A New World's Extraordinary Orbit Points to Planet Nine (wired.com) 82
In early 2016, two planetary scientists declared that a ghost planet is hiding in the depths of the solar system, well beyond the orbit of Pluto. Their claim, which they made based on the curious orbits of distant icy worlds, quickly sparked a race to find this so-called Planet Nine -- a planet that is estimated to be about 10 times the mass of Earth. From a report: Now, astronomers are reporting that they have spotted another distant world -- perhaps as large as a dwarf planet -- whose orbit is so odd that it is likely to have been shepherded by Planet Nine. The object confirms a specific prediction made by Konstantin Batygin and Michael Brown, the astronomers at the California Institute of Technology who first argued for Planet Nine's existence. "It's not proof that Planet Nine exists," said David Gerdes, an astronomer at the University of Michigan and a co-author on the new paper. "But I would say the presence of an object like this in our solar system bolsters the case for Planet Nine."
Gerdes and his colleagues spotted the new object in data from the Dark Energy Survey, a project that probes the acceleration in the expansion of the universe by surveying a region well above the plane of the solar system. This makes it an unlikely tool for finding objects inside the solar system, since they mostly orbit within the plane. But that is exactly what makes the new object unique: Its orbit is tilted 54 degrees with respect to the plane of the solar system. It's something Gerdes did not expect to see. Batygin and Brown, however, predicted it. The rocky body is being described as 2015 BP519. Quanta magazine has more details.
Gerdes and his colleagues spotted the new object in data from the Dark Energy Survey, a project that probes the acceleration in the expansion of the universe by surveying a region well above the plane of the solar system. This makes it an unlikely tool for finding objects inside the solar system, since they mostly orbit within the plane. But that is exactly what makes the new object unique: Its orbit is tilted 54 degrees with respect to the plane of the solar system. It's something Gerdes did not expect to see. Batygin and Brown, however, predicted it. The rocky body is being described as 2015 BP519. Quanta magazine has more details.
9th planet = Pluto (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, Pluto is still a planet [washingtonpost.com].
Re:9th planet = Pluto (Score:5, Funny)
So this new one would be...Planet X?
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No, it's Planet One X, idiot.
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"When are we going?"
"Real Soon!"
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History is made in the dark.
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So the name of the ship should have been Planet Xpress?
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Yes, Hubert
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Good, I was almost out of shaving cream. Now we have a new supply of Illudium Phosdex, the Shaving Cream atom!
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So this new one would be...Planet X?
To make the name more searchable online, it will now be macPlanet.
Nibiru = Planet X Re: 9th planet = Pluto (Score:1)
DUCK DODGERS IN THE 24TH AND A HALF CENTURY!!! (Score:2)
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that's Captain Al, to you
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Captain AI or Captain Al?
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as in Bundy
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I thought your name is Earl?
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Yes it is - if you think it is. No, if not.
In further news what you (likely) call the (opt:dwarf) planet Pluto I call the basketball Screwdriver IV.
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Re:Incorrect (Score:4, Funny)
If you persist in claiming Pluto is not a planet, that does not mean Pluto is not. planet - instead, it means you are an asshole.
Steady on there!
Let's not get too carried away, it's not something to get upset about, unlike say Vi vs Emacs.
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If you persist in claiming Pluto is not a planet, that does not mean Pluto is not. planet - instead, it means you are an asshole.
Steady on there!
Let's not get too carried away, it's not something to get upset about, unlike say Vi vs Emacs.
nano FTW!
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Let's not get too carried away, it's not something to get upset about, unlike say Vi vs Emacs.
Let's get to the really tough, divisive issue: spaces or tabs?
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spaces or tabs?
Depends if I'm using a fountain pen, or a proper goose quill.
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In the world of astronomy even the planets of our own solar system come and go.
In the 1800s it was thought that our solar system contained 11 planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Vesta, Juno, Ceres, Pallas, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. (No Pluto.)
In a few years Vesta, Juno, Ceres, Pallas and Pluto might be considered planets again. Then, in conjunction with this new discovery, we'll be up to 13 planets.
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Not possible. If we start considering dwarf planets as full planets, we'll have dozens to hundreds or maybe thousands in time -- never 13.
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If we start considering dwarf planets as full planets, we'll have dozens to hundreds or maybe thousands in time -- never 13.
Not necessarily. Size matters. We don't call every island a continent.
But really, now that we know of 4500 planets and planet candidates, using ancient five plus three (Earth, Uranus and Neptune) as the guide for defining planets is ridiculous. We need a system of categorization that covers all planets everywhere.
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Because the Solar system is the planetary system best known to Mankind, we primarily want our definitions to work the
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cleaned its orbit and doesn't run risk anymore to suffer a large collision with objects in the same or close orbits which might strongly change its celestial parameters (Pluto hasn't).
A pretty pointless requirement. By this requirement Jupiter is then definitely not a planet as his orbit is polluted with the most objects (hint: thousands of Trojans in both trojan points)
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Tuesday is germanic Tyr's day, the former boss of the pantheon before Odin/Wotan took over and Tyr was demoted to the position of Thor's brother and son of Odin.
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Tuesday is Tiu's Day, or Tiw's Day. Also known as Tyr. God of War and Justice among the Germanic
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It's funny and a bit pathetic how people of a certain age and above are so sentimental about this subject.
Re:9th planet = Pluto (Score:4, Informative)
This is not a recent development. Pluto's claim to planetary status has been doubtful since shortly after its discovery. Here's an article from 1934 http://blog.modernmechanix.com... [modernmechanix.com] that ends with the quote...
