Posted on 06/20/2022 8:18:06 AM PDT by BenLurkin
“If Planet Nine is real, it would be on such an odd orbit and so far out in the outer Solar System, that it would really challenge our ideas of planet formation and dynamics,” Ann-Marie Madigan, assistant professor of astrophysics...
Madigan isn’t searching for just one planet — she’s looking for an entire belt of celestial objects. Like Planet Nine, this proposed Zderic-Madigan, or ZM, belt would be really out there, far beyond the Kuiper belt, with some of its closest bodies being more than twice as far from the Sun as Pluto at perihelion.
Unlike the Kuiper belt, this ZM belt tilts off the orbital plane, exhibits orbital clustering, and contains upwards of 10 Earth masses of material — similar to the prediction of Planet Nine’s mass. That’s a lot of unknown debris floating out there, considering the Kuiper belt contains less mass than even one Earth.
Running simulations focused on the gravitational interaction between the bodies in this hypothetical belt, Madigan and her team discovered that their theory explained why some bodies all uniformly orbit around the Sun in such a strange way. Madigan believes that some already-discovered dwarf planets, like Sedna and 2012 VP113...are members of this ZM belt. Sedna, for example, has a perihelion of 76 AU and could represent the inner edge of this hypothetical belt.
The ZM belt isn’t the only alternative to the Planet Nine mystery. Harvard astronomers think this unexplained gravitational effect could be coming from a primordial black hole about the size of a grapefruit. In contrast, others think all of this is just a problem of a poor sample size and selection bias, suggesting there’s no need for a Planet Nine or any theory whatsoever.
(Excerpt) Read more at inverse.com ...
Europe, and their Euro-centric comrades in the US academia groups, could not tolerate Pluto. It had been discovered by American research!
Yes, it is different from others. But their “definition “ was invented and edited to deliberately exclude Pluto, NOT to define “planets”.
Rather, they should have just recognized trans-Pluto outer planets as a group. Just like “asteroids” and “moons” are a group.
Las is right. We are so screwed.
I remember when Pluto was closer to the sun than Neptune was. Made a good bar bet.
We can thank that bigot Neil Tyson for screwing that up.
He wanted his discoveries to be considered planets, there wasn’t a groundswell of support for that, so, if he can’t get credit of a planetary discovery...
He’s not a little nerd, though, he’s an accomplished astronomer, who now takes observational data security much more seriously.
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/13/science/space/one-find-two-astronomers-an-ethical-brawl.html
I sure hope so
Calling it ‘planet 9’ is stupid. Pluto is ‘planet 9’
Poor Pluto...
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