Theoretical Evidence For a Ninth Planet Beyond Pluto May Be Premature (forbes.com) 176
An anonymous reader writes: Earlier today, the team of Pluto-killer Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin announced that they had found evidence of a ninth planet in our Solar System beyond the orbit of Pluto, larger and more massive than even Earth. However, a closer inspection of the work shows that they predict a few things that haven't been observed, including a population of Kuiper belt objects with large inclinations and retrograde orbits, long-period Kuiper belt objects with opposite ecliptic latitudes and longitudes, and infrared data showing the emission from such an outer world. There are many good reasons to be skeptical, and not conclude that there's a ninth planet without more (and better) evidence.
Skeptical (Score:4, Insightful)
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But they seemed so sure of it.
I even got chewed out in that last posting because someone had a hardon about the new defining characteristics of planets.
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Probably that Icelandic twat who's always complaining that he can't post in runes. Utter shitcock.
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There's also a different between people who say CO2 doesn't cause warming or isn't significant and those that think the projected warming won't be catastrophic. I'm not a climate change skeptic, I'm a climate change catastrophe skeptic. Sadly the religion of AGW doesn't allow for categories of "deniers." They all get lumped together as equivalent to evolution deniers.
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I am sorry that I am so tired but, well, I have seen the climate change. The seasons are different, the weather more mild, and even the birds migrate with new patterns. Mountains which kept their snow pack are bald in the summer. I think we had one day of temperature over 90 last summer. I used to get three or four feet of snow - all the time. Now, maybe twice a year do I get more than 18" in a storm. I have pictures of snowbanks so high that they were HIGHER than the telephone poles.
Yet, until I get all t
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Those 2 concurrent explanations courtesy of the denier community are inherently contradictory.
So which is it? Which of these 2 contradictory theories is the one we should
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Or am I thinking of some other sect
It's not for me to speculate on the functioning of your mind.
Re: Skeptical (Score:4, Insightful)
Burt Rutan can build successful space ships. That doesn't make him an authority in the field of weather prediction and climate modelling.
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"not in the field" is just a lame excuse, unless you want to have to have it that the Pope is the expert on God and nobody else can question his ideas. heck, i know when my doctor misdiagnosed me and was negligent, i don't have to be an expert in the field of medicine to know that.
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It's a matter of how you define the subject. I agree that the Pope has no advantage in talking about the existence of God, however, if someone else wanted to tell the pope that he understood Catholicism better than said pope, that other person would be on very shaky ground.
The pope could very well be considered difficult to argue with on the matter of Catholicism, mainly because he has not only studied it for his entire adult life, but because he gets to change it when he feels he needs to, thus putting an
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"Davis wrote a series of four books, starting with a cookbook in 1947, that ultimately sold over 10 million copies in total. Although her ideas were considered somewhat eccentric in the 1940s and 1950s, the change in culture with the 1960s brought her ideas, especially her anti-food processing and food industry charges, into the mainstream in a time when anti-authority sentiment was growing. She also contributed to, as well as benefited from,
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AGW Alternatives (Score:3)
The models are one thing. Even the temperature record is not necessarily critical to the theory. For AGW to be conclusively disproven, there would have to be at least one of the following discoveries: [a] a new way for large amounts of heat to be transferred to space, or [b] a feedback loop that cancels out the (strongly positive) H2O-CO2 forcing.
Both of these ideas have issues. The first one is almost too fanciful to even mention, but suffice to say we would expect to see this effect in extraterrestrial at
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For AGW to be conclusively disproven,
That sound an awful lot like a religious argument. "You can't disprove the existance of God!" I don't believe AGW can be conclusively disproven in my lifetime. I don't think that's very important.
The models are one thing.
The models are the science. If we want to move past speculation and philosophy, to perhaps policy or engineering, the science needs to be there first, with models making accurate predictions with low error bars. We're simply not there yet - it's a hard problem.
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For AGW to be conclusively disproven,
That sound an awful lot like a religious argument. "You can't disprove the existance of God!"
It may indeed sound like the ring of certainty, while your argument may be characterized as not having examined the evidence.
The models are one thing.
The models are the science
That is bizarrely and categorically false -- like suggesting that orbital mechanics is defined by Kerbal Space Program, or that virology is defined by a particular virological model. Where do you imagine these models come from, curve fitting temperature data sets?
The fundamentals of AGW can be proven in your basement, and rely on undergraduate-level atmospheric and radiative physics.
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If you'll allow me a little flexibility in speaking, AGW depends only on the properties of CO2 gas
If it were that easy, the models would be nailing the predictions.
