Slashdot Mirror
A 10th Planet in Our Solar System?
Apuleius writes "Here's a BBC story about a planet that may be orbiting the sun at 30,000 AU (Pluto's at 30 AU)...." This new wanderer, which may not have been created during the original formation of our system, according to the story, orbits the Sun backwards compared to the other planets. There's one in every crowd, isn't there?
Always seems someone has to post about how some article is "not news for nerds, or stuff that matters" or whatnot, ;)
but this time, it's pretty damned obvious: geeks and nerds love science. Astronomy is a branch of science.
Heck, we can even go a different route by saying: geeks and nerds love sci-fi. Sci-fi is often riddled with astronomy.
Quite relevant.
First, I thought that they discovered a potential 10th planet past Pluto quite some time ago- tagged TL1986 (or something like that). Secondly, is there not a great drive to reclassify Pluto as an asteroid? Just checking. IceMan (my login is hosed)
Might be a great test for the plasma-injection magnetic sail, which gets about 1 newton thrust, continuously, and can approach a fair degree of the speed of light. The trick would be decelerating enough to do useful science when you get there, but the M2P2 drive would get a probe out there in a handful or two of years, even if it is 167 light-days out.
Okay, Grasshopper, cut the Beatnik psycho-babble. Put out your clove cigarette, close your journal of metaphysical poetry you wrote about the waitress who served you coffee at some truck-stop in Arizona on your Kerouak-esque summer road trip, and listen:
If you see science as sterile, demystifying and profane then you clearly have nothing but a rudimentary understanding of scientific discovery. As a mathematical physicist I have special ire for people too ignorant to grasp the enormous beauty and symmetry contained in the clean, precise statements and equations which you dismiss as "primitive" and "sterile."
The amazing thing to glean from modern physics and astronomy is how successful the "unintegrated" theories are in describing and predicting the behaivior of the physical world. Such awesome power contained the rational purity and simplicity of a few simple equations. From simple abstractions of common sense and physical insight we are led by logic and genius to new insights into the structure of the universe.
As each layer is peeled back, and the "God of the Shadows" retreats ever further from the light of human understanding, new layers of structure and order emerge. At each level, patterns exist -- self-propagating, sustaining and perpetuating.
I invite you to rethink your granola-and-worry-beads crypto-mysticism for a new, more embracing theology. Welcome to the world in which science and religion are not eternal enemies. Rather the rational inquiry into the nature of our world and existence is the highest form of prayer -- the genuine and honest attempt to increase mankind's understanding of the universe and his place in it.
You object to scrutiny of trees without understanding of forests, of steps without dances? How is the concept of a forest sensible without an understanding of tree? How can one master the rythms of a dance without first grasping the importance of the steps? Here we approach the infinite regression of structure and sub-structure. To deeply and profoundly understand the whole with the intellect it is necessary to understand its parts. Only then can we manifestly grasp that their sum totals something more.
Peace.
--
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers --
joined in the serious business of keeping our
food, shelter, clothing and loved ones from
combining with oxygen.
-- Kurt Vonnegut
The other paper on this, which estimates 25,000 AUs instead of 30,000 and is unable to determine direction, guesses at 3 jovian masses. Far lighter than a brown dwarf (physically they are all about the size of Jupiter until they hit at least 80 j masses, they just get more degenerate in the core) Wonder what kind of a moon system it has.
Yes, they may have found Nemesis. Will have to take infrared observations over a year after location to determine orbit (and that they've found it and not a low-mass star further out), but the IAU will probably call it something like Persephone. But we shall see.
because he used the n-word, you moron.
Only 3 jovian masses brown dwarfs are at least 15, though it is debateably higher. Physics tells you whether it orbits Sol or not. And you guys code?
The speed is the inverse square of the distance. If you've got the distance, and you've got the speed, you've got the orbital period.
This is exactly why Slashdot should make all replies to a -1, -1.
Of course there won't be any life there....as we all know, life could only have sprung up in one place in a universe this small.
Does that imply that this thing follows the ecliptic? If it's really from outside the Solar System originally, the chances of it being in the same plane as the other planets would be pretty slim.
Good post, descriptive -- but Sitchin calls the twelfth planet Nibiru. The Nefilim are the biblical demigods in Genesis. Also, substitute Earth for Chiron in your enumeration of the twelve planets. okpunk forgot his password
cool, like a human beowulf cluster.
keeeewwwl.
It might be still a good idea to get ones lower back out of here in due time then 8)
The ecliptic is a plane containing the sun and planets. They could a priori orbit in every which direction in that plane.
If the previous post is correct as I am inclined to believe, the orbit would be pulled into that plane regardless of direction of motion.
If it's earth sized but the mass of several jupiters, it must be very dense. Almost as dense as you are, in fact.
I saw her too and god bless you, Hell - a - Loo - Ya I said It was truly a mind blowing experience, until My Nerd god "Ner" (god of all gods an universes) decided to put a holy censorship motion into play, which triggered the collapse of our newly discovered tenth planet into a partial vortex, and as Planet X went down the singularity shoot, Ner uttered a lament to all Earthly sinners "thou shalt be a nerd, and remove ones mind from such things, and focus on da Earth. Leaveth the heavens to me". Then he of course he vanished in cloud of smoke, never to return, leaving only a short message in a few strategic universal nebula gas billboards, near the center of 10 to the power of 11, galaxy centers. And the msg of course most will know "Sorry for the inconvience :-) Have a nice day and don't get too caught up in it all like me :-) JLL (The lazy anonymous coward, cause I can't be bothered creating an acct yet)
The NASA probe Deep Space 1 uses an ion drive. http://nmp.jpl.nasa.gov/ds1/ It's mostly to test out a varity of technologies. The xenon propellant ion drive appears to have worked fine. It's solar powered, and therefore wouldn't be much use for this mission, but as you say a neuclear power source could be used.
I was so excited to tune into /. after reading this fantastic story and look what I face as the first post. It's almost enough to make me cry. I've never registered for /. because I like my anonymity...but seeing this makes me wonder if all posting should be from registered people. This takes Anonymous Coward to a new low.
It's the underpants gnomes!!!
Hell, have I missed the news again? I didn't know they shot Marlon Brando into space... Can anyone of the math-freaks above calculate the energy used up for this?
Planet X [Nibiru] has a theoretic long elliptical orbit of 3600 years. Its collision course with Earth has been predicted at 2012 which 'coincidentally' is when the ancient Mayan calender suddenly ends.
Ancient Sumerians stated that the orbit was clockwise around the Earth contrary to the counter-clockwise orbits of the rest of the planets in our system. There are detailed diagrams which provide its orbit far beyond Pluto at times and then coming between Earth and Mars when it nears the closest point of solar ellipse. Every 3600 years, major events which have been documented by ancient and modern historians/physicists/astronomers have occured on earth in conjunction with the passing of Nibiru; Great Floods [x2], unexplained boosts in human development, etc. Major ancient observatories are based around the Earth at the same latitude which all point to the Southern Skies where Nibiru's hemispheric entry is thought to take place.
