12/15/2023 0 Comments Nasa news planet xSo, it's very different than the mythical Nibiru. In any event, Planet Nine (or Planet X, if you prefer), may actually exist, and it's not coming to destroy Earth. ( Clyde Tombaugh's 1930 discovery of Pluto did not validate Lowell's hypothesis, however, because Pluto isn't big enough to jostle Uranus and Neptune in the way that Lowell imagined.) American astronomer Percival Lowell came up with this theory, and he hunted for Planet X in the early 20th century. This can get confusing, because "Planet X" was also the term used for a world once thought to be responsible for supposed oddities in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. (The International Astronomical Union reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet in 2006, you probably recall.) But some researchers (and many laypeople) still regard Pluto as the ninth planet and therefore use the term "Planet X" (or "Planet Next," or "Giant Planet Five") for the undiscovered object instead. Astronomers around the world are scouring the sky with powerful telescopes as we speak, trying to spot Planet Nine directly.įinally, a note about the name: Brown and Batygin dubbed the putative world "Planet Nine" because, if discovered, it would "replace" Pluto as the solar system's ninth planet. The best explanation, these researchers say, is an unseen "perturber" very far from the sun.Ĭalculations suggest that this Planet Nine may be about 10 times more massive than Earth and orbit perhaps 600 times farther from the sun, on average, than our planet does. The evidence for this hypothetical " Planet Nine" has been building over the past few years, as astronomers such as Mike Brown, Konstantin Batygin, Scott Sheppard and Chad Trujillo have noticed weird clustering in the orbits of small objects beyond Neptune. Rumors spread like wildfire on the internet, but the same technology can make it easier than ever to delve into the scientific evidence about such events.Īll of the above notwithstanding, there may actually be a big, undiscovered world lurking in the dark, cold depths of the outer solar system. People have been decrying the end of the world for hundreds of years. Nothing to fearĭoomsday reports across the internet frequently incite fear, but it's interesting to note they are nothing new. On top of that, most of the thousands of professional astronomers are linked not to the government but rather to private universities.Īstronomer David Morrison pointed out in 2012 that "NASA and the government get most of their information from these outside astronomers, not the other way around."īetween the amateur and professional astronomers, there are plenty of people who would have noticed a new "star" in the sky. The most common rebuttal to this is the cry of "Cover up!" However, there are hundreds of thousands of amateur astronomers around the world, many of whom own their own telescopes. This would have made it visible to astronomers everywhere. Easily performed calculations show that, by April 2012, it would have been brighter than the faintest stars viewed from a city, and almost as bright as Mars at its dimmest. The easiest and most verifiable piece of evidence arguing against the existence of the theoretical planet can be performed by anyone: According to the information available, a planet with a 3,600-year-long orbit that was due to impact Earth in 2012 should be available to the naked eye. After only a few trips, its gravity would have significantly disrupted the other planets, whose own gravitational pushes would have changed the hypothetical world's orbit significantly. Both papers are available to the public.Ī planet with an orbit so eccentric that it took 3,600 years to orbit the sun would create instabilities inside our 4.5-billion-year-old solar system. In the follow-up of the 1984 survey, most of the sources turned out to be distant galaxies. Such surveys are common in astronomy and usually involve follow-ups that individually detail the more interesting sources. Proponents of the fictitious planet note that, in 1984, a scientific paper was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters which discussed several infrared sources with "no counterparts" that turned up in a survey of the sky.
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