Is there a Planet X, a ‘massive perturber,’ hidden beyond Pluto?

Washington Post ^ | September 3 | Joel Achenbach

[BenLurkin]

The paper ... noted that a number of large, very remote objects share a similar orbital angle. That's suspicious if you're an astronomer expecting to see a random distribution of objects.

The key orbital feature is known, rather obtusely, as the “argument of perihelion.” We're not shy of complicated orbital concepts (we try to toss around the phrase "obliquity of the ecliptic" whenever possible), but this one is not very easy to explain. "The argument of perihelion is the angle at which an object comes to perihelion with respect to the ecliptic plane," Sheppard said in an e-mail. Mike Brown, the Caltech astronomer who discovered the dwarf planet Eris, tells us by e-mail, "Scott's claim is that all of these objects come to perihelion at the ecliptic, and all are going from below the plane to above the plane at perihelion."

So there's something seemingly non-random, indeed a striking pattern, in how these extremely distant objects move around the sun. And that suggests that there's something out there influencing them -- or, more precisely, making other types of orbits unstable.

Sheppard explains by e-mail the concept of the "disturber":

A massive object or great disturber would perturb or disturb anything that came close to it. So objects that stay away from the great disturber would be the most stable objects. Thus the great disturber can “shepherd” objects into similar types of orbits with similar arguments of perihelion which are the orbits which constantly keep the smaller objects away from the bigger object. This is seen in the Near Earth asteroids, where there is a preference for Near Earth Asteroids to have certain orbital angles to keep them away from close encounters with the Earth.

[BigEdLB]

http://home.dtm.ciw.edu/users/sheppard/satellites/

Scott Sheppard's website

[Slyfox]

Well now. I don’t need me a beer.

[MadMax, the Grinning Reaper]

I didn’t know that you could say “mass perturber” on the internet.

Where are the sex PC police when you need them?

[brivette]

leave it to Joe....

[80skid]

Welp. When it’s your time, it’s your time is the way I was raised.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks BenLurkin.

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[80skid]

GOD has a plan for all of us.

[uglybiker]

Wake me when they discover Planet XXX.

[Gaffer]

Isn’t that this how the existence of Pluto was indicated? differences in the orbits of the nearer planets that had to be because of influences of an unknown orbiter?

[Psalm 73]

"The Bible refers to this object as the great Red Dragon."

Sound reasoning that lines up with Scripture.

I used to think the "end" was maybe a generation or two away, but I never could have imagined how fast the prophetic time-table would be upon us.

To paraphrase Joe Biden: This Iran agreement is a big f'in deal - I believe it means much more than many here on Freerepublic may think, unless you are intimately familiar with the Bible.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

When the central body is the sun, the periapsis is the perihelion. The plane of reference is the ecliptic plane, the plane that contains the earth's orbit. The argument of the perihelion is just the angle between the point where an object's orbit crosses from north to south (from below to above the ecliptic) and the point on its orbit nearest the sun, measured through the sun. North in the ecliptic plane is the direction of the earth's orbital angular velocity vector, which conveniently is more or less (within about 23.5 degrees) of the direction of the earth's rotation axis, south to north positive.

[SunkenCiv]

That link doesn’t constitute evidence, either.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks all.

Here’s a scientist’s website, he’s an advocate of the Nemesis model:

http://muller.lbl.gov/homepage.html#nemesis
http://muller.lbl.gov/
http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/nemch1.htm (thanks ForGod’sSake)

John Matese has written about comet focussing (that long-period comets are disproportionately arriving from the same point in the outer solar system):

http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~jjm9638/matese.html