Zechariah Sitchin faithfully recorded and translated thousands of ancient tablets which clearly provide navigational maps for astronauts entering the 7th planet [Earth] from the outer solar system rim. There are UFOs in the bible, and various ancient landmarks on our planet and Mars. and a stack of information waiting to see the light of day under the Sphinx [Hall of Records]. The decipherment of the Sumerian culture's clay tablets, buried for millennia, reveals roots that stretch all the way back to 450,000 B.C. Sumerians claimed roots back to Nibiru.
Take it or leave it... but there's only 12 years till countdown kids.
If legions of comets were flung earthwards, this probably significantly increases the chances that just one of them would hit (If earth ever got hit by more than one during one of these periods, I doubt we'd be around at all) This probably also has something to do with the way all the orbits of the planets and other things in the solar system have become somewhat synchronized (in a complex way involving something about harmonics and other things I don't understand)
Uh, you're kidding right? There are a couple thousand asteroids that orbit the sun.
My god man! No one (!) has ever gone to Za'Ha'Dum and lived to tell about it. No one!
(Score: -1 deranged)
I read something somewhere that around the year 3600 or thereabouts, we should begin to see the first really detectable signs (spectragraphic, radiation, gravitational, stuff that requires mega-sophisticated measuring equipment to detect) of the beginning of the death of the sun. This is what should light a fire under our collective asses to get a *real* space program underway. Even though it will be billions of years before the sun swells up to swallow the inner planets, it will be eminating such killer intense radiation levels that the earth's magnetic field and atmosphere cannot stop...... pretty early in it's dying process.
>The acceleration of a solar sail drops as
>inverse cube of your distance from the sun. It
>will very fast become comparable to friction
>from interstellar matter after you pass Pluto
>(cannot say off the top of my head but this can
>be calculated).
That's what the laser is for. These so-called "driven" sails can provide a slow but steady acceleration for a looong time.
Slap together a radioisotope thermal generator (RTG) to provide some electricity to power the laser, communications gear and instrument package (say 10 or 20 kWe) and enough thermal energy to keep the equipment in it's ideal operating temperature range -- hell, use a Voyager II class RTG and save some R&D.
I like the idea of an ion drive, too. The only trouble with using hydrogen is that you have to keep it refrigerated and insulated (heavy, expensive and not 100% effective). Hydrogen is notoriously difficult to store for long periods of time without leakage. Xenon has some promise in this regard, but it's specific impulse is quite a bit lower (I assume that's why you suggested hydrogen).
But I digress. We can lob our hypothetical probe into orbit using an Atlas booster or equivalent (they're still making the Atlas, right?), and give it enough velocity to get a grav assist from Venus. In the inner solar system the wind provides our acceleration, and once we get out past Mars we can activate our laser. It looks pretty weak on paper until you figure that a tiny push times a few months adds up to a biig deltaV.
We could get a probe there within a decade of launch for a high speed fly-by. If we wanted to drop into orbit around the beast (naturally), we'll need to use some grav-assisted cleverness which I leave up to the fine folks at JPL. Assuming we have adequate attitude controls (directional adjustment of laser on broad sail? conventional thrusters w/ easily storable fuel?), we should be able to turn our probe around and slow it down with our laser sail enough to where a stable orbit about the object could be found.
To pull that stunt off would require another decade of transit time though, since you have to start slowing down so far in advance of your orbtal maneuvers. We'll also need some good data on where this thing is -- "in the dolphin-shaped constellation" isn't going to cut it.
In short, my only question is: when do we start?
30,000 AU? This planet, if it exists, is so far from the sun that it recives a factor of 9e8 less energy from the sun that the Earth. As a result this place is going to be very cold. Coupled with the fact that it is probably a brown dwarf (a gas giant just not large enough to start the fusion reactions to make it shine like a star) make these stories of aliens rather far fetched. The reverse orbit is not unprecidented, I think one of the moons of Saturn orbits in the opposite sense to all the other rotation in the solar system.
Basically, it won't complete an orbit before our Sun explodes. That's assuming it's actually in orbit - it may just be passing through. Or even cooler, it could be headed right for us! That'd motivate those bastards in Congress to fund a space program, for sure.
I'm sick of christians and other ignorant fundamentalists. /. should endorse ATHEISM
I can't believe a person gave up the chance to say "first post!" just so he could make a racist comment. What a waste of a life...
The Nemisis theory postulated that the orbit was highly eliptical and that Nemisis only ventured close enough to the Oort cloud to perturb objects once per orbit (either its minimum or maximum point, I forget which).
The orbital period was then chosen to match what some researchers thought was a 26 million year period between extintion events on earth. (Again I'm not sure of the 26 million year figure, but it was of this magnitude.)
Thus, once every orbit of Nemisis would trigger a comet shower. And the earth would get slammed.
It appears that the orbital period of the proposed planet is somewhat shorter then that proposed for Nemisis.
Steve M (as an AC because I'm at work and don't know my password)
There is another difference, the orbital period. A key part of the Nemisis proposal was that the orbital period was such that it would trigger comet showers every 30 million years.
The proposed new planet has an orbital period of just 6 million years, to short to be Nemisis.
Steve M (as an AC because I'm at work and don't know my password)
Look Dick-for-Brians, next time you open your pie-hole, make sure something other than shit pours out. Any jackass knows that the English have a different numbering system: their billion is our trillion. They only give new mneumonics every 10^6, not 10^3 like normal, even-toothed people do. Maybe it's because they eat so many kidneys; I don't know.
Sure, they didn't give mass, but with a volume many times jupiter, it's gotta be big enough to qualify, even if it's primarily gas and what not.
question:
I missed the whole pluto thing. But isn't Pluto actually two (a binary) body? One was called Pluto and the other one was... erm. the Character from Greek mythology who took the boat across the river styx?
Or am I dillusional?
if we can detect planets orbiting around suns that are hundreds or thousands of light years away, why can't we detect our own planets?
Dude, at a half light-year away you're talking some serious transit time. You might want to make this vacation part of a career change, or perhaps your retirement Grand Tour.
The biggest threat of "civilization ending" impacts along the lines of some recent (and very bad) moives comes from a source much closer to home: Near Earth Objects (NEOs) There are estimated to be several thousand asteriods in orbits of varying eccentricities ranging between roughly 0.75 and 1.50AU (where 1AU is the mean distance from the Earth to the Sun). Current estimates predict there to be a large number (on the order of 1000 or so) that are big enough to exterminate all life (except cockroaches -- nothing kills cockroaches) on this planet. Furthermore, there is roughly a 40% chance of an impact with one of these big mommas between 1000BCE and 3000CE. We haven't (obviously) had one yet, so we're about due... Not to sound apocalyptic or anything, but it's only a matter of time. Write your congressmen -- we need to get off of this rock -- we're sitting ducks!
the one that has the same orbit as Earth but is always behind the Sun. The people there are just like the people on Earth but when they eat corn on the cob they hold it vertically instead of sideways. I read that in a book somewhere, honest!
There's an article about planets and moons once believed to exist in the solar system. It is part of the Nine Planets web page. Unfortunately, this page was deleted a long time ago, but a bunch of mirrors of it still survive. Try here and here, or just search for web pages whose title is "Hypothetical Planets". (Note: these versions don't seem to be the same age and it's not clear where the newest one is.)
