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The mysterious ‘Planet Nine’ might be causing the whole solar system to wobble
- gchokov 10y agoDid I hear someone screaming Nibiru? :)
- jd3 10y agoThis past summer, during my internship at MIT's Lincoln Lab, Dava Newman (Deputy Administrator of NASA) came to give a talk about NASA's journey to mars. At the end of the talk (during the Q&A), some greybeard conspiracy nut in the back of the room asked her about the existence of Nibiru; suffice it to say, she had no idea what he was talking about..
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- gchokov 10y agoRight on :) Every time when there's discovery for yet another distant object from the sun, there's some speculation that pointing to Nibiru (where does this name come from)?
- mhurron 10y ago> Nibiru (where does this name come from)? It's Babylonian, which was then co-opted by conspiracy theorists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibiru_(Babylonian_astronomy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibiru_(Babylonian_astronomy)
- arca_vorago 10y agoActually it's Akkadian, here is some better reading than wikipedia. As for your comment about conspiracists, I have a feeling thou dost protest too much, if you catch my drift. http://www.michaelsheiser.com/nibirupage.htm http://www.michaelsheiser.com/nibirupage.htm
- mhurron 10y agoYa, I believe in the cataclysm theory and need to hid that on HN, or I'm not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibiru_cataclysm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibiru_cataclysm "Although the name "Nibiru" is derived from the works of the ancient astronaut writer Zecharia Sitchin and his interpretations of Babylonian and Sumerian mythology, he denied any connection between his work and various claims of a coming apocalypse."
- soufron 10y agoReally? At MIT? Lunatics are everywhere (pun intended).
- jd3 10y agoYep! Lincoln is MIT's DoD/FFRDC lab in Lexington, if that helps. There are people who have been there since the SAGE program... I lived with one of the guys who currently works in the director's office for a couple of weeks before I could move into the campus dorms; he would tell me about how these life-timer researchers literally die at their desks.
- soufron 10y agoReally? At MIT? Lunatics are everywhere (pun intended).
- MrZongle2 10y ago"...some greybeard conspiracy nut in the back of the room asked her about the existence of Nibiru..." I guess he couldn't make it to Guadalajara to ask Musk.
- mseepgood 10y agoCan we kick him out?
- asymmetric 10y agoPlanet 9 from outer space!
- ImTalking 10y agoThat explains my mid-section.
- FuNe 10y ago" But the history of astronomy is rife with speculation that is never borne out: The same guy who correctly predicted the existence of Neptune also believed that a planet he called Vulcan was responsible for the wobble of Mercury. That “discovery” caused the astronomy world to waste years looking for something that wasn't there. (Mercury's wobble was eventually explained by the theory of general relativity.) " Buying into the theory though and given that there is no sight of it yet - has the possibility of a small black hole been considered?
- nickff 10y agoDepending on when exactly you think the black hole was formed, it would likely have grown large enough to swallow the rest of the solar system. Simply swallowing interplanetary particles would cause fairly quick growth, and the black hole would soon be absorbing comets and asteroids; in addition, it would obscure and distort our view of distant stars. Apart from those issues which would make the black hole apparent, you would have to figure out how one could form in a stable solar system. I am not aware of any theory of black holes which would explain how one could spontaneously form within a stable solar system.
- FuNe 10y agoCould be a mini stray back hole caught up in a highly elliptical orbit around our solar system (not much of interplanetary particles there - right) ? I have not studied astrophysics (quite obviously) - just pitching ideas.
- zamalek 10y agoThe more important thing here is that there is currently no reason to believe that it's a black hole - although it would be cool to have access to that sort of experiment.
- scatters 10y agoSuch a black hole would have to be primordial, and then you'd have to explain how it came to be associated with our solar system. Far more likely that a planetary-mass object associated with a solar system is an actual planet. I don't think it'd be likely to accrete much mass, though; a back-of-the-envelope calculation of a 10 Earth mass black hole in the outer solar system subject to interstellar mass flux gives an accretion rate of 0.1 nanograms/year and a radiative power of 0.1 milliwatts. Likewise, its Schwarzschild radius would be of the order of 10cm, so gravitational lensing events would be nigh-on unobservable.
- cLeEOGPw 10y agoMaybe it's one of the wandering planets that got caught by Suns gravity. I'd imagine there are plenty of those cold bodies between the stars, it would be strange if solar system didn't encounter any of them. Also the fact that one of them probably even hit the Earth forming Moon makes it even more likely. Maybe Jupiter just "cleaned" our space from them.
