Something Big Is Warping Our Outer Solar System (futurity.org) 144
schwit1 quotes Futurity:
The plane of our solar system is warped in the outer reaches of the Kuiper Belt, suggesting the presence of an unknown Mars-to-Earth-mass planetary object far beyond Pluto -- but much closer than Planet Nine. An unknown, unseen "planetary mass object" may lurk in the outer reaches of our solar system, according to new research on the orbits of minor planets.
The object would be different from -- and much closer than -- the so-called Planet Nine, a planet whose existence has yet to be confirmed... "The most likely explanation for our results is that there is some unseen mass," says Kat Volk, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and lead author of the study in the Astronomical Journal. "According to our calculations, something as massive as Mars would be needed to cause the warp that we measured."
The object would be different from -- and much closer than -- the so-called Planet Nine, a planet whose existence has yet to be confirmed... "The most likely explanation for our results is that there is some unseen mass," says Kat Volk, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and lead author of the study in the Astronomical Journal. "According to our calculations, something as massive as Mars would be needed to cause the warp that we measured."
Spock (Score:2, Funny)
"Captain, that is definitely a Klingon warp signature."
Greekgeek :-)
Don't panic... (Score:4, Funny)
But it's probably V'Ger.
Re:Don't panic... (Score:4, Informative)
It's a breach in the Immaterium. Prepare for the warp storms, pray that the god-emperor will see us through safely.
Super-massive (Score:2, Funny)
I figured out what's warping the solar system:
http://static.deathandtaxesmag... [deathandtaxesmag.com]
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Bigly fake moon! So sad.
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inb4 "brown planet" (Score:1)
There's a kook who'll be commenting soon enough quoting Sitchin and his horseshit. Yeah, I know, there'll be PLENTY of those idiots.
(go ahead, mark me flamebait. They can't unbutthurt you)
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Zecharia Sitchin was a hugely influential man who changed the way that many people view human life, human nature, and our role in the cosmos.
1. The ancient Mesopotamian gods were actually real, only they were not actually gods. They were alien beings. Lacking the language to discuss extraterrestrial life, the ancients simply referred to them as “gods.”
2. There is another planet in our solar system which is presently undiscovered by modern scientists. It follows a slow elliptical orbit s
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Actually because Earth is flat, the CO2 is a lot lighter, so we can just dig giant holes, the CO2 will fill these holes. That's why we use HAARP to make sure when we spray chemtrails the air is ionized in such a way that the full color spectrum is visible (for reference search "rainbow conspiracy" on YouTube) !!!
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You mean that they got the Antarctica gate, flew it to a black hole and then dialed THAT gate from Nibiru in order to freeze Nibiru in an area of time dialation, don't you?
Re: inb4 "brown planet" (Score:2)
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Not again! (Score:5, Informative)
We only just knocked the last "Planet Nine" theory and now we've got ANOTHER ONE?!
See:
https://medium.com/starts-with... [medium.com]
Re:Not again! (Score:5, Funny)
The planets, they go all the way to eleven!!
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Starts with a bang never knocked anything with his tabloid space gibberish.
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We only just knocked the last "Planet Nine" theory and now we've got ANOTHER ONE?!
See: https://medium.com/starts-with... [medium.com]
(A excerpt from our not-so-distant past...)
"You know, I think there are other objects besides our Sun and Moon out there..."
"Oh, what a load of shit. Everyone knows our world is flat, and we are the most important world. Even our Sun rotates around us."
Sometimes I wonder how many more times we'll find ourselves to be dead wrong when speaking about our solar system. From the dawn of time (brought to you by the Sun Chariot), we've certainly proven we have a rather ridiculous ability to not be right.
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And we thought we are done with epicycles... (Score:2)
... when Kuiper belt objects started to kick in.
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Regardless of which , with this proposed "planet" being around 1xMars mass, it's also around 0.1xEarth mass and 0.01xP9(BB2016). Literally, it and it's effects would fit in the error bars of the P9(B
Re: Not again! (Score:1)
As if there were a righty science to compare it to. Lol
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righty science is "god waved a magic wand, poof, we don't need no stinking cause and effect"
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God made it. [youtube.com]
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Lefty science: Conclude, biased proof, fail.
It only took you six words to prove that you're a fucking mong. Congrats on your efficiency.
Must be the Deathstar (Score:4, Funny)
The Empire obviously decided to park it here and then forgot all about it...
Mars mass object inside 100 AU? (Score:3)
If its a kuiper belt object, then it must be huge to have that much mass, because of its low density. Or it could be a rocky object, like Vesta or Mercury, but then its hard to explain how it got to be so far from the sun.
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The only way a foreign object could enter the solar system would be to score a near direct hit on the sun, and break up during closest approach. Parts of it would remain in a comet like orbit. But this object doesn't seem to be in an orbit like that. I really don't see how it could be from a different solar system.
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Either way its pretty unlikely. And it would have remained in an eccentric orbit. If that happened there would be evidence of it in the inner solar system.
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Either way its pretty unlikely.
Everything is pretty unlikely, but space also gives a lot of opportunities for unlikely things to happen.
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I agree that an extra-Solar origin would be considerably more unlikely than a within-Solar origin, but it's hard to rule out an extra-Solar origin.
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If it came from some other system it would be as likely to end up there as anywhere else.
Well, as likely as anything ending up in an orbit is I guess.
This requires a momentum transfer with another large object so it is not as likely. Without a momentum transfer, it would be in a hyperbolic orbit which leaves the system.
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I bet it's not so huge that some arrogant administrator will declare it's not big enough to be called a planet.
It'll have to be someone from Europe, because I just read on Slashdot that there aren't any Presidential science advisors left.