The atmosphere is not a bottle. The radiant heat absorbed by CO2 and re-radiated to the ground is trivial. "Forcing" summarizes complex effects - warmer upper atmosphere would mean less convection (the primary mechanism for cooling at ground level), and convection of the atmosphere is non-trivial. The CO2 in the atmosphere is regulated by the CO2 in the ocean (vastly more CO2 in the ocean), and ocean mixing is not yet well understood. The
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You keep harping on about models as if they were relevant to the theory. The atmosphere is opaque to IR to the edge of the CO2-rich layer. Raising the partial pressure of CO2 pushes the CO2-rich layer further out into space, which means the IR takes longer to reach space, which makes the Earth as a whole retain heat. Whatever happens in the lower atmosphere isn't going to change the radiative physics. The H2O feedback can be presumed to be strongly positive due to its efficacy as a greenhouse gas, its abund
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No one's debating that CO2 causes warming - that's not the climate change debate. The debate is about how much Man's action matter. If it were easy to show that answer, the models would be right. If it were easy to understand the system, the 19-year "pause" would have been predicted.
Here's a competing hypothesis. The Sun is "cooling" (less radiant energy will be input into the system in the future). We'll return to glaciation, as has been the norm for the current Ice Age, in a few centuries. Increasi
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There is a minimum level of warming given by the Stefan-Boltzmann equation, and then the feedback loops, which are likely to be strongly positive. Predictions are something like four degrees C per doubling plus or minus 1.5, which is a big range, but still not particularly comfortable for many parts of the world even on the low end. If there were no feedbacks to worry about we could probably increase CO2 at least to the end of the fossil fuel reserves.
The Sun is heating up on a giga-annum timeframe. On huma
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You're wrong about solar activity. Take a look at the Vostok ice core data [wikipedia.org] You see the definite pattern every 100k years? That's the glaciation cycle for the current Ice Age. The 100k year cycle is a bit of a mystery, but the best current theories are all about solar cycles. The Sun has many cycles, on many timeframes. The past 10k years are a bigger mystery - why didn't the climate return to ice-age conditions as it normally had? Whatever the reason, that anomaly was quite important for humans to de
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But there has been warming for the last 19 years. If you can't even get that basic fact right, why should anyone listen to you on this subject? You clearly are not arguing from expertise and experience, just hubris and emotion. Yay you.
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Or perhaps you misunderstand the debate? You do realize that none of the climate change models have been better at predicting the climate this century than the null hypothesis, right?
So, in fact, the impact of increasing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere to 400 ppm could be much larger than the impact predicted by the climate models?
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Sure, except at some point you'd expect the null hypothesis to fail - you'd expect warming beyond the error bars. You have to give the null hypothesis the same size error bars as you do the models, or it's all meaningless. Right now the error bars on the models are quite large - large enough that "no warming" doesn't disprove the models (well, most of them, some have been retired, but there are lots of models). That doesn't mean the science is bad, but it does mean the science is young and the problem is
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Sure
Exactly.
except at some point you'd expect the null hypothesis to fail - you'd expect warming beyond the error bars
We're talking about climate models. Climate models aren't used to test hypotheses. Science: you're doing it wrong.
Right now the error bars on the models are quite large - large enough that "no warming" doesn't disprove the models
Error bars go both ways. If the implication of wide error bars is as you describe, then a massive spike in temperature is as likely in the future as a cessation or reversal of the current warming trend.
That doesn't mean the science is bad, but it does mean the science is young and the problem is hard.
Well, given the acknowledged possibility that climate models might be severely underestimating the warming yet to occur, we should pull out all stops to tackle this hard problem, and simu
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Climate models aren't used to test hypotheses.
A climate model is a hypothesis. It's a falsifiable prediction about something you can measure. Textbook example, really.
Well, given the acknowledged possibility that climate models might be severely underestimating the warming yet to occur, we should pull out all stops to tackle this hard problem
Given the acknowledged problem of tiger attacks, no cost is too high for my Tiger Rock (tm), good for keeping tigers at bay.
The burden of proof is on the one making the claim. There are claims that AGW is a significant contributor to climate change. Great - that's definitely a falsifiable, scientific hypothesis. One that we can model and make concrete predictions about. It's certain
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Climate models aren't used to test hypotheses.
A climate model is a hypothesis
This being the case, your assertions are contradictory. Perhaps review your material and get back to us.
Well, given the acknowledged possibility that climate models might be severely underestimating the warming yet to occur, we should pull out all stops to tackle this hard problem
Given the acknowledged problem of tiger attacks, no cost is too high for my Tiger Rock (tm), good for keeping tigers at bay.
