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Space Science

Curious Tilt of the Sun Traced To Undiscovered Planet (spacedaily.com) 232

Posted by msmash from the curious-cases dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Planet Nine - the undiscovered planet at the edge of the solar system that was predicted by the work of Caltech's Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown in January 2016 -- appears to be responsible for the unusual tilt of the Sun, according to a new study. The large and distant planet may be adding a wobble to the solar system, giving the appearance that the Sun is tilted slightly. "Because Planet Nine is so massive and has an orbit tilted compared to the other planets, the solar system has no choice but to slowly twist out of alignment," says Elizabeth Bailey, a graduate student at Caltech and lead author of a study announcing the discovery. All of the planets orbit in a flat plane with respect to the Sun, roughly within a couple degrees of each other. That plane, however, rotates at a six-degree tilt with respect to the Sun -- giving the appearance that the Sun itself is cocked off at an angle. Until now, no one had found a compelling explanation to produce such an effect. "It's such a deep-rooted mystery and so difficult to explain that people just don't talk about it," says Brown, the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy.
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Curious Tilt of the Sun Traced To Undiscovered Planet More

Curious Tilt of the Sun Traced To Undiscovered Planet

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  • Just curious... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by XxtraLarGe ( 551297 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2016 @10:22AM (#53146449) Journal
    How is it that we have an undiscovered planet in our solar system, yet we're able to find earth-like planets orbiting stars that are light-years away?

    • Re:Just curious... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Maritz ( 1829006 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2016 @10:27AM (#53146507)
      The far away ones are seen either with a wobble in the star (shows up as redshift/blueshift on a spectrograph) or the planet occludes the star and makes it dim measurably. That means the planet has to be in line of sight of the star. This planet can't be in line of sight between us and the sun, because it's far out. If it exists, of course.

    • Re:Just curious... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25, 2016 @10:27AM (#53146511)

      How is it that we have an undiscovered planet in our solar system, yet we're able to find earth-like planets orbiting stars that are light-years away?

      Most of those exoplanets are quite close to their respective stars, making them much easier to spot. On the other hand this planet is so far out and moving so slowly in its giant orbit that its difficult to spot it even moving and that's if you're lucky to be watching the spot it is currently in for a long time. The original discovery of Pluto was a happy accident in many ways.

      • Yeah, funny story that.

        "We've calculated Neptune movement and orbit as such requires a ninth planet to exist, in orbit roughly this, position roughly this..."

        "Hey, guys! You were right! We found it! Let's name it Pluto!"

        "But... uh, we made a mistake in our calculations. Neptune's orbit really doesn't need a ninth planet actually..."

        "But... we found it anyway?"

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

          They found it because there is a whole bunch of Pluto-like objects out there, which is the whole reason it got demoted once this was recognized. Take ten thousand high-albedo objects (Pluto is at least partly high albedo), and say "point there, that's where we think it is" -- even if you really have no data, just a hunch -- and there's a good chance a dedicated observer will find something. They found Pluto not because it was Planet Nine, but because it was Dwarf Planet One of Thousands. While it was unlike

          • They found it because it happened to be where the (faulty) predictions of Planet Nine foreseen a planet to be there.

            Look at the time gap between discovery of Pluto (1930) and the next Kuiper Belt dwarf planet (Varuna, 2000). The time gap is so large because people stopped looking for the "ninth planet" once the "Neptune's orbit necessitating ninth planet" theory was disproven. Yes, it was dumb luck that Pluto happened to be where the faulty theory predicted a planet to exist. Still, it was that theory that

    • Re:Just curious... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by plopez ( 54068 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2016 @10:30AM (#53146533) Journal

      Possibly due to perspective. If a solar system is far away, you can observe all of it. If an object is in the solar system *and* out of the elliptic it may well be hidden. The location of the other planet, which may have an orbital period of centuries, has to be in the correct place to be seen and you need to be looking for it. Just guessing.

      Now that there is evidence of a large object outside the elliptic I'm sure someone will try to calculate the period and approximate location of it. The fact it is out of the elliptic may explain why some comets are out of the elliptic.

      By the way, nice sig.

      • Re:Just curious... (Score:4, Informative)

        by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2016 @11:32AM (#53147089) Homepage

        And that is assuming it's a bright object reflecting a LOT of light from a very distant sun. If this thing is dark in color at all, the lumens available out at where they guess it is...

        One astrophysicist basically said, IT would be easier to spot a flashlight that is on and pointed at the earth out in the OOORT cloud than to directly observe a planet out there. They need to look for stars that are being occluded and see if we can create a dataset, but if it is beyond the oort cloud, the orbital period may be measured in 1000's of years and will be even hard yet to detect

        • One astrophysicist basically said, IT would be easier to spot a flashlight that is on and pointed at the earth out in the OOORT cloud than to directly observe a planet out there.

