Slashdot Mirror
Weird Orbits of Distant Objects Can Be Explained Without Invoking a 'Planet Nine' (space.com)
schwit1 shares a report from Space.com: The weirdly clustered orbits of some far-flung bodies in our solar system can be explained without invoking a big, undiscovered "Planet Nine," a new study suggests. The shepherding gravitational pull could come from many fellow trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) rather than a single massive world, according to the research. "If you remove Planet Nine from the model, and instead allow for lots of small objects scattered across a wide area, collective attractions between those objects could just as easily account for the eccentric orbits we see in some TNOs," study lead author Antranik Sefilian, a doctoral student in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University in England, said in a statement.
The duo's modeling work suggests that the strength-in-numbers explanation does indeed work -- if the mass of the Kuiper Belt, the ring of bodies beyond Neptune, is a few to 10 times that of Earth. This is a pretty big "if," given that most estimates peg the Kuiper Belt's mass at less than 10 percent that of Earth (and one recent study put the figure at 0.02 Earth masses). But other solar systems are known to harbor massive disks of material in their outer reaches, Sefilian and Touma noted. And our failure to spot one around our own sun doesn't mean it doesn't exist, they stressed. The new study has been accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal.
The duo's modeling work suggests that the strength-in-numbers explanation does indeed work -- if the mass of the Kuiper Belt, the ring of bodies beyond Neptune, is a few to 10 times that of Earth. This is a pretty big "if," given that most estimates peg the Kuiper Belt's mass at less than 10 percent that of Earth (and one recent study put the figure at 0.02 Earth masses). But other solar systems are known to harbor massive disks of material in their outer reaches, Sefilian and Touma noted. And our failure to spot one around our own sun doesn't mean it doesn't exist, they stressed. The new study has been accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal.
Remove planet nine and replace it with lots of little objects that is equal to the 10 earth mass that is still valid in the calculation only to end up with not only planet nine but also 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 15, 16, 17, 18 so really you can't remove planet nine just change its size...
But we already know where Pluto is!
Not exactly. The whole mass of the Kuiper Belt (containing millions of objects) has to be about 10 mass of the Earth in this model to explain the special orbits of some known Kuiper Belt objects. But no single object has to be exceptionally large. A million objects each 10 km in diameter would have the same mass than one planet of 1000 km diameter of the same density.
That Planet X, Nibiru, *doesn't* exist? Well where are the lizard people coming from if not there? Check and mate.
Not exactly. The whole mass of the Kuiper Belt (containing millions of objects) has to be about 10 mass of the Earth in this model to explain the special orbits of some known Kuiper Belt objects. But no single object has to be exceptionally large. A million objects each 10 km in diameter would have the same mass than one planet of 1000 km diameter of the same density.
Ah, but would the gravitons emitted from such objects warp spacetime similarly? I think not.
On the other hand, the gravitons would be Spring green. Don't believe it? Just go out there in the Kuiper Belt, sit on a 10 km icy rock, and take a picture of the emitted gravitons: Spring galore!
The best one could do is take a picture of said green gravitons from the perpendicular, in which case the red shift would turn them brown.
That always happens if Spring in the Kuiper belt is over, and after Summer, there comes Autumn.
The news in 2018 was all "There's a Planet X, there's a Planet X". Fast forward to January 21 2019. Two Cambridge PhD's claim "it may be a ring of smaller" objects. Now the news is all "There is no Planet X, there is not Planet X." Nobody has been able to observe either a 9th Planet or a ring of smaller objects yet. So basically, nobody knows whether there is a 9th Planet out there or not. Everybody's speculating. (Btw, Nibiru sounds like a Linux distro =)
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
It only warps brains covered by tinfoil.
Why do I never see any of you geniuses explaining this to neo-Nazis? I'm sure they'd be most grateful for the heads-up.
FTFA: "January 21, 2019 08:32am ET"
Up your game.
Wouldn't this just increase the chances of a Kuiper Belt planetoid if the total mass of Kuiper Belt objects was 10x that of Earth?