Father Antos lives on X!
actually, isn't this the 11th planet? a 10th planet was found a couple years ago, i think near saturn, jupitor? it was the size of a an average city, but because it orbited the sun like any other planet, it was classed a planet.
I was wondering if most of the systems that had brown dwarves were single star systems?
I hope you're joking, even if so that's not funny. That's totally not cool to post stuff like that.
There is a Manga comic called 2001 nights or something which is about a 10th planet orbiting the sun backwards. It is also made out of anti-matter, which they have to go there to find out. It all fits nicely into all periodic catastrophe theory. Patrik
First of all...I'm not one to whine about postings but REALLY...how does this fall under "news for nerds" or "stuff that matters"
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Let's say you can prove there article is true...
BFD? There is probably a ton of crap out there that has yet to be discovered. Before we go rewriting all the science books, shouldn't we consider if someone this "large" and this "far away" is even a planet at all?
It's like back in the 16th century when people thought the Earth stood still and everything else move around. For all we know OUR sun is orbitting around this thing, or even some other much larger thing...
Which brings me back to my original point...since when does someone coming up with a new theory about a rock 30 gazillion miles away have ANYTHING at all to do with my fairly diverse nerd life?
Just my OPINION...but I think my submission about Visor's now being on sale (though not yet shipping) would have been a much more nerdly topic for the front page.
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
I don't know for sure, but isn't the orbiting period related to the distance to the sun? What would be the orbiting time for this 'planet'? bye, pieter
The book was "The 12th Planet" by Zecharia Sitchin. As to his educational background from his website (www.sitchin.com):
"Zecharia Sitchin is one of a small number of scholars who can read the Sumerian clay tablets which trace Earth's and human events to the earliest times. He was born in Russia and raised in Palestine, where he acquired a profound knowledge of modern and ancient Hebrew and of other Semitic and European languages, the Old Testament, and the history and archaeology of the Near East. He graduated from the University of London, majoring in Economic History, having attended the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Sitchin is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Oriental Society, the Middle East Studies Association of North America, and the Israel Exploration Society."
Sitchin has written five books including "The 12th Planet" about the influences of 'extraterrestrial gods' on our civilization.
Yeah I've heard a couple times about the discovery of planets past Pluto. Assumably, these were just found out to be wrong a bit later. My question is this: is there a groovy website that details the Planet X false alarms? ... Thanks!
if we attack it a different way, 30,000 times 8 light-minutes is 24,000 light-minutes, or 400 light-hours, or 16.7 light days, which is only a bit over 1% of the way to Proxima Centauri, so this does not sound right either; it is hardly "a significant fraction of the distance to the nearest star"
*grunt*
Probably eventually it will be classified as a double planet system, if it is downgraded from planet status?
I don't know what kind of analyis was applied or what methods were used to come up with this, so I won't commment on that.
What bothers me though, is that there are people who have been studying the orbits of comets for a very long time. People like Brian Marsdan at Harvard-CFA. Why hasn't Brian seen this sort of thing? He has access to a lots of data, a lot more than a mere 13 comets. It makes me wonder if this "discovery" may be nothing more than a selection effect (the 13 comets selected just happen to produce this sort of effect, but when you include a larger body of data, the phenomenon disappears).
Shop Smart, Shop S-mart!
Yes, and the b* have Episode 4, so you can't see how they were defeated.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Even an object several times Jupiter's mass isn't going to do anything, if the atomic weights are too high. It takes the conditions inside a blue supergiant to get iron to undergo fusion, for example, and that reaction is unstable. (It takes more energy than it gives out.) Stars with iron in the core have a tendancy to splatter themselves over space in a supernova.
Our own sun is capable of handling hydrogen, and some helium. Nothing heavier. Jupiter and Saturn are likely to have harbon cores - much heavier than helium and far too heavy for even a star of one solar mass.
If this new planet, likewise, has a heavy core, it won't be capable of undergoing fusion, unless it's close to twice the mass of the sun. Something only two or three times the mass of Jupiter isn't even going to burp.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Damn!!! I was gonna post something like that.
:)
Guess we'll have to name the planet Mondos now
This is not all new, because there has been a theory called the "nemesis theory" which is an extension to the catastrophe theory. It states that there have been quite a lot of impacts on earth that more or less caused mass extinction. The impact that killed the dinosaurs is just one of them. Some scientists have found a strange cycle in those impacts of about 20 million years. They figured it must be caused by a small star, doubling with the sun. This sounds like more evidence for that theory.
wayout
Odd to here the news is from the BBC. Maybe Dr. Who was a documentary series...:-)
nearest star (Alpha Centauri) is 4.3 light years from earth, or: 4.3 * 365 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 186,000 miles (25,222,492,800,000). Planet "X" is 30,000 times more distant than earth from the sun (earth is 93,000,000 miles from the sun): 30,000 * 93,000,000 miles (2,790,000,000,000), so in this case 'a significant fraction' is approximately: .11061555343173692966, so I'd say the comment was pretty accurate.
there are two kinds of people in this world - those who divide people into two groups and those who don't
But the new planet would be 30,000 times more distant from the Sun than the Earth, putting it a significant fraction of the distance to the nearest star.
What does he mean by significant fraction?
30000 Times the distance from the earth to the sun would be about 0.5 lightyear. The nearest star other than our sun is about 4.5 lightyears away.
If there really is a massive planet orbiting the sun at half a lightyear away, there is no hope of ever sending a probe and taking pictures.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
At one time I had some hope but better, far better, to live in shameful ignorance than even take slight cognizance of the sanity depriving crawling chaos. Take comfort that the Pope is sanctioning new internet saints and that scientists are the ones responsible for this discovery. Yeah, right.
Say what you want, but when these subterranean horrors meet up with their elders .... I mean, it's not what they done, but what they're a goin' to do.
support gun control: take guns from cops
you saw a gorgeous female on bbc? impossible
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This may not be a planet.... Do any astronomers reading Slashdot know if 30,000AU would qualify this as a planet via Bode's Law? If it is, wouldn't there be other objects between it and the Sun? It may be a moon that was sent into this retro orbit by some collision, as it is believed of Pluto.
Linux- Viva La Revolution!
pronoblem
Why bother going there? Why not just get a bigass telescope and look at it? It's not like there'd be any life there or anything.
There have always been different stories for Planet 'X', most of then disappeared when the Kuiper Belt started to be discovered. There was a story with Pioneer 10 earlier this year which had it suffering orbital peturbations from KB objects.
If it does exists, it's too far away for a probe with current technology.
I suppose they will call it Prosperine (Pluto's wife) as that appears to be widely used in SF for a tenth planet.
Or is it one of the others?
Or have I taken leave of my senses completely?
There is mention of a "massive" object, but no mention of its estimated mass. Given that Pluto may be de-regulated from its status as a planet (has anyone heard the results of this?) due to its insignifigant size and mass, is it fair to speculate on the existance of this as another planet?
Of course, if this object is massive enough to divert the course of comets then I suppose it is reasonable to assume that it would qualify as massive enough to factor as a planet...
