In The News:
A huge unknown lurks in the far reaches of our Solar System — something massive enough to pull distant space rocks into extraordinarily long, thin loops around the Sun.
In 2016, he and a colleague at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) proposed something almost unfathomable: a huge planet, up to 10 times heftier than Earth, way out on the edge of our Solar System.
Now, they have published a study , yet to be peer-reviewed, that simulated the movements of objects on the Solar System's fringes , and found that the chance of a Planet-Nine-type object not existing was just one in a million.
The honour of predicting it goes to mid-19th-century astronomers Urbain Le Verrier and John Couch Adams.
They noticed that Uranus (which was only discovered about 60 years earlier) had irregularities in its orbit that could only be explained by the presence of another, more distant planet.
Le Verrier in Paris and Adams in Cambridge calculated coordinates for this hypothetical planet, and when German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle and his student pointed a telescope to that part of the sky in 1846, there it was: Neptune, the Solar System's eighth planet.
While Planet Nine might be found the same way, the most tantalising hints it exists come not from ice giants like Uranus, but the motion of dwarf planets and asteroids that typically orbit much further out in our Solar System.
More than 3,000 of these objects — including dwarf planet Pluto — have been found so far, although most have not yet been named or thoroughly investigated.
No comments:
Post a Comment