrop even if the planet is dead center on the group of pixels. When you detect the light of a planet without backdrop both problems would be much smaller because then you can actually see some tiny dark blurry object moving relative to the stars around it in the image.
- xenophonf 11y agoYou're thinking about one of the ways extrasolar planets can be detected, when they cross in front of their parent star (transit photometry) or when they're imaged using light magnified or redirected by a massive foreground object (gravitational microlensing). I don't think we have the capability to detect something in this solar system eclipsing a background object (whether that's a star or a galaxy or whatever else is out there).
- versteegen 11y agoCorrection, rogue planets are detected when their gravity causes micolensing of distant objects (stars), not the other way around. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_planet#Observation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_planet#Observation Not an astronomer, but my impression is that microlensing couldn't be used to detect objects in our own solar system, but I don't see any reason why eclipsing of distant stars couldn't be used... it would be far too rare to be practical to find a planet, though.
- xenophonf 11y agoThanks for the correction!