Its nothing but pure speculation at this point, but that does not prevent it from being fascinating.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
I just lent the book out, but Carl Sagan utterly destroyed this argument in the book Broca's Brain.
:)
-Chapter on the paradoxers.
(Don't mean to rain on your parade
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
Now that we may have found Alvin how long do you think it'l be before we find Dave?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Charon I think it is.
The Moon and Earth are a binary planetary system too, it's only there's a greater mass difference and, well, a slight difference in materials and hence living conditions.
Pluto has always been considered a boarder-line minor planet. A Minor planet is basicly something the size of a small moon or large asteroid orbiting in our solar system. They don't tell the mass, so I assume that this is just what it is, a minor planet. There are a lot of minor planets out there, so this guy finding one would not be that much of a break through. Pluto is only famous because it was found a long time ago and became famous (1930's I think). The technique this astronomer used to find it is cool, its been done before to find planets exterior to our solar system through.
IIRC the technical definition of a planet is anything that orbits the sun. So if I threw a baseball into orbit around the sun by that definition it would be a planet. As far as classifying things as planets as we know them I don't think there is a definition. Look at the controversy over pluto for example. I think basically it comes down to size. If it's small it's an asteroid, if it's big, it's a planet.
-matt
i remember a story on /. claiming that scientists had decided that Pluto was not a true planet. Wouldn't that make this the 9th planet?
I claim my 10 points, and humbly point out that someone cracked that one higher in the thread. nb, I think you got the spelling correct.
Was that the one where Adric bought the farm?
Well, basically you don't. There's gravity, or you can throw away 3/4 of your sail, and have a laser reflect off it to push at you, but in low light conditions, the sail doesn't do much for you.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Check out project Orion, in the '50s or '60. The idea is to make LOTS of small atom bombs, and explode them behind the ship. Of course you need a rather sturdy construction for the ship, but you can get a pretty good acceleration, as long as nobody needs to get anywhere near the path of flight or the hind end of the ship.
Sounds like a good use for some old stockpiles of stuff that's just begging for some way to throw it away, doesn't it?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Watch out, its Mondas, and its crawling with Cybermen! Just you wait, they're going to invade us in 1988 and...uh, whoops, wrong universe! *Dives into the TARDIS*
I, too, have some doubts about the newest candidate for Planet X... However, I want to answer/clarify some of your points.
1) IMO, 13 points is not statistically significant. However, for all 13 orbits to be altered in the same way is somewhat remarkable.
2) AFAIK, Jupiter has no nuclear reaction within it's core. The critical mass to begin nuclear fusion is 10-100 times that of Jupiter. If "Planet X" is only a few times more massive than Jupiter, it would certainly have a higher core temperature, but not necessarily high enough to fuse hydrogen.
3) The "observations" of brown dwarfs has been solely through their gravitational effect on companion stars rather than direct optical observations.
4) You are correct about the orbit. Without some observation of the objects trajectory, there is no way to know if it is elliptical (bound to the Sun) or hyperbolic (not bound).
Looks like it will be an interesting read nonetheless.
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Well, if it is 30,000 AU from the Sun, it would be approximately 10% of the distance to Proxima Centauri. That star is about 1.25 parsecs away, and 1 pc == 206025 AU.
It's not all that significant in some respects, but if it is bound to the Sun, it certainly is interesting.
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We should name it Ork!
The BBC article mentioned that the object might lie in the constellation Delphinus. Although Delphinus is not far away from the ecliptic, Delphinus is not an ecliptic or zodiac constellation.
The ecliptic is defined as the plane of the Earth's orbit around the sun, and the zodiac is defined as the zone within 7 degrees of the ecliptic, roughly corresponding to Mercury's orbital inclination.
There is nothing about the ecliptic that makes it certain that all undiscovered hypothetical planets must lie within it. Pluto's orbital inclination is about 17 degrees, and it is not uncommon for comets to have highly inclined orbits. Our Northern Hemisphere friends were fortunate in that two bright comets (Hale-Bopp, Hayutake) passed really close to the North Celestial Pole recently.
One thing to note is that Pluto and comets are relatively distant members of the Solar System. They would feel less of a gravitational influence from other planets such as Jupiter than inner planets. It therefore makes sense that a hypothetical distant planet, particularly if captured and half a light-year away, would only be in the ecliptic by chance, and not because of any immutable cosmic law.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
So what you're saying is that Holst was right?
Could just be some large object, doesn't necessarily imply that it is a planet.
What is the definition of a planet anyway, and what makes it different from an asteroid.
Isn't this the 3rd tenth planet to be discovered in as many years?
Rupert? I hope you're right, because my first thought was that it was Unicron!
-"I talked to God and here's the deal/ He said to floss between each meal" -- Uninvited
You're all wrong. Its obviously Mongo Planet of Doom.
Steve -- If you have to call it a system, you don't know what it is.
Yeah, but 'moon' is really a status, not a description. Titan would certainly have no disputers as to being a planet if its primary was the sun rather than Saturn. Triton probably *was* a planet -- the current theory runs that Pluto and Triton are the last survivors of a group of small icy/rocky planets outside Neptune's orbit, but that a single or multiple disasters led to Pluto being knocked into its elongated orbit, Charon possibly being formed from an impact with Pluto a la Luna, Triton being captured by Neptune, and possibly even Uranus' sideways tilt.
The outer system looks like the remains of a driveby shooting... something big came by, but we don't know what or when!
I hacked a Java gravity simulator I wrote last year to show the hypothetical Planet 10 slingshotting comets into the inner solar system. The physics is quite realistic, but the scenario is very simplistic. I did just as a tool to show how knowing the trajectory of a number of comets can hint at the orbit of a perturbing body.
The href is http://www.astro.wisc. edu/~dolan/java/planet10/Planet10.html
Please send comments/complaints by email instead of posting.
P.S. if you want a pretty accurate simulation of the solar system, crank the timstep down to a few days, zoom in and turn on the planets (options screen).
I don't think it could be a brown dwarf. If it were, at 30,000 AU it would be visible to the naked eye (about 6th mag apparent), and significantly brighter than Neptune or Uranus.
There was no telescope involved. This hypothetical planet has not been seen.
The comets in question have had their trajectories computed (there are difficult, but well-known procedures to calculate the 3D orbits of comets/asteroids/etc from their 2D positions in the sky - one was invented by Gauss). Once the trajectories are known (in the form of elliptical orbits around the Sun), you can figure out where in the sky the furthest point from the sun lies (called the aphelion). This is the point at which the comet was ejected from the Oort cloud at the fringes of our solar system.
My understanding of this potential disocvery is that the 13 must all have aphelia which lie in a line in the outer solar system. This line would then indicate the trajectory of the perturbing body (our hypothetical planet in question) and yield a preliminary orbit.
The high probability that this is not coincidence (1 in 1700) probably comes from the authors' calculations of whether the aphelia lie in the same region by chance or not. This calculation would take into account the uncertainty of the 3D location of the aphelia (since we couldn't have *seen* each comet at its aphelion - we can just extrapolate their orbits out to that point).
