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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?
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
you call me a dwarf now, I'll tilt your sun..
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Sorry, Pluto is taken.
How about Pluto1088549?
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
The Earth is round and also tilted... same concept.
"How massive is it?"
"It's so massive that even at an insane distance, this Oort Cloud body can out-twist the masses of both Jupiter AND Saturn."
Wait? How massive is it? How is it able to tilt the axis of the sun, since tilting an axis is a TIDAL action? IMHO (as a degreed rocket scientist) that Occam's Razor would indicate that it's easier to shift the orbital planes of the planets, rather than tidally torque the sun. Remember, for the tidal action, the Planet IX must be very close to Sol to work its magic.
I prefer calling it Janus, after the Roman god of "beginnings, gates, transitions, time, doorways, passages, and endings." As the presumably the most outer planet in our solar system, kind of fitting.
Or maybe xNoScope_Pluto_Nubklrx?
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
That would be a bad omen.
Well, neither one is perfectly round; both are oblate spheroids, though this is trickier to measure in the case of the Sun.
Marshmallow.
Actually, I kind of like the sound of Planet Marshmallow.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
>Whether it's the Sun or the plane that's tilted is a philosophical question.
Actually, it's a physics question. The answer seems to be that the planets' orbital plane, the ecliptic, is tilted. Given the relative mass and positions of the bodies involved, it is much easier fir the hypothetical planet to affect the ecliptic than the sun.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
We can do better:
The mysterious 9th planet was caused by Climate Change!
Required reading for internet skeptics
... then they must surely know what direction it lies in, from the sun. Working backwards from there, they should be able to narrow the area to search sufficiently that they ought to at least figure out exactly where they need to be looking to find this object.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
And to think we could have had Pluto, Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Daisy, and Goofy...
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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.
... then they must surely know what direction it lies in, from the sun. Working backwards from there, they should be able to narrow the area to search sufficiently that they ought to at least figure out exactly where they need to be looking to find this object.
The researchers did not infer the existence of this new planet from looking at the sun tilt, the tilt was reasoned to be potentially explainable by a theorized planet that we haven't discovered yet.
The planet in question was inferred by looking at the statistical orbital distribution of Kuiper Belt Objects. They have a general idea of it's orbital inclination for this mysterious new planet they only have a general range of mass (~10x earth) and orbital distance (~20x Neptune's orbit). That makes a pretty big chunk of space to search for a relatively small object that is not luminous among very slowly moving objects (~15K year orbit).
The original analysis that suggested this new planet is currently only statistical using orbital dynamics, not some specific N-body problem they are solving. They are only attempting to estimate the potential orbital objects that could cause of perturbation of the Sedna-like objects and KBOs relative to long term evolution of orbits. AFAIK, to do their analysis they replaced the orbit of the planet with equivalent massive "wires" that traced currently know orbits because the planets orbit in a timescale much shorter than the proposed planet (and thus exchange angular momentum between themselves and a distant perturb-er which they are analyzing at different timescale). Statistic analysis also showed it likely to have a perihelion opposite to the aggregate distribution of the KBOs. This means they only have a few orbital parameters for this object relative to long-term orbital evolution, not a realistic way of determining where along this 10K-20K year orbit it actually is today.
I am becoming afraid. It looks more and more like Zechariah Sitchin was right.
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