          Clearly, the answer is to put a flashlight on this planet, pointed at Earth, so we can know where it is.

        • And that is assuming it's a bright object reflecting a LOT of light from a very distant sun. If this thing is dark in color at all, the lumens available out at where they guess it is...

          The best chance - if you read the papers - is in the fairly far IR, looking for remenant heat of formation from the assembly of the planet. If I remember the papers, which I did read.

          It has all been put up on Arxiv, and no small amount of it submitted to this site as news items.

      • Now that there is evidence of a large object outside the elliptic I'm sure someone will try to calculate the period and approximate location of it.

        If you follow Brown or Batygin's twitter feeds, you'll find that they've just had a substantial chunk of observing time on one of the big Hawaiian light buckets doing exactly what you suggest. Hint : time on telescopes like this requires a very well-formulated proposal. It's valuable time. And when the fog rolls in ... it's dead time.

    • Re:Just curious... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25, 2016 @10:35AM (#53146595)
      The same way we can observe the ass of that girl 3 rows in front during our astronomy lecture, but we can't see our own ass even if we're talking out of it.

    • Re:Just curious... (Score:5, Informative)

      by myrdos2 ( 989497 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2016 @11:09AM (#53146873)

      XKCD has a good image [xkcd.com] to explain this.

    • We can't detect any wobble it might impart to the Sun because we're orbiting around the Sun so we wouldn't detect the shift in frequency that gives it away. And we can't detect a transit because it will never pass between us and the Sun.

      And in any case, most exoplanets we've found are the heavy close-orbit ones, not the heavy distantly-orbiting ones.

      • Its interesting. In principal we could detect the sun's wobble but looking at Doppler shifts to distant objects. The problem with planet 9 is that the orbital period is so long that it would take too long to get a data set.

        I don't know if anyone has measured the solar system wobble on shorter timescales. The information is probably already in planetary searches.

    • Re:Just curious... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Kozar_The_Malignant ( 738483 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2016 @11:45AM (#53147227)
      Here's what I get from the reporting on the original article by Batygin and Brown. Given the data, Planet Nine's orbital path is pretty well known. It is, however, way out there, which means that there is a lot of orbital length to search. The data do not give any hint as to where on the orbit Planet Nine might be. B&B speculate that it is not on the part of the orbital path that brings it closest to the sun, because there are good odds that all of the comet hunting scopes in the world would have spotted it by now. A good amount of telescope time is now being spent searching the further reaches of the orbit, and my guess is that it will be found within five years. If it exists, of course.
    • Why someone would mark a perfectly valid question like this as "overrated"?

      • Re:Just curious... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by XxtraLarGe ( 551297 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2016 @12:10PM (#53147517) Journal

        Why someone would mark a perfectly valid question like this as "overrated"?

        Because someone who doesn't like me has mod points. I've seen many of my comments modded down across several different threads. From what I understand, by modding someone overrated, your mod can't be metamoderated, so you don't lose moderation opportunities. But, it's just a message board, so it really doesn't bother me. I've got "karma" to burn. One of the reasons I always quote a person I'm replying to: If someone is modded down below the threshold, people will still know what my reply is about.

    • It is mostly due to Mathematical calculation vs. Visual observation.

      The Planets part of the Solar System have been found using visual observation. A Dark planet so far away would be nearly impossible to find.

      The Planets we found outside our solar system are from Stars that are having particular traits that that fit a mathematical model.

      So just as how we found the mysterious 9th real planet basing the observation of the sun. Vs looking into the darkness to see if we find something.

      If/When we do visually fin

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by nusuth ( 520833 )

        IANAA but I have an impractical idea that might work. Everything outside solar system is either redshifted or blueshifted by a large margin. If we use a very narrow band of spectrum for observation we may observe only stuff move relatively slowly wrt Earth. For example, if we are reasonable sure that any planet in our neighborhood would have some helium in it, just look at around 447.148 nm. Stuff near us move relatively slowly wrt Earth, so helium's absorption bands would be shifted only slightly. If we h

        • You have a problem.

          First, there are lots of little chunks of stuff that have helium in it. A huge number are very small, but close enough to out gas and show up in a low resolution version of your survey.

          That's where the problem comes in. This planet is very far out. If it is in the far reaches of its orbit, very little sunlight is going to hit the planet. You're going to have to capture very high resolution images to even get a few photons from this object. And they will be hidden by the myriad of closer o

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by nusuth ( 520833 )

            I see your point. I think there is no getting around the fact that we would receive too little light from the planet. Discarding almost all of the photons coming from it is the best start for a solution, if the best result we could hope is to tell the planet together with all local junk from interstellar objects.