Hi,
this must be the planet Rupert! (Ever read the 5th part of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to The Galaxy?)
Greetings,
Ivo
I seem to recall an article, oerhaps in Discovery News, about using a large magnetic field, and trapping ions in it. This setup functioned just like a solar sail, but doing away with the mass of the solar sail.
The party's over
I think that might have been one of Erik von Dainikken's books. he was famous for the "Chariots of the Gods" books; ancient astronauts, ufo's, Atlantis, etc. He filled 12 or 13 volumes with 'interesting' things. No I did not read them. I stopped halfway through COTG because the damn thing was near unreadable.
The party's over
That's OK. I refrain from actually *believing* any of the unintegrated & primitive poetry stuff too.
OTOH, an analogy for you, courtesy of a BBC proggie the other day: if I were a biologist, sitting alone at my computer all day, and some gorgeous female walked through the door with no clothing on, would I sit there thinking 'cor, think of what those cells there do' and a whole load of biological stuff, or would I just leave it at "rowwrf!"?
Y'know, we're not beyond appreciating the pretty pictures too. It just helps to know what we're looking at, as well.
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
Lesseee, it wasn't on Neighbours.. ;)
;(
Actually, I did say it was an *analogy*.. and it was from Horizon, about 6 years ago.
But otherwise I'd agree. There are no gorgeous females on the BBC...
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
Yes, The Twelfth PLanet by Zecharia Sitchin. The 12th planet, according to him, orbits the sun once every 3,600 years. So that would put this theoretical blob right out as it (Since, theoretically, they're saying that this thing orbits the sun in millions of years, not thousands)
.998 solar masses or something like that... so wouldn't that make it a star?
Although, in that article, the caption on the picture indicates that this "new" planet would dwarf Jupiter... well Jupiter is supposed to be like
Sitchin is referring to the 12th planet in Astrological terms, i.e. Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, Pluto, Chiron (an extra-orbital planetoid, about tht size of Pluto) & the 12th planet, or in Sumerian: Nefilim.
One of the more interesting facts he uncovered was that the Sumerians called the earth the 7th planet, not the 3rd... and from the perspective of the "mythical" 12th planet with it's hyper-eliptical orbit, it is the 7th large body from the outside of the solar system. Not to mention the fact that they seem to have known about Neptune, Uranus, Pluto & Chiron as well as numerous comets.
I'd highly recommend his books for those interested in mythology & ancient cultures.
I too don't take everything Sitchin says at face value, but some of it is far too interesting to be ignored.
As understood it, even the US military uses metric for their systems.
Sorry - when I was in the Navy (87-91) we were still using nautical miles and knots. And yes the DDT's displayed information in knots, volumes were measured in gallons, etc. etc.
http://www.bullnet.com
Physics Majors are , perhaps , the preimminent nerds of the world .
That is not an insult .
Seriously , Physics amongst other sciences such as computer science and Math are all things that we shoudl take a look at from time to time . They are the points at which mankind is at his finest :
when he is *learning* about the universe that he lives in .
Squireson@bigfoot.com
"...there is another planet in deep space (that) comes from Dr John Murray."
Was anyone else confused by this line? Of course, I added a word that wasn't really there.
sup
Just wondering....I seem to remember, that some of the original "fathers" of IP have been working on a version, suitable for interplanetary communication. Any clues on how far they've gotten on that?
/. on "Rupert" (this new planet)....
:)
Would be interresting to know - if only to know the possibility of reading
Another thing - I wonder what would be the MTU of a wireless link from earth to Rupert...?
--
-- "Life is a bitch - and she hates me..."
What the hell do you mean a racist comment? because he called a dormant star a "brown dwarf"?
Get a grip, I know it is hard being a dwarf and all that, but he wasn't talking about you.
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
This is not exciting at all to me, What have we done with the closer planets we found? asdf.
It means nothing if we find 1000000 other planets, because we are not going to do anything with them, at least not in my lifetime...
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
Could this be what is affecting the speed of our deep space probes? (as posted on /. about a week ago) I would like this explanation much more than some of the other stuff I read like rethinking our basic physics.
Ancient Sumerian culture have this additional wandering member of our solar system etched into 7000 year old tablets from Eridu -- as were all other recently discovered planetary members up until this century when Pluto? was found.
This is what Zechariah Sitchin introduced into our contemoporary society as Planet X a couple of decades ago. His theory based on ancient Akkadian translations is that the planet orbits the Sun on a different elipse to the remainder of the planets and contrary to current findings passes our earth every 2400 years. Unfortunately we're going to miss out by a couple of hundred years...
These theories and more are fundamental in universal creation myths as humans being the genetic product of a scientific fusion between Nefilim [Planet X locals and hominids].
It's God Jim but not as we know it.
BLAMMO shaken not stirred
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/960726.html
Further enlightenment.
-nme!
Oh yeah, and I'd just love to have NASA sending all of that up there. That's like asking why don't we send all of our nuclear waste to the Sun? Well... if it explodes in the atmosphere, I'd stay indoors for quite a long time.. maybe until I had a grandchild and wanted to go out.. my last day.
"Open Source?" - Press any key to continue
Itanium and have Pizza Hut shine their logo on it or just send up a rocket with their corporate logo...
Then again that's just silly and it would never happen in real life....
right?
I vote to name the planet Za'Ha'Dum :-)
:I claim my 10 points, and humbly point out that someone cracked that one higher in the thread. nb, I think you got the spelling correct.
Was that the one where Adric bought the farm?
Actually the story name was "The Tenth Planet", and was aired in 1965 I believe. It was patrick troughton's last story. The story where Adric bought the farm was Earthshock, aired in 1983. That's when some freigher explodes, and goes back in time, killing off the dinosaurs on earth.
The correct spelling of the planet is Mondas. Either way, ive sent a warning email to the BBC telling them to get The Doctor before this situation gets out of hand. Wonder what the reply will be.
Is this 10th planet perhaps named Mondas? (10 points if you get the reference + 20 points if I screwed up the ref and correct me)
There are many other reasonable explanations that involve multiple smaller bodies, and unfortunately even Occam's Razor can't cut away at this one.
There have been many different people who tried to use variations in planetary orbits to find a 10th planet. (see Hypothetical Planets ) Unfortunately theories like this one are difficult to disprove because of the difficulty of finding a dark object in space. The idealist in me wants to find a 10th planet though, and this seems like as good a place to start searching as any.
I kinda had the impression that was pretty much Lockheed's fault. "Wait a minute, you mean to tell me Lockheed still uses the imperial system? Where the hell did they get there engineering degrees?" As understood it, even the US military uses metric for their systems. Lockheed's making 21st century equipment using 19th century measurements?
Intolerant people should be shot.
Nah.. if they all put their braincell to use they should be able to find it in a little while..
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
hold on a sec... a guy wrote a DISSERTATION on weird alien stuff? dang! where do i sign up! sounds a lot easier than my PhD stuff!
*insert pithy sig here*
Here's an article about Pioneer 10 deviating off course, also from the BBC.
The deviation happened in 1992 and lasted 25 days... most likely was a Kuiper belt object.
