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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.
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.
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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.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The Earth is round and also tilted... same concept.
Well, neither one is perfectly round; both are oblate spheroids, though this is trickier to measure in the case of the Sun.
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.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
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 spot. It's not getting any light from the Sun to speak of, so it'll be visually black. It's also far enough out that it will be too small to occlude anything visually, and any gravitational lensing it produces would be insignificant against the background.
We're not going to find this without a major event happening. Something like a rogue asteroid detected swinging in towards the sun from somewhere out in the Oort cloud. Something like that, angled from 6 degrees away from the ecliptic, would suggest gravitational deflection from this ninth planet, and would actually give us one specific direction to search in.