        • IANAA but I have an impractical idea that might work. Everything outside solar system is either redshifted or blueshifted by a large margin.

          Your last sentence which I quote is where it breaks down. Not everything outside the solar system is considerably red- or blue-shifted w.r.t laboratory standards (at zero relative velocity). Most things that we can see in our galaxy have very little velocity relative to us, because most of the galaxy is invisible to us due to dust and gas in the plane of the galaxy. It

    • Have you looked at the size of those eco planets? Most mass i. The Jupiter range and are quite close to their host stars(like closer than Venus)

      There are exceptions but they are harder to spot.

      Lastly we don't know where to look so we have to guess

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by idji ( 984038 )
      We are good at seeing planets closer than Mercury is to the Sun, basking in the light of their star. But this planet as SO FAR WAY OUT THERE beyond Pluto it is super cold and dark. It's easy to see a pinprick of light against black, but not a tiny black, slow moving (thousands of years for an orbit) object against a black sky.

    • There are two main ways to detect planets. The first was is by occultation [wikipedia.org], where the planet passes in front of its parent star, causing a reduction in the amount of light reaching the observer. In effect, a solar eclipse, but the effect is much smaller. This method won't work here, because we actually occult the sun as seen from Planet X and not vice versa.

      The method that could be used is by the radial velocity [wikipedia.org] method, where a star is moved in it's orbit by the planet orbiting it. The problem here is that

      • The problem here is that Planet X is so far away, and its orbit is so long, that you would need to observe the sun for thousands of years for the movement to be discernible.

        This might work, if the output of the Sun was stable over that period of time. We don't know that.

  • Pluto bitches (Score:3)

    by Virtucon ( 127420 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2016 @10:24AM (#53146483)

    you call me a dwarf now, I'll tilt your sun..

  • I'm holding out for planet 10. When are we going?

  • Would have been nice if they explained that... is it the sun's rotational plane?

    • Re:the sun is round how is it tilted (Score:4, Insightful)

      by TFlan91 ( 2615727 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2016 @10:38AM (#53146621)

      The Earth is round and also tilted... same concept.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tomhath ( 637240 )
      The Sun's axis is not perpendicular to the plane of the known planets' orbits. Whether it's the Sun or the plane that's tilted is a philosophical question.

      • >Whether it's the Sun or the plane that's tilted is a philosophical question.

        Actually, it's a physics question. The answer seems to be that the planets' orbital plane, the ecliptic, is tilted. Given the relative mass and positions of the bodies involved, it is much easier fir the hypothetical planet to affect the ecliptic than the sun.

        • The answer seems to be that the planets' orbital plane, the ecliptic, is tilted.

          It's worse than that. "THE ecliptic" is the projection of the Earth's orbit onto the plane of the sky as seen from the centre of the Sun. Or (equivalently), the projection of the Sun's position onto the plane of the sky from the Earth.

          For every object in orbit around the Sun, there is a different ecliptic, similarly defined. We relate them to the Earth-Sun ecliptic purely for the convenience that we are mostly resident on Earth

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by idji ( 984038 )
      the orbital plane of the solar system (all the planets and asteroids) is 6 to the Sun's equator. The question is - are the plaents 6 off or is the sun 6 off?

  • Say this aloud: "It's so massive..." (Score:5, Interesting)

    by starglider29a ( 719559 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2016 @10:38AM (#53146629)
    "How massive is it?"
    "It's so massive that even at an insane distance, this Oort Cloud body can out-twist the masses of both Jupiter AND Saturn."

    Wait? How massive is it? How is it able to tilt the axis of the sun, since tilting an axis is a TIDAL action? IMHO (as a degreed rocket scientist) that Occam's Razor would indicate that it's easier to shift the orbital planes of the planets, rather than tidally torque the sun. Remember, for the tidal action, the Planet IX must be very close to Sol to work its magic.

    • Re:Say this aloud: "It's so massive..." (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mysticgoat ( 582871 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2016 @11:44AM (#53147219) Homepage Journal

      A more careful reading of the article reveals that what is being tilted is the plane of the ecliptic. From a geocentric point of view, that appears to be a tilt of the Sun's axis, but to an observer outside the solar system, it is the plane of the orbits of all the known "non-dwarf" planets that is tilted. (IIRC, Pluto's orbit is outside the plane of the ecliptic-- which is part of the reason it took so long to find it after the maths showed it must exist.)