There is definitely a Planet Nine, and it's called "Pluto."
I just don't get why any of this matters. When I look out my windows and see big stuff like mountains or skyscrapers, I notice and care. I could care less about the hill or shack hiding behind what is obvious. Why is anybody interested in virtually invisible rocks fliating in distant space? To confirm that mathematics still work?
Because a huge 10k year elliptical orbit of a massive object has very possibly cause the unexplained devastation of this planet in the past?
We would explain but you wouldn't grasp the answer. Don't feel bad; it's merely a cognitive thing. Lack thereof, rather..
Yes! The same "essential employee" who is working without a paycheck and won't get paid after the shutdown because he's a contractor at the FBI Palo Alto field office.
Currently, based on the sizes of the minor planets we have found beyond Neptune, as well as our chance of finding objects, one can extrapolate to a good possibility that we are missing something that is planet sized.
If the mass of the Kuiper belt is far higher than expected, that makes it seem more likely that there is an undiscovered planet out there.
I know this study is specifically about the hypothetical "Planet Nine", used to explain the clustering of some Sednoids. And its alternative explanation for that clustering may be correct. But overall, it seems to suggest that there's a unknown mechanism for adding more mass to the far outer reaches of the solar system.
I will do your bidding.
Lead us, mein Fuhrer
Wouldn't a large number of small object in the Kuiper Belt essentially form a spherical shell with roughly uniformly distributed mass?
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.g...
Given that, the net gravity and gravitational influence within would be zero so it wouldn't explain anything inside it...
I guess the question is, are the strange orbits inside or outside of the "shell".
Actually...
The news in 2016 was "We can explain the weird orbits of some known Kuiper Belt objects if we assume a planet ten times the size of the Earth."
The news in 2017 was "We can explain the weird orbits of some known Kuiper Belt objects by observation bias; planet nine doesn't need to exist."
The news in 2018 was "There is no planet nine news, but here are a few more Kuiper Belt objects that have the same weird orbits, and planet nine OR observation bias are still in the running."
Now this article comes out and says, "We can also explain the weird orbits of some known Kuiper Belt objects if we assume a large number of objects that have a summed mass of ten times the mass of the Earth."
I have to say, IMNSHO, that this theory doesn't really pass the sniff test. First of all, if the current estimates peg the mass of the Kuiper Belt at 10% the mass of the Earth, what are those estimates based on? Direct visual detection only? Surely those fancy proto-planetary disk simulations that astrophysics grad students run on their VMS Beowulf clusters provide additional insight into the probable mass of the Kuiper Belt. And wouldn't a Kuiper Belt with 10x Earth masses act on the observed planets in a detectable way? Remember that planet nine also helps explain some other, known orbital oddities of the gas giants
Also, when they say that there are other observed systems "that have massive disks of material in their outer reaches" so it's possible we just missed the same thing in our solar system, that seems oversimplified to me. Which specific extra-solar planetary systems have these massive disks of material? Are those systems analogous to our own in age, solar mass, etc.? There are a lot of binary star systems out in the galaxy, too, but that's doesn't mean our system is a binary system, and we just haven't noticed the other star.
Finally, given the way object accrete over time, I would think that 1 large object (or maybe a handful, 2-10) is more likely to exist than thousands or millions of smaller objects of the same total mass. I know that the vast volumes of space in the Kuiper belt slow down such processes, but suggesting the mass of the Kuiper Belt is 3+ orders of magnitude more massive than current models account for is a big ask.
Since people have been looking for planet nine along the projected orbit for several years now without finding either it or any evidence of the massive disk suggested in this article, I'm of the opinion that the whole thing comes down to observation bias. I'll be thrilled if they do find planet nine, but it seems less likely the more the search drags on.
Ah, and then if you modulate the resonant frequency of the red shifted spring green gravitons and use a Kerr black hole as a lens, you'd have the long sought brown note gravity laser. On a space shark.
Wrong. The 10 earth mass was calculated for the theorised planet mass, to count for the irregularities of the cuiper belt objects, separately.