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New And Better Data Disfavors A Giant World Beyond Neptune https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/06/21/goodbye-planet-nine-new-and-better-data-stro
by acqq 9y ago
New And Better Data Disfavors A Giant World Beyond Neptune
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/06/21/goodbye-planet-nine-new-and-better-data-strongly-disfavors-a-giant-world-beyond-neptune/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/06/21/good...
As the months passed since it was first proposed by Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, they compiled additional evidence for it, and things were looking rosy. But a new study by Shankman et al. has turned the evidence on its head, disfavoring the planet's existence and uncovering a bias in the data itself.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.05348 https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.05348
"The clustered TNOs were detected across different and independent surveys, which has led to claims that the detections are therefore free of observational bias. This apparent clustering has led to the so-called "Planet 9" hypothesis that a super-Earth currently resides in the distant solar system and causes this clustering. The Outer Solar System Origins Survey (OSSOS) is a large program that ran on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope from 2013--2017, discovering more than 800 new TNOs. One of the primary design goals of OSSOS was the careful determination of observational biases that would manifest within the detected sample. We demonstrate the striking and non-intuitive biases that exist for the detection of TNOs with large semi-major axes. The eight large semi-major axis OSSOS detections are an independent dataset, of comparable size to the conglomerate samples used in previous studies. We conclude that the orbital distribution of the OSSOS sample is consistent with being detected from a uniform underlying angular distribution."
- sohkamyung 9y agoYes, I've heard of that. Some follow-up articles I've read [1] [2] say that the evidence against (or for) Planet Nine is still inconclusive. But the question should be settled one way or another: Planet Nine will either be there or it won't. [1] "Solar System survey casts doubt on mysterious 'Planet Nine'" [ https://www.nature.com/news/solar-system-survey-casts-doubt-on-mysterious-planet-nine-1.22177 https://www.nature.com/news/solar-system-survey-casts-doubt-... ] [2] "Planet Nine Is Put on Trial in Absentia" [ https://www.quantamagazine.org/planet-nine-is-put-on-trial-in-absentia-20170627/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/planet-nine-is-put-on-trial-i... ]
- moomin 9y agoThey thought that about dark matter.
- Sniffnoy 9y agoThe article accounts for this new data. You might want to see Batygin's post itself here: http://www.findplanetnine.com/2017/06/status-update-part-1.html http://www.findplanetnine.com/2017/06/status-update-part-1.h... Basically, yes, if you just look at bodies that OSSOS detected, it does not support the Planet Nine hypothesis. If however you consider both what OSSOS found and the already known TNOs, the new picture reinforces the Planet Nine hypothesis (with one outlier TNO that doesn't really fit, although it can apparently be made to).
- verytrivial 9y agoAnd from Batygin and Brown's (font-mangled) website: "A recent paper[1] that Mike put together shows exactly the opposite to be true for the non-OSSOS dataset: observational bias cannot account for orbital clustering beyond 250AU." I love this sort of debate. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.04175.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.04175.pdf