This has nothing to do with the new hypothetical planet. Remember, it's supposed to be 1000 times farther than Pluto, while Pioneer and the Voyagers are less than twice as far as Pluto.
By the way the BBC has a great Science & Technology section... worth bookmarking and checking every day.
Every so often I've stolen a glance at the night sphere, the celestial blanket of holes with a light outside, the enormous planck maelstrom dance which wraps around like mobius at the turn from infinity to infinitessimal. I've felt the gestalt memory of my time-independent self and ancestors experience the same cool night air and crickets, stretching our awareness out into the realm of the gods, reaching within to find the connection.
And then I read scientific establishment articles, with sterile descriptions of collisions, captures, explosions, all missing the forest for the trees, missing the dance for the step.
Oh well, guess we all have a different experience of reality. I would just refrain from actually believing any of the unintegrated, primitive theories they have thrown at us so far.
a prophet on the burning shore
> The acceleration of a solar sail drops as inverse cube of your distance from the sun ... and using the sun's gravity well and the solar wind after that to get yourself up to max speed.
;-)
Yeah, but I want to know how do you apply the brakes on a solar sail !?
i.e. How much stopping distance do you need? Hey wasn't that pluto back there 10 mins ago?!
A solar sail, probably laser boosted, could provide constant acceleration with no reaction mass. These have been feasible for a while, but NASA has no money to experiment with them, and there's no profitable reason for others to do it. Constant acceleration would let the trip take a short enough period to retain public interest.
Communication is only possible between equals
The thirteen comets must have been deflected at different times, so from each calculation he would have gotten a position for this planet at a particular time. Look at how that changes and you know its speed.
Or, look at it this way: you have a bunch of unknowns about this planet (x,y, and z position, x, y, and z velocity, and mass.) Each comet trajectory gives you an equation relating those numbers. You end up with 7 equations in 7 variables, which you can solve. Throw in a few extra equations for double-checking and getting a handle on the size of experimental errors, and you're up to 13.
Oh, and all astronomical observations are two-dimensional. What astronomers do is plot the exact sky position of a comet over time, watching how it changes. Throw in the positions of the planets, Newton's law of gravitation, and a calculator, and you can figure out the comet's 3-D position.
There's something about this that just seems kind of rediculous. It's a little far out from the sun to be thought of as the 10th planet. Next, we'll find one that does a figure 8 with Sol and Proxima Centauri.
:)
The only thing that kind of interests me is the thought of it being a rogue planet, one that didn't originate from the same matter pool from which the Solar System was created. Or maybe the oort cloud out there has condenced over the years into larger balls of matter from collisions, and creating their own local gravity wells to pull in more, and make themselves larger. Who knows.
As a side note, I think it's laughable that Pluto is even thought of as a planet. There are identified asteroids that are more planetlike than Pluto. It's tough to call this 'new' discovery the 10th planet, when the 9th is little more than a free floating rock, with a nearly as large orbiting rock. Hell, Pluto orbits Charon almost as much as Charon orbits Pluto. It's just nuts.
Now that I've gone completely off the deep end, I'll return to work.
Mike
In reading the article, it seems he was studying the orbits of "long period" comets. While I forget the definition of "long period" I seem to remember it's on the order of hundreds to thousands of years. Given that, it seems likely that the comets in question have only been reliably observed once, so their orbits won't be known with a great deal of accuracy.
I'm not sure where the 1:1700 probability came from, but I'm sure the actual paper will elaborate.
As for observing this beast (if such exists) I'm not surprised it hasn't been spotted. Its energy output will be very low (probably not dramatically more than Jupiter's) and probably limited to the deep infra-red. Of course, without more information, it's hard to say how big this rogue planet would need to be. A good size asteroid (or several on different trajectories) could easily perturb the orbits of comets in the Oort cloud.
Until they release the paper, of course, anything we say here is pure speculation. Personally, I'll put a small wager on the evidence failing under peer review.
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
guys, you do know that because of the very high speed light has, you have to consider the effects of einsteins theory of relativity. ;-)
;)
30,000 AU = approx .474 light years. The next-nearest star is about 4 light years away I think. So about 1/10 the distance. Pretty damn far!
--
I suppose the fastest rocket we have is the shuttle that has to reach a speed of 17400 MPH to achieve escape velocity. Using your numbers, we would have to have a rocket 800 times more powerful than the shuttle to reach the planet in thirty five years. I bet one of those designs that Omni magazine published in the early eighties of rockets using multiple atomic engines could do it. It would be pretty bright though.
If this is true, it might be worth a Nobel prize. Look what it might mean - If it is the size of earth, it could have an atmosphere. If it is going the wrong way, it may have come from another solar system - think of all what that might mean. It could have a history other than our solar system. What sent it adrift? Is it icy or rocky? Is there volcanic activity? Do objects like this acoount for the missing mass? If it does exist, how large (or huge!) of a rocket would it take to get a space probe there in a few years?
C'mon, it's going against the norm and way out there. Isn't that all linux users? How much more appropriate can it be for /.? Email is really ivenn@yourmama.net -Kernel "yes I voted" Panic
No datacenter is secure if it has windows.
I have three questions:
1) Would any hypothetical interstellar drive do things to space-time that would look like an object of incredible mass?
2) Was that probe heading in a direction anything like "towards" Planet X?
3) Would the super-mass of Planet X have caused the probe to have started to head significantly towards it?
"Conspiracy theories are put about by the Illuminati to deliberately mislead the public"
cool, i'll have to check it out...
one of the things (among sooo many) i didn't really buy was that these alien guys had a longer lifespan because their planet took so long to revolve around the sun.... it would be the same as saying that living at the north pole would increase your life expectancy because of those periods of a few months of day, then a few months of night. they would technically only live one or two "days" (light then dark then light cycle) a year...
There are thousands of bodies orbiting (under the gravitational influence) of our sun. It's called the Oort Cloud, and just because someone happened to find a pretty big hunk of rock out there does not mean it is the mysterious planet X. Frankly, with all the flak Pluto has been taking about being a planet, I seriously doubt that this new body will ever be considered as a member of our solar system.
----
Striving to put right what once went wrong, and hoping each time that his next leap, will be the leap ho
Depending on who you talk to, you may be told that even Pluto is not a planet. What's that, you say? Well, surrounding Pluto's orbit is a large belt of similar objects called the Kuiper Belt. Pluto simply happens to be an unusually large object in the Kuiper Belt, and so we noticed Pluto long before we discovered the rest of the belt. Thus, there is some controversy as to whether Pluto is actually a planet at all, or just a large Kuiper belt object. I know this is a little offtopic, but I thought you might find it interesting.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
This actually sounds alot like the Genesis theory. A race of advanced humanoids used a special missile to turn the once desolate planet orbitting the sun at 30,000 au into a virtual paradise, making it inhabitable. The evidence is conclusive, we need no further research into the matter.
I can't be sure, but this may parrallel this movie that's coming to theaters soon called the 13th floor. its about this virtua- what? you say the 13th floor was already out in theaters and is coming out on video soon? funny, i hardly even noticed.
Yeah, every stealth fighter comes with a slide rule for conversion.