So have previously mounted an argument which results in the conclusion that climate models might be severely underestimating the warming yet to occur, you've now chosen to imply that this is not a real possibility.
Which of these contradictory positions are you going to actually argue for?
The burden of proof is on the one making the claim.
And this context, you've claimed that models are not required to predict the interac
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The burden of proof is on the one making the claim. You don't seem to get that. Your faith is strong, but faith is not science.
No one is arguing about whether CO2 is a greenhouse gas. That has never been a debate, but you can keep thrashing that strawman if you need the exercise. The debate is about whether CO2 man emits significantly affects the climate. That's non-trivial science. That's why there are models - when you can't just solve some equations, when the problem is more complex, you model the
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The burden of proof is on the one making the claim.
Correct.
You don't seem to get that.
Citation?
Your faith is strong, but faith is not science.
My personal views are irrelevant.
No one is arguing about whether CO2 is a greenhouse gas. That has never been a debate, but you can keep thrashing that strawman if you need the exercise.
Incorrect. I've just come from a discussion with a guy making that exact claim. Your assertion that the (alleged) lack of model correlation somehow supports the "no AGW" assertion is a slightly less plausible version of the same thing. Your assertion is less plausible because it assumes a mechanism that somehow reverses the anthropogenic climate change that has already been observed. What is this mechanism? At least the one with the conspiracy theory is a b
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You do realize that none of the climate change models have been better at predicting the climate this century than the null hypothesis, right?
* for values of "this century" starting with 1998.
There is a good reason why climatologist always look at time-frames of at least 30 years, anything below isn't expected to be statistically significant.
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And there's a tenth planet called Eris!
Evidence of a 9th planet!? (Score:2)
Wait....... (Score:2)
Forbes doesn't like AdBlock (Score:5, Informative)
Oh well. Article will go unread.
Re:Forbes doesn't like AdBlock (Score:5, Funny)
This is Slashdot so not reading TFA is expected.
Using a Forbes link is just ensures things are as they should around here.
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Never mind propaganda sites like Forbes. There are plenty of decent sources still left on the web, though you wonder how much longer it will be before they dry up. http://phys.org/news/2016-01-e... [phys.org]
Re:Forbes doesn't like AdBlock (Score:5, Informative)
I don't use AdBlock and yet Forbes thinks I'm using it. So I can't read it.
But I can say, at least the infrared claim doesn't hold up. Wise ruled out Saturn-sized bodies out to 10k AU (based not on reflection but, due to the distances, more the internal heat they'd give off), but here we're talking about a body that's far smaller than Saturn and would have much less internal heat. The theoretical planet is 1/10th the mass of Saturn, and its IR from internal heat would be much less than that. And while one could argue that due to being closer its additional solar reflection would overcome that, I wouldn't be so sure. Neptune is 1,7x heavier than the theoretical planet yet still has a cross sectional area less than 18% that of Saturn. And you can't just scale down by that 1,7x to around 10% the cross sectional area of Saturn - it's probably much less because its colder (the reason why Neptune has a smaller radius than Uranus despite being heavier). And even more than what you'd get simply from cooling gases - at aphelion it could well be cold enough to chill liquid hydrogen out of its atmosphere into hydrogen seas. And that would make it dramatically smaller.
In short, if it's even remotely near aphelion, WISE could well have missed it. And elliptical-orbiting bodies spend much more of their time near aphelion than perihelion.
As for the required observations about KBOs, I don't know enough about the types of bodies and their orbits being referred to in the summary to know if we should already have seen them or not. But either way, we need *something* to explain the similar arguments of perihelion of the sednoids. It's hard enough just to explain how something with such a distant perihelion ended up in an elliptical orbit to begin with, let alone multiple such objects sharing similar arguments of perihelion.
Re:Forbes doesn't like AdBlock (Score:5, Informative)
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It says right in the article that Wise had a hard time detecting Neptune which is relatively close.
However he had no trouble detecting Uranus from quite a distance.
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It says right in the article that Wise had a hard time detecting Neptune which is relatively close.
However he had no trouble detecting Uranus from quite a distance.
To be fair, he had a flashlight then.
[ Dyslexics: Note that was with an "a". If you saw "e" - do not Google that at work. :-) ]
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I don't use AdBlock and yet Forbes thinks I'm using it. So I can't read it.
What the hell? You don't use Adblock and you clicked on a Forbes link to a StartsWithABang post? That's like going to an African mental institution for recovering whores and aiming to have a conversation followed by sex without a condom. Today's special: We will drop your IQ and you'll end up with an STD! Buy it now!