Also, didn't Arthur C Clarke call this?
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As the mass goes up, the material near the core gets compressed. Which is why, despite very similar compositions, Earth has a density of 5.51 (g/cc or tonnes/cu.m) and Mars (1/10 Earth mass) is 3.93 (same units) while the Moon (1/82 Earth mass) is 3.34.
Triton and Pluto and Charon are the furthest out bodies for which I have figures (I've really got to put some more of the KBOs into my data base) : Triton Ma
Protomolecule at work. (Score:3)
Probably the ring.
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They'll forget by the time that makes it to TV.
Pluto? (Score:1)
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Either Neptune has a dick or he doesn't. Stop calling him trans.
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No. Alan Stern and some others from his team have made the argument again, and been soundly ignored by the rest of the planetary science community.
He's a respected worker (PI on New Horizons, for instance), so he'll get peer reviewed and published, but that doesn't mean that he'll carry the consensus with him.
I'm not a planetary scientist myself, but I do follow the field quite closely. When @plutokiller (Mike Brown, Caltech) killed Pluto, I was pers
It's Uranus (Score:2)
Go on a diet already. Jeez!
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Gentle reminder: X-day is in THREE DAY'S TIME, people. Praise "Bob"!
I have MY saucer ticket. Do you have yours?
How do they do this? (Score:4)
I have read articles like this for many years (I recall that the outer planets were detected before they were known this way) and have always wondered something that maybe someone here can explain.
I understand at a high level the theory behind detecting unseen objects by their fanatic effect on known bodies but just how can you make measurements that precise? How many digits of precision do you need to do the calculation? Intuitively the angles involved must be far smaller than typical mechanical tools could measure so how do they do it?
Re:How do they do this? Good question (Score:2)
Re:How do they do this? Good question (Score:5, Informative)
The scale is exactly what lets you detect the issue. The orbital time in days for Neptune is 60,200 days. Sixty Thousand days. Its orbital velocity is 5.43 km/sec. even a very TINY change to that speed over that many days will put it far out of the expected location and that is what we detect.
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Re: How do they do this? (Score:2, Interesting)
Because they're really, really dark. Think about this for scale. Pluto is so far out there that the sun's light warms it only enough to melt nitrogen. It is amazingly dark. And Pluto is relatively close compared to the KBOs. Now, the KBOs are, at least the ones we've seen, very dark. They don't reflect any light. And, IIRC, they're about 7 times the distance, so roughly 2% as much light is getti to them. Then, once only a tiny fraction of the light that hits them reflects, it's still an amazingly long way
Re:Angles (Score:2)
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Neptune was found this way, but that was likely coincidence. The early estimates of Uranus's mass (and the other planets, principally Jupiter's) were off by a few percent, which made Le Verrier's estimate for the location of Neptune essentially unjustifiable. But he got lucky, and Galle found the planet at the predicted position. Repeating Le Verrier's calculation with the revised Solar System geometry after the transits of Venus
Oh No It Is (Score:3)
Nemesis (Issac Asimov) [wikipedia.org]
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So much for my recall after 15 years
Nightfall (Issac Asimov) [wikipedia.org]
Black Hole? (Score:3)
That we cannot see it... maybe it's a small black hole? Or some other lesser stellar remnant that's burnt out, but not massive enough to be a full scale black hole. The suggestion it's quite massive, yet we haven't found it... I dunno! Maybe some time in the distant past, this system had two stars. Singular star systems are supposedly less common than binaries.
TLDR; Just speculative rambling.
Re:Black Hole? (Score:5, Informative)
That we cannot see it... maybe it's a small black hole?
It's really far away, and brightness drops with 4th power of distance, so even a regular planet-sized object would be very hard to see. It's not that massive either, only estimated to have the mass of Mars, so that's a relatively small planet.
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The sunlight falling on the object goes down with the square of the distance to the Sun, and what we get of the sunlight goes down with the square of the distance back here. For objects that far away, distance to Earth and the Sun is about the same, and the amount of reflected light we get from it does go down with the fourth power of the distance.
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It gets significantly more complicated when one or more of your mirror, source, or receiver is travelling at a significant fraction of c.
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If it was a
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Meh. Just call it Dark Matter and be done with it...
More seriously, though I am unsure of how reasonable it is, perhaps it is a close agglomeration of belt objects working in concert gravitationally. Even within the belt most objects, probably particularly distant ones are quite far apart relatively speaking, most space is exactly that. However if there was some event in the distant past, or even some unknown solar mechanic that might glom many of these objects close enough together that as a whole have eno
Astromers (Score:3)
I wish astronomers would stop pulling these shitty theories out of Uranus all of the time.
Eddies (Score:3)
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Yes. Also in reality.
Why do you believe that planetary origin modellers don't include chaos in their models. After all, they do used thousands of processor years of computer time to do exactly that. Can you give me an Arxiv (i.e. open) link to these hydrodynamic papers that don't include chaos. You do realise that they run ensembles of these models precisely to search f
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Why do you believe that planetary origin modellers don't include chaos in their models.
Why do you assume they do? Computer models are an extension of the always-flawed thought processes of the humans who make them. If the humans don't (or won't) think of something, it won't be in the models the computers are crunching. See every climate change simulation that doesn't take our Sun's periodic cycles into account. Or which hasn't considered the short and long-term effects of the BP oil spill on action of the Gulf Stream.
ALL simulations are, by necessity, simplifications of a problem and its para
I've finally figured out American politics... (Score:1, Funny)
The Democrats are a conspiracy to convince people to vote Republican
The Republicans are a conspiracy to convince people to vote Democrat
Re: I've finally figured out American politics... (Score:2)