Posted on 01/26/2016 8:03:21 AM PST by BenLurkin
Planet Nine - a newly proposed but not yet confirmed world perhaps 10 times more massive than Earth that's thought to orbit far beyond Pluto — probably could not have triggered such "death from the skies" events, researchers said.
Planet Nine likely has an elliptical orbit, coming within 200 to 300 astronomical units (AU) of the sun at its closest approach and getting as far away as 600 to 1,200 AU, Brown said. (One AU is the distance from Earth to the sun - about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers).
Neptune orbits about 30 AU from the sun, and Pluto never gets farther than 49 AU from our star. So Planet Nine, if it exists, is very distant indeed — but not distant enough, Brown said, to stir up any of the trillions of comets in the Oort Cloud, which begins perhaps 5,000 AU from the sun.
The existence of such a "perturber" has been hypothesized as a way to explain the mysterious periodicity of big extinction events on Earth, which have recurred roughly every 27 million years over the last quarter-billion years or so.
"Really big planets really far away could do that," Brown told Space.com. "Planet Nine is smaller than all these things that people have called 'Planet X'- that's always been sort of Jupiter-sized, or even brown dwarf-sized, or something. This is a good bit smaller, and a good bit closer; it's not in the realm of the comets."
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"I do think it could throw a few small objects into the inner solar system every so often, but I don’t think it would significantly increase the odds for a mass extinction event," he added.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
“Don’t Blame ‘Planet Nine’ for Earth’s Mass Extinctions”
I can if I want to.
That’s the spirit, give ‘em ‘ell.
Typical, blame another Planet for our problems. Sheesh...
It's so very lonely, you're 600 AU from home.
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