Re: Forbes doesn't like AdBlock (Score:2)
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Well, Forbes doesn't like AdBlock and just last week ON SLASHDOT it was reported that they'd served malware to those who did turn it off...
But what do the editors of /. care?
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Re:Forbes doesn't like AdBlock (Score:4, Funny)
Well Forbes is that great source of Astronomy news. I keep it right next to Sky and Telescope.
I'm Skeptical (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm Skeptical that it's ever going to be worth following a Forbes link.
Re:I'm Skeptical (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Oddly enough, I have had to check that box repeatedly over the past few months. I use the latest version of Chrome.
Another oddity: APB still reports that it is filtering out some ads on Slashdot. Searching Google did not help me figure out how to view the logs for APB, so I can't report what is being filtered.
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They likely are also still tracking what content you visit.
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They likely are also still tracking what content you visit.
Thanks for the info. How creepy of them! Was this another Dice innovation? I've been away from Slashdot for a half score years.
Why don't they remove the YRO section of Slashdot while they are at it?
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Why would Slashdot need you to turn off the ad-blocker when it gives you that little check box on the front page to turn off ads yourself?
Because the little check box doesn't work. It only turns off some of the ads, and not all of them. It also doesn't stop the trackers, just [some of] the ads. AdBlock turns off all of the ads, and the trackers too.
Re:I'm Skeptical (Score:5, Interesting)
I do not get why so many articles here are sourced at Forbes when almost everyone here can't see them.
They are all submitted and posted by one person. Look at starts with a bang's profile. One single post on slashdot, but some 300 story submission attempts of which all are to his personal blog on Forbes, and of which a sadly high number is being accepted.
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To be fair Starts With a Bang was one of the best astronomy blogs on the internet when Nathan effectively ran it for free. It is unfortunate that having moved into a more commercial setting he happens to be publishing it on Forbes. That is one good reason why his articles are featured on this site.
However a significant number of readers, myself included, do not like sharing data with Forbes advertising partners and can no longer read his good quality journalism. YMMV.
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To be fair Starts With a Bang was one of the best astronomy blogs on the internet when Nathan effectively ran it for free.
There's nothing to be fair, the vast majority of his articles are clickbait and borderline pseudo-science existential crap debunked by several theories which are conveniently ignored when he tries to prove sometimes no point at all.
Occasionally he posts something interesting and relevant.
In the past he also occasionally posted on slashdot. But the flavour wore off when he posted EVERY SINGLE ONE OF HIS BLOGS on here. That's no longer doing astronomy blogs a good service, that's using Slashdot as a personal
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I don't remember if it was Forbes, but yesterday there was a link to the 25 happiest companies. The first one opened with title, a sentence of text, a huge picture, and plenty of space for ads I presume... Fuck that, I'm not clicking and loading a new damn page 25 times to read a bullet list. Sounds like something Forbes would do.
Theoretical Evidence? (Score:2)
What would "theoretical evidence" actually be. Evidence which is not like real evidence because it is theoretical. Evidence for a particular theory? That seems plausible but if so, it should be stated as "theory evidence".
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Just what I came to say. And how would it be premature? It's just evidence.
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Back in third grade when we learned the scientific method I don't remember a "theory" step in there anywhere. If anything calling something a theory only serves to create the illusion of factuality which is a rather ironic thing to do to the product of skepticism and rational inquiry. A still valid hypothesis should be used as the best tool we have s
I blame the media (Score:5, Interesting)
Every time some scientist comes out with even the most untested hypothesis, the media starts touting it as some great new discovery. The headlines were "New Planet Found!" when there should have been no headlines at all (not until it can be verified by many other astronomers).
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I suspect it's as much that readers lack reading comprehension and gloss right over words like "may" and "potential" as that the headlines are bad.
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Provid
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I blame startswithabang. After all what could get more clicks than posting some article about being sceptical about something that was in the media only a little while earlier.
Re: I blame the media (Score:2)
No no no (Score:2, Insightful)
This post, and the post yesterday covering the Caltech announcement, are great examples of what's wrong with science reporting these days. The story yesterday should have been titled "Caltech Researchers Find Evidence That Might Indicate A Ninth Planet"; it isn't proven, and while the researchers like their model, even they don't claim it's a done deal. However it makes better headlines to make it seem more certain, so yesterday's slashdot headline actually said "Caltech Astronomers Say a Ninth Planet Lurks
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Not even. It's (that is, the proposed "planet" is) a fucking hypothesis. It hasn't been found.
ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
The 'blogger' complains that the authors predict things that have not yet been observed, but that is exactly the point. A proposal that only explained things that are known is awfully convenient and cannot be confirmed or disproven by new observations.
Re: ridiculous (Score:2)
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The tree falls in the forest...
Astrophysicist Pissing Contest (Score:2)
Ethan's a pretty good guy and friends of friends of mine. I have been following their circles has been entertaining over the years. Every one of them has their points and almost all of them should be taken into consideration when "finding" a new planet.
There is a large community of astrophysicists who want Pluto reclassified as a planet. Mike Brown being the Pluto killer, finding a new planet only adds to the frustration.
Yet we know there to be a difference between sensational findings and actual findings
PLUTO is the 9th planet... bring it back... (Score:3)
Planet Definition (Score:3)
As i understood it, the primary reason for classifying Pluto as a "dwarf planet" was size.
Actually no, the size criterion was whether it's big enough to be round. Pluto and Ceres, and a number of TNOs all qualify. However, Pluto is gravitationally dominated by Neptune, in a 3:2 orbital resonance. The rule is, if some other planet's gravity makes you its bitch, you don't get to be a planet.
For a more precise definition of what it means to be a planet, including several criteria for what "clearing the neighborhood" means, you can consult this arXiv paper [arxiv.org][pdf]. Interestingly, it suggests that the s
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Actually, I thought it was because Pluto hadn't cleared its orbit.
A dinosaur astronomer could say the same thing about the Earth. Seriously, I suspect it's a matter of restricting the definition to the point where the number of planets become manageable rather than the couple of thousands mentioned by the grandparent. I wonder what would happen to the definition if the new ninth planet turned out to be a collision prone celestial body.
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134340 Pluto is its official name.
It is minor plant number is 134340.so it is not even a few thousand. It is orders of magnitude more. It is however the second dwarf planet as ceres was classified as that before Pluto was recategorised
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Actually, I thought it was because Pluto hadn't cleared its orbit.
A dinosaur astronomer could say the same thing about the Earth.
Hint: "cleared its orbit" is not the same as "can't be hit by objects not in its orbit".
Simple explanation... (Score:2)
It's just a large frozen Mass relay. Or better yet maybe a sleeping reaper!
StartsWithAClickbait is posting anonymously (Score:2)
It appears as though StartsWithABang is posting articles anonymously now. How quaint.
We still know it's you oh click-whoring leech.
Ignore Article (Score:2)
Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown even state: "Now we can go and find this planet..."
So yes the researches are actually skeptical of their own work, we don't need some douche bag trying to make themselves look important.
No way Forbes (Score:2)
Rubbish journalism, rubbish clickbait submission (Score:2)
This is the kind of tripe that's sinking /.
Yesterday, journos spin a "hey maybe there's something interesting here" announcement into an "OMG another planet" gush...
Today, we are supposed to click though to the dreadful Forbes site to find out...that more data is required....
Fuck me, who'd have thought it! Of course, the scientific method is so passé these days.
It reminds me of the tabloid that published a story (with picture) about the "amazing discovery of a WW2 bomber found on the Moon"
Did the ensu
Regardless (Score:2)
Looking at a scale depiction of our solar system and possible orbits, if true, it is only really true for very large definitions of "solar system". It apparently ranges from 400AU to 1100AU on a 15,000 year period. To be blunt, even at its closest, it's way fscking out there... It is interesting none the less I suppose.
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The solar system extends to the end of the Oort Cloud which is about 100,000 AU away from the Sun. That's much, much farther than this object.
If this object is as big as they think it is (assuming it exists, of course) then it could have observable effects on objects in the Oort Cloud and the Kupier Belt, which is very important to the solar system.
More to the point, it makes certain planetary formation models make a lot more sense which is certainly worth considering this to be a part of the Solar System,
"theoretical evidence" (Score:2)
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Pluto is not the 9th planet by any measure. There's over a dozen bodies in hydrostatic equilibrium before it. If you don't count "planetary moons" you still have to count Ceres, there's no question that it's in hydrostatic equilibrium.
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I also see no particular reason to keep the planet count low. Why institute arbitrary limitations to keep it below a dozen? If there are 36 planets there are 36 planets, if 300 there are 300.
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You missed the point. It's not the 9th. It's either the 8th, 10th, or some number greater than 10. There's no logical definition that makes it the 9th apart from "historical".
I too support a high planet count.
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So you're saying that there's the Fear of a Black Planet?
Because, if so, I already discovered it in 1990.
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No friend of Plutonians would fund this scum.
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*slow clap*