Posted on 03/20/2008 11:43:43 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Japanese scientists believe another planet, up to two-thirds the size of Earth, is orbiting in the far reaches of the Solar System... "Because of the very cold temperature, its surface would be covered with ice, icy ammonia and methane," said lead researcher Tadashi Mukai. The study by Mukai and co-worker Patryk Lykawka will be published in the April issue of the Astronomical Journal. "The possibility is high that a yet unknown, planet-class celestial body, measuring 30 per cent to 70 per cent of the Earth's mass, exists in the outer edges of the Solar System," says a statement released by the University. "If research is conducted on a wide scale, the planet is likely to be discovered in less than 10 years," it claims. This Planet X -- so called by scientists as it is yet unfound -- would have an oblong elliptical solar orbit and circle the sun every thousand years, the team said, estimating its radius was 15 to 26 billion km... "In coming up with an explanation for the celestial bodies, we thought it would be most natural to assume the existence of a yet unknown planet," Mukai said. "Based on our hypothesis, we calculated how debris moved over the past four billion years. The result matched the actual movement of the celestial bodies we can observe now."
(Excerpt) Read more at cosmosmagazine.com ...
Who sez up to 2/3rds isn’t Earth-sized, you? Big deal.
The evidence for an undiscovered outer solar system body consists of comet focusing (Matese et al); the large (Pluto-sized) bodies on very long, eccentric orbits (Brown et al); and the people in this article based their figures on a computer simulation based on retrocalculating the orbits of known bodies; others.
The perturbation of Neptune, detected not many years after discovery and the calculation of its ephemeris, has been attributed by some to a few bad observations, but that’s a minority view. My own minority view is, the perturbation was brief because the planetary body is either A) orbiting more or less in the ecliptic, but in retrograde, so everyone looking for it winds up looking in the wrong direction, or B) orbiting out of the ecliptic, and perhaps also in retrograde.
I don't care what Neptune in the privacy of its own home and why are these pervs spying anyway?
I totally flubbed that joke
http://muller.lbl.gov/homepage.html#nemesis
http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/lbl-nem.htm
http://muller.lbl.gov/papers/Lunar_impacts_Nemesis.pdf
http://muller.lbl.gov/papers/An_Adventure_in_Science.pdf
I still laughed! :’) Probably would work better with (you guessed it) Uranus.
We are stardust.
Billion year old carbon.
We are golden..
Another consequence of a retrograde outer solar system body would be that it mitigates in favor of all other unknown solar system bodies having retrograde orbits, or having really elongated, kinda screwed up orbits (which has been observed in a few cases; plus all the comets).
Then the article says between 30% to 70% the size of the Earth, so that would mean half the size of Earth if the theory is correct.
Seriously, I try to avoid Uranus.
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