Proof of 'Planet Nine' May Be Sewn into Medieval Tapestries

Live Science ^ | May 4, 2018 | Stephanie Pappas

[SunkenCiv]

The records include dates and times, Cesario said, which makes them useful to modern-day astronomers.

Planet Nine, if it exists, would have about 10 times the mass of Earth and orbit 20 times farther from the sun than Neptune does...

Scientists suspect the existence of Planet Nine because it would explain some of the gravitational forces at play in the Kuiper Belt, a stretch of icy bodies beyond Neptune. But no one has been able to detect the planet yet, though astronomers are scanning the skies for it with tools such as the Subaru Telescope on Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano.

Medieval records could provide another tool, said Pedro Lacerda, a Queen's University astronomer and the other leader of the project.

"We can take the orbits of comets currently known and use a computer to calculate the times when those comets would be visible in the skies during the Middle Ages," Lacerda told Live Science. "The precise times depend on whether our computer simulations include Planet Nine. So, in simple terms, we can use the medieval comet sightings to check which computer simulations work best: the ones that include Planet Nine or the ones that do not."

[SunkenCiv]

Graphics coming. "The Bayeux Tapestry features a depiction of the 1066 Halley's Comet."

[SunkenCiv]

No Planet Nine? Weird Orbits of Distant Objects May Have Different Explanation
By Mike Wall January 21, 2019 Science & Astronomy
https://www.space.com/43072-planet-nine-unnecessary-solar-system.html

[al baby]

That reminds me i need to order another velastate hat from that dude

[dangus]

Planet x used to sound so cool. Then they found planet x after decades of denial, so downgraded planet 9 so they didn’t have to call Haumea a planet. Even found a planet xi.

[BenLurkin]

Seems that Chinese astronomical records would have more, and perhaps better, information.

[JennysCool]

“You see??? You see??? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!”

[SuperLuminal]

Hmmm... Initially thought title said: “Planet Nine discovered in medieval pastries” Was confused until a second reading... Dang 85-year-old eyes...

[DesertRhino]

There is no planet x, and they never found one. It was an error based on an overestimation of the mass of Neptune.

“Following the discovery of the planet Neptune in 1846, there was considerable speculation that another planet might exist beyond its orbit. The search began in the mid-19th century and continued at the start of the 20th with Percival Lowell’s quest for Planet X. Lowell proposed the Planet X hypothesis to explain apparent discrepancies in the orbits of the giant planets, particularly Uranus and Neptune, speculating that the gravity of a large unseen ninth planet could have perturbed Uranus enough to account for the irregularities.

Clyde Tombaugh’s discovery of Pluto in 1930 appeared to validate Lowell’s hypothesis, and Pluto was officially named the ninth planet. In 1978, Pluto was conclusively determined to be too small for its gravity to affect the giant planets, resulting in a brief search for a tenth planet. The search was largely abandoned in the early 1990s, when a study of measurements made by the Voyager 2 spacecraft found that the irregularities observed in Uranus’s orbit were due to a slight overestimation of Neptune’s mass”

[Telepathic Intruder]

20 times farther than Neptune. Let’s see it took 9 years for New Horizons to reach Pluto. So that would make it around 150 years after discovery until we can send a probe to look at it. Can’t wait.

[Go_Raiders]

We’ll have small space probes capable of far faster travel in the next decade or so. Driven by lasers from earth, or a satellite.

We’ll be able to send a series of them to relay information back to Earth.

[blueplum]

maybe there’s a math pattern that points to a planet with a 370year orbit, which is why we haven’t seen it?

uranus is 14 times the mass of earth; orbit is 84 years
neptune is 17 times the mass of earth; orbit is 164 years (2x Uranus)
pluto is about 40% the mass of earth; orbit is 247 years (1.5x Neptune)
Planet Nine is 10 times the mass of earth; orbit is ??
If ?? is 1.5x then it’s 370 years. Then check the charts.

164
84 = 80 or 2.05x slower

247
164 = 83 or 1.5x slower

??
247 = 1.5x slower then ??=370, or slower.

[pepsi_junkie]

"Most schoolroom charts show the planets coming one after the other at neighborly intervals—the outer giants actually cast shadows over each other in many illustrations—but this is a necessary deceit to get them all on the same piece of paper. Neptune in reality isn’t just a little bit beyond Jupiter, it’s way beyond Jupiter—five times farther from Jupiter than Jupiter is from us, so far out that it receives only 3 percent as much sunlight as Jupiter.

Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn’t possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn’t come close. On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway)."

Pluto may be the last object marked on schoolroom charts but the solar system doesn’t end there. In fact, it isn’t even close to ending there. We won’t get to the solar system’s edge until we have passed through the Oort cloud, a vast celestial realm of drifting comets… Far from marking the outer edge of the solar system, as those schoolroom maps so cavalierly imply, Pluto is barely one 50,000th of the way.
- Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

[LukeL]

In high school for an in class project we took some receipt tape and laid out the distances between the planets. Every cm was 10 million miles. The 4 inner planets were all within a narrow band and the outer planets were much much father apart. It really showed the scale of the solar system.

[jmacusa]

“Shoot them!’’ Shoot them now!’’. “I can’t, my ray gun is jammed!’’

[Telepathic Intruder]

Distances within the Solar System are huge, beyond the imagination. But even those are tiny compared to outside of it.

You certainly can't get an idea of the size of the cosmos from pop sci fi. Star Trek treats travelling to others stars like flying from once city to another. The series claimed the Federation had explored 11% of the galaxy, but that's at least 10 billion stars. If it's 300 years in the future, they must have explored 1 or 2 stars every second starting from now. And that says nothing of the sheer distances either. If our star is comparable to a grape 1 cm across, the nearest other star is another grape 180 miles away. That's just the nearest one, and there are at least 100 billion more just in this galaxy, one of at least a trillion.

[SunkenCiv]

Same thing happened at Apple. ;^)

[SunkenCiv]

Screw up your order of medieval pastries, and you'd likely be given the Rack! ;^)

[SunkenCiv]

Better safe than sorry.

[SunkenCiv]

Pluto was discovered telescopically in 1930 (Tombaugh continued mapping for years thereafter, and was convinced that he hadn't missed any planet-sized bodies in the ecliptic) and the New Horizons probe wasn't launched until 2006, a 76 year span. So, add that to the number of years we'll have to wait. ;^)

[SunkenCiv]

The Grand Rapids museum has a large replica of the Earth, turns on the axis, and spotlights simulate the day side. There's a replica of the Moon, of a sort, placed 200 or so feet away, at the other end of the "whale room", to impress visitors with the scale of just the Earth-Moon system. Kinda humbling.