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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?
dude, the planets going the opposite direction to us... imagine how tangled the cable's gonna get, and dont mention the boosters... argh.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
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.
From what I can gather he was unable to detect it directly. He has inferred the location and approximate mass through studying the alteration of the comets paths. Hence it is speculated to be there. My guess as to how he assumes that it is orbiting the planet is again by mathematical calculations. I assume that the 13 comets studied had known paths as they left the solar system, and altered paths as they returned (well, I guess they did not REALLY leave, but you get the idea)
By calculating how much they were altered and the angle that they were altered by, it is possible to determine the location and mass (to some degree) of the altering influence.
Its like shining a light on an object, you dont ACTUALLY see the object itself (although we believe that we do) you see the light that has been reflected by the object. We cannot see the suspect planet, but we can detect its gravitational influence on the comets themselves.
This all taken in context that his observations and math are correct...
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
What do you mean what does it mean? It means this massive object orbiting our sun could be the mothership of those blasted aliens that live in our washer/dryers and steal our socks, underwear, and other items of clothing to power their cold fusion engines and provide their replicators with raw material. Think about it, they're probably using their tractor beams to deflect the comets from hitting us so their greatest supplier of raw materials doesn't die out!
-Xuff
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Kepler's laws say that the square of the period is approximately proportional to the cube of the radius (and using the right units, years and AU) equal. Which makes the orbital period just over 5 million years.
The sun won't expand until it runs out of hydrogen and starts helium burning, even then it probably won't expand beyond the radius of Mars. Pluto will get a bit cooked, but it won't be swallowed up, the Jupiter and maybe Saturn could start to evaporate which would be really cool to watch if we weren't dead. And as the others said this ain't gonna happen for another five or six billion years, and it won't go BANG! though there will be a little pop! as it blows off it's outer layers to make a planetary nebula which will look really pretty if you're a couple of hundred light years away and not dead. Callum (just another astrophysics geek)
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.