- verytrivial 10y agoThere seems to be an unfair amount of giggling in this thread. Brown et al aren't, to my knowledge, simply hoping this hypothetical planet into existence a la Nibiru. Brown discovered Eris and his handle on Twitter is @plutokiller for a reason. See https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.05712 https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.05712 for previous work. Edit: Adding from the Conclusion The existence of a distant massive perturber in the outer solar system – Planet Nine – explains several hitherto unconnected observations about the outer solar system, including the orbital alignment of the most distant Kuiper belt objects, the existence and alignment of high perihelion objects like Sedna, and the presence of perpendicular high semimajor axis Centaurs. [...] i.e. Planet nine may be Occam's razor for a number of whacky observations.
- runeb 10y agoLeaving Occam's razor behind for a second, could this not also be explained by multiple objects whos mass and orbits sum up to the expected properties of a proposed Planet 9?
- amelius 10y agoAnd could these objects lie far outside our solar system?
- muninn_ 10y agoIt's possible I suppose, but it seems kind of strange that a planet-size group of rocks are floating exactly together in an orbit without colliding, or knocking each other about. What seems simpler? That we have a group of rocks the size of Neptune floating together, or that they actually formed together into a planet? I'm not an astrophysicist, but I'm not sure what else it would be. Looking forward to the proof or refutation.
- runeb 10y agoI didn't necessarily mean the object were very near each other. Just wondering if there could be some set of objects out there that would, in sum, have the observed effect on the inclination of the solar system and orbits of far-away objects.
- muninn_ 10y agoWell, in order to have that affect those groups would have to be close together wouldn't that? (serious question)
- smallnamespace 10y agoObjects in the same orbit tend to coalesce over time because of gravity (hence planets)
- ccozan 10y agoIsn't maybe a case for dark matter? Maybe instead of looking for hypothetical planets, can we explain this with dark matter? Same as we did with the unexplained galaxy rotation of outer regions.
- petewailes 10y agoShort answer - no. There is a long answer, but it requires enough knowledge of physics that you wouldn't have asked the question. But suffice to say, there's no chance whatsoever that this is dark matter.
- stuff4ben 10y agoWrong. Short answer - yes. There is a long answer but I too can be an Internet scientist and offer no explanations for my reasoning except "trust me, I know more than you do" as a certain political candidate is known to do (yes I went there). Also looking forward to an epic beatdown of mounds of scientific evidence that is way above my head. But at least I will have gotten you to say more than "trust me".
- petewailes 10y agoPithy answer - dark matter, whatever it might be (WIMPs or otherwise) is most importantly, Weakly Interacting (the WI in WIMP). It appears to clump around gravitational structures, acting like normal matter, but in more of a field way, rather than a matter way (think of it like a fluid filling a container, with uneven density - where the density is higher is where you've got matter pulling at it). For dark matter to be causing this, you'd need some exotic form of something that's already exotic - it'd have to be able to interact with an intensity we don't associate with it. It'd also be defying what we understand it to normally do (you'd need something to make it pull into a lump from how we think it behaves, which predisposes a physical structure like a planet). So, is there some massive errant lump of dark matter pulling the solar system around? From what we infer about how dark matter behaves from observation, no. (The fluid thing is not an entirely accurate model of how dark matter works, but it's a decent enough metaphor. However, this gets very complex and I'd rather not spend the rest of the day getting into ever more detail about theoretical physics.)
- RikNieu 10y agoCould this hypothetical planet be responsible for lobbing comets and other projectiles-of-death at us every couple of thousand years?
- mrfusion 10y agoCouldn't we get an amazing gravity boost out of this planet? How much faster could the voyagers be going if they used it?
- petewailes 10y agoDepends where it is, but probably not. Repeated gravitational assists from things much closer would probably beat slingshotting around whatever this is, if there's something there.
- mrfusion 10y agoWhy would that be? Is t there more orbital energy in things far away?
- yongjik 10y agoNo, the amount of speed you gain (delta-v) is, at an ideal condition, twice the orbital velocity of the planet (or moon) you're flying by. (Imagine throwing a ping-pong ball at a truck. If the truck is at rest, you get the same speed back. If the truck is running at 60 mph, you may go to jail, but assuming you don't, you get back a 120 mph ping-pong ball.) A planet that far away from the sun must be moving at a very slow speed (otherwise it will escape the solar system altogether), so you can't gain much speed flying by.
- mrfusion 10y agoThat sounds backwards to me.