      Do we have enough data to estimate the orbital period of Planet IX? If so, it may be possible to correlate its changing angle to the plane of the ecliptic with long term changes in Earth climates. It would seem that during the thousands of years when Planet IX is near the plane of the ecliptic, the Earth's orbit would become more oval. Currently Earth is closest to the Sun (and moving faster in its orbit) around January 3, give or take a day; and most distant around July 3 (moving most slowly in its orbit). This causes Summer in the northern hemisphere to be around 4 days longer than Summer in the southern hemisphere. If Planet IX can cause a tilt of the planetary orbits at this time, then when it is in line with the plane of the ecliptic the Earth should see northern Summers significantly longer than southern Summers (and southern Winters longer than northern Winters).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Reziac ( 43301 ) *

        My first thought was to wonder if this "massive planet" is actually a dead star. Has there ever been any evidence that this was once a binary system?

        • Has there ever been any evidence that this was once a binary system?

          None. The Sun matches the behaviour of similarly massed stars very closely. While about half of all stars are in multiples (and so about 1/3 of star systems are multiple), no evidence of the Sun having a companion star has been reported.

          If a putative companion were comparable in size to the Sun, than we'd see it by night. In fact, we'd not really have a night. (ACC played with that in one of the Space Odyssey sequels, IIRC)

          If th putative

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Reziac ( 43301 ) *

            I meant, is it possible that this hypothetical giant pulling-us-out-of-alignment planet is actually a dead dwarf star (dead long enough to have effectively zero luminosity and be therefore invisible), and if so was it a binary or a captive?

            Cuz seems to me it's got to be more massive than any of the known planets to have this much effect.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Is this reminding anyone else of the old theory of an second sun in our system who's eccentric orbit through the Kuiper Belt could be blamed for sending out showers of debris that helped create mass extinctions?
  • ... then they must surely know what direction it lies in, from the sun. Working backwards from there, they should be able to narrow the area to search sufficiently that they ought to at least figure out exactly where they need to be looking to find this object.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Too many variables. The mass of the planet. Its angular tilt. Its angular path/velocity. They don't know exactly where to look. Computer modelling suggested the existence of this planet, but even if we're able to predict its orbital path correctly that's still going to be a literal 360 degree arc of the sky needing to be searched. Always assuming of course that the purported ninth planet isn't currently occluded by the Sun.
      Something as far out as this is purported to be is going to be nearly impossible to s

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by slew ( 2918 )

      ... then they must surely know what direction it lies in, from the sun. Working backwards from there, they should be able to narrow the area to search sufficiently that they ought to at least figure out exactly where they need to be looking to find this object.

      The researchers did not infer the existence of this new planet from looking at the sun tilt, the tilt was reasoned to be potentially explainable by a theorized planet that we haven't discovered yet.

      The planet in question was inferred by looking at the statistical orbital distribution of Kuiper Belt Objects. They have a general idea of it's orbital inclination for this mysterious new planet they only have a general range of mass (~10x earth) and orbital distance (~20x Neptune's orbit). That makes a pretty

  • ...and pass close to other stars. Furthermore the Sun probably evolved in a densely packed globular cluster. The solar system is therefore susceptible to random and drastic gravitational chaos. No need to invoke the presence of giant invisible constant companion planets. Rather consider a periodic drive by shooting wreaking mayhem and havoc in the Oort cloud.

    • We Travel through a Crowded Galaxy ... and pass close to other stars. Furthermore the Sun probably evolved in a densely packed globular cluster.

      Not a globular cluster. They're a different cluster of stars. Probably the Sun did form in a molecular cloud with many others - see for example, the modern Orion star-forming region. The light from the largest and brightest of the cluster's stars would then have dispersed the remaining gas and dust of the cloud (see both the Orion nebulae and the "Pillars of Creati

  • TEN, you fucking cunts.

    Signed,
            Pluto.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by quenda ( 644621 )

      TEN, you fucking cunts.

      Signed,

              Pluto.

      ELEVEN, you self-righteous potty-mouthed wanker. You were 130 years too late to be planet number 9.
      Go back to the Kuiper belt, and stop stealing our orbits.

      Signed,
              Ceres.

      • Planet 1665, you innumerate baboons.
        Signed, Felix.

        (After minor planet 1664 Felix (1929 CD), discovered February 4, 1929 by E. Delporte ; the last Solar system body discovered before Pluto, TTBOMK).

        Yes, this is an example of reductio ad absurdam [wikipedia.org] .

  • Sitchin (Score:3)

    by jbmartin6 ( 1232050 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2016 @03:54PM (#53149677)
    I am becoming afraid. It looks more and more like Zechariah Sitchin [sitchin.com] was right.
  • Given the vagueness of the estimates and the proposed distance and orbital period, can we actually say with a good probability that this object is actually orbiting the sun? We haven't been doing really precise measurements of planet's orbits all that long. Couldn't it just be an object passing by the solar system that isn't even orbiting?

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