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Something Big Is Warping Our Outer Solar System (futurity.org)
schwit1 quotes Futurity:
The plane of our solar system is warped in the outer reaches of the Kuiper Belt, suggesting the presence of an unknown Mars-to-Earth-mass planetary object far beyond Pluto -- but much closer than Planet Nine. An unknown, unseen "planetary mass object" may lurk in the outer reaches of our solar system, according to new research on the orbits of minor planets.
The object would be different from -- and much closer than -- the so-called Planet Nine, a planet whose existence has yet to be confirmed... "The most likely explanation for our results is that there is some unseen mass," says Kat Volk, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and lead author of the study in the Astronomical Journal. "According to our calculations, something as massive as Mars would be needed to cause the warp that we measured."
The object would be different from -- and much closer than -- the so-called Planet Nine, a planet whose existence has yet to be confirmed... "The most likely explanation for our results is that there is some unseen mass," says Kat Volk, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and lead author of the study in the Astronomical Journal. "According to our calculations, something as massive as Mars would be needed to cause the warp that we measured."
But it's probably V'Ger.
#DeleteChrome
We only just knocked the last "Planet Nine" theory and now we've got ANOTHER ONE?!
See:
https://medium.com/starts-with...
The Empire obviously decided to park it here and then forgot all about it...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I have read articles like this for many years (I recall that the outer planets were detected before they were known this way) and have always wondered something that maybe someone here can explain.
I understand at a high level the theory behind detecting unseen objects by their fanatic effect on known bodies but just how can you make measurements that precise? How many digits of precision do you need to do the calculation? Intuitively the angles involved must be far smaller than typical mechanical tools could measure so how do they do it?
The scale is exactly what lets you detect the issue. The orbital time in days for Neptune is 60,200 days. Sixty Thousand days. Its orbital velocity is 5.43 km/sec. even a very TINY change to that speed over that many days will put it far out of the expected location and that is what we detect.
That we cannot see it... maybe it's a small black hole?
It's really far away, and brightness drops with 4th power of distance, so even a regular planet-sized object would be very hard to see. It's not that massive either, only estimated to have the mass of Mars, so that's a relatively small planet.