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Theoretical Evidence For a Ninth Planet Beyond Pluto May Be Premature (forbes.com)
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.
Of course there are good reasons to be skeptical. It's just the way to be. Nothing to do with this article.
Oh well. Article will go unread.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
I'm Skeptical that it's ever going to be worth following a Forbes link.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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).
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
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.
What the hells goin on in the engine room? Were there monkeys? Some terrifying space monkeys maybe got loose?
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 Beyond Pluto".
Of course that idiocy leads to today's ridiculous headline. It's a fucking theory. It hasn't been proven. Of course it is fucking premature to talk about it like it's established fact, which dumb-ass journos did, not actual scientists. The evidence isn't fucking premature; the evidence is what it is - a model, a theory, observations. The paper is published, anyone is free to look at the theory, examine the predictions made, and show where it stands up or falls down; that's the scientific process, you fucking morons.
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.
As i understood it, the primary reason for classifying Pluto as a "dwarf planet" was size. If there were 2000 similar sized bodies in the Kuiper Belt, then they felt obligated to say "there are 2009 planets in the solar system". Of course this was decision was made BEFORE New Horizons, so if Pluto was just another smallish hunk of ice and rock then I guess it makes some sense (still think it was silly). Now, we know that Pluto is a hell of a lot more than that, and is a more active planet than expected. It's time to bring it back as #9 and maybe when we get to the Kuiper Belt to actually get a look, we can rethink the terminology...
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[pdf]. Interestingly, it suggests that the size criterion may be superfluous; anything large enough to clear its orbit should be big enough to be round.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
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.
What the hells goin on in the engine room? Were there monkeys? Some terrifying space monkeys maybe got loose?
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 atmospheres as well. The second hypothetical has seen some investigation and was a favorite of anti-AGW researchers for a while, but so far all proposed mechanisms fall seriously short of negating the known positive feedbacks. It's not enough to say "the data sucks" or "the models suck", you need to have some sort of replacement hypothesis which explains why, all else being equal, an increase in atmospheric carbon does not lead to increased temperatures. We've eliminated a lot of false candidates over the last 100 years, and if there is some sort of force that would prevent a carbon catastrophe, we could sure use one now. It's pretty slim pickings at this point though.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.