> So that Pluto ranks as the largest asteroid, rather than the smallest
> planet; and it may be necessary to look farther for unknown planets.
In a way, it's very similar to the story of Ceres. A pint-sized "planet" was discovered, and proclaimed to be a planet. Then another one, and another one, etc etc. Eventually it became ridiculous According to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
> As of 20 September 2013, the LINEAR system alone has discovered 138,393 asteroids.
Asteroids long ago stopped being called "planets".
Similarly, when Pluto was first discovered, it was called a "planet", but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
> In 1992, Albion was discovered, the first Kuiper belt object (KBO)
> since Pluto and Charon. Since its discovery, the number of known
> KBOs has increased to over a thousand, and more than 100,000
> KBOs over 100 km (62 mi) in diameter are thought to exist.
Again, you're looking at a gazillion "pint-size-planets" in similar orbits. You don't really expect kids to memorize a thousand plus planets in science class. And if you insist on forcing Pluto in, why not Eris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] which is more massive than Pluto, even though Pluto is larger in size? And if you include Eris, then what about the slightly smaller ones like Quaoar and Sedna? And slightly smaller ones than them? You have to "draw a line in the sand" somewhere, or else you'll be calling every pea-sized fragement in orbit around the sun, a "planet".
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Why should the question of whether kids can can memorize the names of the planets be a deciding factor in the development of a scientific definition of planet? That was one of the justifications used for this malformed, ill-considered, back-door approach back in August of 2006. Should we have stopped calling everything after Io, Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa a moon of Jupiter? My goodness! There's already at least 69
Re: 9th planet = Pluto (Score:2)
So as far as Ceres, Eris, and anything else large enough to pull itself into a sphere and orbit a star, absolutely call it a planet.
So all the moons are now planets?
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I've seen an observation that this could be a nationalist matter. After all, Pluto was the one planet discovered by a scientist from the New World.
Maybe, but no one I've talked to who refuses to give up on Pluto knows this. To a one, they say, "but I learned it in grade school." Which is bizarre to me, because pretty much everything you learn in grade school is so oversimplified it is effectively wrong if you stick to that version as an adult. Often they did a report on Pluto because it was obviously special among the planets, which is just icing on the irony cake.
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The only web site where I ever heard about "Kardashian's" is /. ... and that is worth talking about?
I admit I googled about a year ago to get a clue what this is about. A rich man and a girl with a much to fat ass
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Then it must be downright hilarious how anyone with any experience with classification systems could support one in which [adjective]+[noun] can be called "not a [noun]."
That's a red house, not a house.
Amongst those with an interest in astronomy it has nothing to do with sentimentality and quite a lot to do with the slipshod and rushed way in which the change was crammed through as a fait accompli by a
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Indeed the Washington post says it's so.
Don't worry though, eventually you'll all die off. We all do eventually. In the meantime our school textbooks have been updated to stop at Neptune so in a couple of generations people will forget that Pluto was ever a planet and this can be relegated to the encyclopedia of history under a section labelled: Famous petty arguments.
Mike Brown (Score:2)
I saw an episode of "The Universe" on the History Channel where Mike Brown was talking about his belief that such a planet existed. He was lumped in with a bunch of 2012 Doomsdayers who suggested that such a planet would spell doom for us. Given his track-record of planet* discovery, I thought his interview may have been taken out of context, but it sounds like he actually believes this is the case (the planet part, not the doomsday part).
*dwarf-planet, extra-solar body, or whatever name we use nowadays
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I watched a lecture by one of the guys who did the math showing where to look for Planet 9. It's very convincing.
Essentially, if there ISN'T a Neptune-sized object in the orbit they're predicting, there is something extremely odd happening in the outer Solar system that will still require explaining. There are KBOs with orbits that are most easily explained by a small gas giant in a long, elliptical orbit - if you assume more than one body (excluding the possibility of a dual-planet arrangement like Plut
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I remember hearing that Neptune's orbit could only be explained by some other gas giant affecting it (which spurred the hunt that found Pluto), but it turned out that Neptune's orbit had been calculated incorrectly based off of bogus calculations of it's mass. I wonder if that's the case here.
Publish or die ... (Score:2)
... even if it's premature speculation.
An object as remotely located as "planet nine," would be part of the Kuiper belt.
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... even if it's premature speculation.
An object as remotely located as "planet nine," would be part of the Kuiper belt.
Like most of the planets in the solar system are mostly in a similar plane, the Kuiper belt (like the asteroid belt) is mostly like a disc also on a plane (maxing out at about 15 degree inclination from that plane)
The recently discovered dwarf object BP519 [wikipedia.org] is on a different plane about 50 degrees inclined (Pluto is only about 17 degrees inclined) which is why some scientists think it is potential evidence of another planet at extreme inclination: the postulated highly inclined "planet 9".
Of course if an obj
I read that as ... (Score:2)
"Plan 9".
Damn. I was really looking forward to meeting Vampira.
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Don't be bummed. Planet 9 really may be from outer space [newscientist.com].
Why this obsession with gods of the underworld (Score:2)
Pluto aka Hades was the god of death and the underworld. Should we name the new planet if it exists "Satan"? Plutonium is so dangerous it was consciously named after Pluto. A dark god for a dark element.
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Hades: "What? What do the Romans call me? Pluto? Gee, I wouldn't even name my dog like that!"
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Seeing the Plutonium was found 10 years after the planet Pluto was found, and the previous two elements are Uranium and Neptunium, I find your claim highly suspect that Plutonium was named after the God Pluto. Do you have an authoritative reference for that?
Planet 9 from outer space? (Score:2)