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
check out... http://www.sciam.com/0596issue/0596jewitt.html Callum
I've been writing SF stories set at Oort-cloud planets and brown dwarfs for a couple of years now. (You can find one, "Halo", in the Tor Books anthology Northern Suns; I am just completing a novel set among these objects). This planet, if it exists, is probably not unique. The astronomer J. Davy Kirkpatrick said in a press release last year that brown dwarfs appear to be so abundant that we'll probably find one closer than the nearest star.
So what? Well, let me put it this way: while the stars remain as far away as ever, the distance between planetary systems has been halved by the recent calculations of the abundance of brown dwarfs and the possible existence of this planet.
Consider Jupiter. It's got a couple of Mars-sized moons orbiting it; one of them might even have a subsurface ocean (Europa). This theoretical new planet could easily have similar moons. Might as well call 'em planets at that size.
The resources of the Jupiter system are huge, and the same could be true of this distant world. It's not likely to be a frozen ball; Jupiter radiates more heat than it receives from the sun, and it heats its own moons with tidal force. Even half a light-year into the Oort cloud, we might find a Europan-style oceanic world orbiting Nemesis (or whatever you want to call this 10th planet).
While the radiation environment around Nemesis is likely to be nasty, if its magnetic field is anything like Jupiter's it will be trivially easy to draw power from it; easier, in fact, than it is to generate power from solar cells. A simple wire orbiting a jovian planet produces electricity in colossal amounts through interaction with the magnetic field. A nascent colony at Nemesis would have as much power as it needed for light and heat.
If this planet does exist it should be our target for settlement after Mars and Jupiter. It will be the place where we'll learn if and how we'll travel to and survive at other stars.
Yes, it's probably not a brown dwarf, but it could be several Jupiters in mass, in which case it could have its own satellites--moons? planets? It will not be bigger than Jupiter no matter how massive it is; trans-jovian masses compress into roughly the same volume as Jupiter has. It will receive negligible light from the sun, so the dark-adapted eye might see this world as a black absence of stars containing lightning flashes, and with a halo on top--the halo being the powerful aurorae of the polar regions, their energy kicked up by its radiation belts. If it has close-orbiting moons similar to Io, there might be a luminescent ring from ionized gas orbiting the equator as well. Visitors to its moons might see this world as a collection of faint flickering luminescent rings in the sky.
In my SF stories on this subject, I've dubbed worlds like this "halo worlds".
I believe the name would be "Proserpine".
Umn, friend, you have an off-by-one error in your orders of magnitude:
>If we attack it a different way, 30,000 times 8 light-minutes is 24,000 light-minutes, or 400 light-hours, or 16.7 light
>days, which is only a bit over 1% of the way to Proxima Centauri, so this does not sound right either; it is hardly "a
>significant fraction of the distance to the nearest star"
Umno. 30,000 times 8 light-minutes is 240,000 light-minutes, 4000 light-hours, 167 light-days, a bit over 10% of the way to PC. A significant fraction.
--
I've heard that Pluto is in danger of losing its status as a planet, but what I've never understood is why Pluto was considered a planet but Charon was not. Charon is usually referred to as Pluto's moon, but my understanding is that Charon is actually about 2/3rds the mass of Pluto, so really they orbit around a common epicenter (that is not within either body, but between them.) So that sounds like a double planet to me, not a planet with a moon...
Hey Rob. What kind of transfer rates do you think Slashdot would get if we dropped the servers on this planet and strung it to earth with a couple bazillion miles of fiber? (Well. Other than the 208 day lagtime between and receipt, receipt, and then final delivery of the page. that is.......)
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Yep -- the Pluto/Charon barycenter is in the space between the two, and neither Pluto nor Charon ever move retrograde to their mutual orbit around the Sun.
IIRC, the only other similar relationship between a "planet" and its "satellite" is Earth/Luna, where the barycenter is significantly outside the Earth's core and neither Earth nor Luna ever move retrograde to their mutual orbit around the Sun. (Every other satellite will, in its orbit around its primary, move the in the opposite direction of it's primary's movement around the Sun.)
And, given that Luna is larger than Pluto, it's then easy to argue that the Solar System has eleven known planets: Mercury, Venus, the dual planets Earth and Luna, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and the dual planets Pluto and Charon.
Of course, you could also argue anything larger than size X is a planet (in which case the four Gallileians, Luna, Titan, and Triton are planets if Pluto is...), or any of a dozen other criteria.
I remember hearing about "Planet X" in grade school.
Seriously, though, it's a good bet that this is a brown dwarf (basically a small, dormant star).
And yeah, orbiting the opposite way, it definitely doesn't sound like it was formed in the accretion disk around the Sun.
Hey, but maybe we have something useful to send a probe to now past Pluto. Provided NASA doesn't botch it and mix up metres and yards.
The acceleration of a solar sail drops as inverse cube of your distance from the sun. It will very fast become comparable to friction from interstellar matter after you pass Pluto (cannot say off the top of my head but this can be calculated).
It may be a feasible way to move things cheap and clean between earth orbit and mercury, venus and mars but that's about it.
If you want to use solar sail your only feasible option for launching something fast past Jup will be to pull the crazy stunt of deccelerating towards the sun with the solar sail and using the sun's gravity well and the solar wind after that to get yourself up to max speed. In either case you are hardly going to get anything very high.
A ion drive seems to be much more feasible (or a combination - start on sail, go towards the sun, use the well to accelerate, accelerate further on sail, dump it and continue on a ion).
This of course assumes that someone will be able to get a working ion drive (in other words a decent proton accelerator in space). It does indeed have constant acceleration until you run out of reactive matter. And all you need is an electrical power supply. F.e. nuclear power generator and a tank of hydrogen to ionize and accelerate.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
The nemesis theory describes a star, not a planet, so there is some difference.
-matt
a brown dwarf rather than a 10th planet. For years astronomers have been theorizing an as yet unseen large body in some kind of orbit around the Sun. It's more plausible that it's a Brown dwarf with enough mass to keep itself from being drawn into the solar system at large but not enough mass to keep from being caught in the Sun's deep space gravity well.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Ever cruise by the NASA site lately. Check up on the probes designed to sail on the solar winds. I'm sure the story was on here a coule of weeks/months ago. If deployed today, it would overtake Voyager in about 2 years.
Dan. -- So what if it's spelt wrong, nobody's perfect
Pluto is much larger than Ceres, the largest asteroid; 2274 km to 933 km. Even Pluto's moon is larger than Ceres (Charon is 1172 km), though Pluto is considerably smaller than Mercury (4,880 km) and both Pluto and Mercury are smaller than the moons Triton and Ganymede. But it's vastly bigger than any of the other trans-neptunian (Kuiper Belt) objects, or the Centaurs (TNO refugees between Jupiter and Neptune); Chiron is the largest Centaur and it's barely over 200km; the biggest known TNO is around 400km.
Arguing that Pluto is merely the largest of a class of similiar objects doesn't seem to wash for me; you could say that the inner planets are merely the largest examples of a class of rocky objects inside Jupiter's orbit. The line between minor and major planet is essentially arbitrary, setting it in between Ceres and Pluto makes as much sense as setting it in between Mercury and Pluto. Since the former has been the standard for 70 years, seems no reason to change it. If a bunch of 2000km Kuiper Belt objects start turning up, they'll probably rethink.
