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Curious Tilt of the Sun Traced To Undiscovered Planet (spacedaily.com)
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.
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.
I'm sure Elon Musk is already beating his dick off about how we need to go there
XKCD has a good image to explain this.
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
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.