Posted on 01/15/2015 3:45:27 PM PST by BenLurkin
In their studies, the team analyzed the effects of what is called the ‘Kozai mechanism,’ which is related to the gravitational perturbation that a large body exerts on the orbit of another much smaller and further away object. They looked at how the highly eccentric comet 96P/Machholz1 is influenced by Jupiter (it will come near the orbit of Mercury in 2017, but it travels as much as 6 AU at aphelion) and it may “provide the key to explain the puzzling clustering of orbits around argument of perihelion close to 0° recently found for the population of ETNOs,” the team wrote in one of their papers.
They also looked at the dwarf planet discovered last year called 2012 VP113 in the Oort cloud (its closest approach to the Sun is about 80 astronomical units) and how some researchers say it appears its orbit might be influenced by the possible presence of a dark and icy super-Earth, up to ten times larger than our planet.
“This Sedna-like object has the most distant perihelion of any known minor planet and the value of its argument of perihelion is close to 0°,” the team writes in their second paper. “This property appears to be shared by almost all known asteroids with semimajor axis greater than 150 au and perihelion greater than 30 au (the extreme trans-Neptunian objects or ETNOs), and this fact has been interpreted as evidence for the existence of a super-Earth at 250 au. In this scenario, a population of stable asteroids may be shepherded by a distant, undiscovered planet larger than the Earth that keeps the value of their argument of perihelion librating around 0° as a result of the Kozai mechanism.”
(Excerpt) Read more at universetoday.com ...
Possible but we won’t really know without being able to clearly image the ort cloud.
/mark
Oort
A "super earth"?
Uh oh. Nibiru.
Know two of three. What is the “Dolmadakia?”
hang on a second.... our solar system??
don’t you think we would have seen them by now??
and didn’t they say that our solar system really ends at the Oort Cloud??
Stuffed grape leaves.
Krypton.
I now them as dolmada or Dolmas, or warak iben in arabic.
Dwarf planet is an offensive term! They are mass challenged worldlets.
BTW, New Horizons began operations today for the July flyby of Pluto. The first pics will start coming in about 10 days from now. They won’t be great pics but will get better and better.
http://www.space.com/28270-new-horizons-pluto-science-observations.html
And we were darn happy to have ‘em.
Would you believe a super, duper Pluto?
Right!
..not very likely being able to image that Ort cloud...
...too far...too tenuous, since it is populated by small, discrete objects...
...good thought though...
If they are far enough away they may only have moved through a small portion of their orbit since people had access to real astronomical telescopes.
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