A more interesting question is whether Pluto should be considered a double planet -- the 2:1 ratio between it and Charon is by far the smallest in the solar system, and if I recall correctly the mutual point they both orbit around is actually *above* Pluto's surface, unlike any other satellite relationship known.
the effect is pretty conclusive. I have caculated that there is only about a one in 1,700
chance that it is due to chance.
That doesn't quite scan. I presume he means a one in 1700 chance that it was something other than a rogue planetary body.
Check out the Nine Planets website... great for info about the solar system.
Here's the Pluto page.
The main problems with Pluto's status as a planet are:
So Pluto is just the biggest and brightest of a whole family of rock/ice "asteroids" out there beyond Neptune.
Perhaps calling Pluto a planet is just an accident of history, based on a wild over-guesstimate of its true mass. But why rock the boat? And after all, Pluto is a couple of orders of magnitude more massive than the biggest Mars-Jupiter asteroids (Ceres, Pallas, Vesta, etc).
PS, From the Nine Planets mass figures, Charon is 1/9 the mass of Pluto, not 2/3. But it's still pretty accurate to call Pluto-Charon a double planet.
Earth-Moon is really a double planet too (despite 1/80 mass ratio), if you go by visual appearance... the difference in radius is much smaller than the difference in mass (volume is proportional to radius cubed, and the Moon is less dense than Earth as well).
Before reading the article I was saying to myself : "Hey this is cool, another planet in the Solar System!"
After reading it, my mind had some doubt about the claims.
How by studying only 13 comets, could someone arg that he as found a planet wich is several Jupiter masses at such a large distance.
If he studied the path off known comets that already travel through the inner solar system, they certainly did nt travel far enough for their orbit to get significantly, in a observable way, altered bu such a distant object.
For 13 comets to be affected by this distant object, they should all have similar orbits. If one comet as an elongated orbit wich is oposite of this object, it's orbit will not be affected in an observable way.
In the light that Jupiter may have nuclear reaction in it's core (some theory exist about that possibility) an object with several Jupiter masses willl certainly have nuclear reaction in it's core and would emit some kind of radiation. At such a close distance from the Sun, it would certainly have been discovered long ago. We are able to observe brown dwarves at much longer distance.
With a "six million" years orbit, no one can say that it is, in fact, orbiting the Sun (especially for an object that has not been observed).
Finally, such a big object will certainly not be a planet, but some kind of star.
In the shadow of all these doubt, I'll wait for the paper to be presented next week. Then I'll will listen to the comments of other scientist.
- Escape velocity is 25,000 MPH or so (from the surface of the earth; it is a function of altitude).
- The Space Shuttle is nowhere near our fastest booster.
- The Space Shuttle cannot get anywhere near escape velocity; it can get to an orbit at a few hundred miles altitude carrying no payload, and that's it.
- Omni is a poor guide to anything other than fiction. You are much better off using the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Analog, or even the sci.space FAQs.
I just can't put it any nicer right now.--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Something like a StarWisp probe could investigate this in a short time. A StarWisp is essentially a very thin piece of metallic lace, and it is propelled by a microwave beam (a "light sail" that operates at microwave instead of optical wavelengths). It weighs a few grams; you hit it with a few gigawatts of microwaves and it takes off at an enormous acceleration. p = E/c, so 10 GW impinging on the sail with 100% reflection would yield about 67 N of force. If the probe weighs 10 grams, that is close to 700 G's of acceleration!
If the cruising speed of StarWisp is 0.5 c, then it could do a flyby of this planet about a year from launch and we get the data 6 months later. That's quick enough to build the probe for your Master's degree and analyze the data for your PhD.
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
My point was not how is this news for NERDS...
= -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
How is this NEWS?
A many people have already pointed out, scientists have been talking about a possible Planet X for years...when I read the article...what news was there?
Did they prove it exists? No...it's still just a theory they can't prove with existing technology
Did they prove where it exists? No...two different groups are giving two different numbers...I don't know what the significant digits are but if you can't get anything more precise that "really really far away" what does that tell me?
Even if I was the most die hard astronomy fan, I don't see anything in this article that leads me to believe anything newsworthy has happened here. For the record...I think there is a Planet Y in orbit at least 50000 AU away. Do have any conclusive proof, but it's still a theory and maybe someday, there will be a away to prove it and they'll have to call it planet JoeShmoe.
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
A few years back I read a book written by some sort of ph.d (one of those researchers who has a degree but whose ideas are so far fetched that no one else in his field believes him... every field has one..) that wrote of a planet that orbits our sun, but from very,very far away... the name of the book was "The Thirteenth Planet". It basically described humans being visited by powerful creatures that lived on this 13th planet and cited biblical and other ancient religious tomes pointing to the various instances where "holy" or "sacred" events occurred and tried to prove how these could only be done by these "aliens".. anyway, i digress, i'm not saying this guy is right or even sane, but the 13th planet was so far away that it only came near (relatively) to earth every like 2000 years.... like i said, i'm not one for human origins being tied to aliens (i'm a big evolution buff) but it makes me wonder how closely (if even) this is tied into that guys works or if the "ancients" ever knew about this planet....
/.
great, now i'm going to officially be named a psychopath on
Observing at that distance, what is the resolution of the tools (telescope?) he is using? And of the many calculations to determine trajectory for 13 different comets, what would be the probability for error?
Also, at that distance, the view we would get would appear to be effectively two dimensional with small depths very hard to perceive. Yes/no??
That being the case, how would the they determine the trajectory for a comet that would be three dimensional, without all the info?
What does he mean by significant fraction?
1/*000 ?
1/*000000 ?
1/*000000000 etc.....
That being the case, how can they be sure it is orbiting our Sun?
Hope someone can shed a little light on these for me...
cheers
marty
"I can't buy want I want because it's free. Can't be what they want because I'm me." -Corduroy, Pearl Jam
Lets just bring it here...
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
As I see it he means that the orbits of the comets he studied, their vectors and timing have only a 1:1700 of having the relationship they have by chance, without a single large body deflecting them (assuming his math is correct, that is)
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
The so-called Nemesis theory is about 14 years old - a large planet with extremely long period deflects comets from the Oort cloud and is responsible for mass extinctions like the dinosaurs which appear to be happening periodically.
The new thing here is that someone has actually calculated a probable orbit.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Hey, but maybe we have something useful to send a probe to now past Pluto.
With a distance of almost half a light year, we'd either have to be very patient or come up with a method to send a probe much faster. (And, then, after we've figured that out, we can be about a dozen times as patient and send a probe to the nearest star.)
At the very least, it's far enough away that the fastest way to get there is to spend quite some time coming up with a faster way to send things there. (Orbital rail-gun, anybody?) I mean, seriously -- get something started at about 1800 miles per second (fast enough to get to the sun in 13 hours) and it'd still take you almost 50 years. Take 10 years to come up with something twice as fast and you'd get your probe there 15 years earlier.
In other words, it's a bit distant to be trying to send probes there just yet.