Thanks presidio9.
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Posted on 01/20/2016 12:01:57 PM PST by presidio9
There might be a ninth planet in the solar system after all - and it is not Pluto.
Two astronomers reported on Wednesday that they had compelling signs of something bigger and farther away — something that would definitely satisfy the current definition of a planet, where Pluto falls short.
"We are pretty sure there's one out there," said Michael E. Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology.
What Dr. Brown and a fellow Caltech professor, Konstantin Batygin, have not done is actually find that planet, so it would be premature to revise mnemonics of the planets just yet.
Rather, in a paper published Wednesday in The Astronomical Journal, Dr. Brown and Dr. Batygin lay out a detailed circumstantial argument for the planet’s existence in what astronomers have observed - a half-dozen small bodies in distant, highly elliptical orbits.
What is striking, the scientists said, is that the orbits of all six loop outward in the same quadrant of the solar system and are tilted at about the same angle. The odds of that happening by chance are about 1 in 14,000, Dr. Batygin said.
A ninth planet could be gravitationally herding them into these orbits.
For the calculations to work, the planet would be quite large — at least as big as Earth, and likely much bigger - a mini-Neptune with a thick atmosphere around a rocky core, with perhaps 10 times the mass of Earth.
It would dwarf Pluto, at about 4,500 times its mass.
Pluto, at its most distant, is 4.6 billion miles from the sun. The potential ninth planet, at its closest, would be about 20 billion miles away; at its farthest, it could be 100 billion miles away. It would take
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Ah yes modern man throws up a few instruments and says see that all there is.
Hubris.
“My point was that if life arose once on this planet it should of arose more than once on this planet”
Point of fact it did. There was a period where the Earth’s atmosphere was methane. Prior to that there was life, and after the methane period ended there was life again. Don’t ask me to detail this for you, please.
In fact, I do not believe that the observable universe is "all there is." I'm just taking your statistical argument, correcting it, and throwing it back at you to say that there are not nearly as many throws of the dice available as most people seem to think. Not by a long shot.
Point of fact it did. There was a period where the Earth’s atmosphere was methane. Prior to that there was life, and after the methane period ended there was life again. Don’t ask me to detail this for you, please.
You are almost right about this. There was more methane in atmosphere when the first life arose, but it was still mostly CO2 and Hydrogen. This first life added to the atmospheric methane by through their own biological processes.
But, again, that's not my point. All of life that we are aware of on this planet is based on the DNA molecule and there fore ultimately arose from a single source.
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One trip around the sun would take 10,000 to 20,000 years.
Wow... That’s one heck of a long year!
http://web.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/
http://www.mikebrownsplanets.com/
https://twitter.com/plutokiller?lang=en
That would be a long football season.
Man, I loved that show as a kid.
Has any when there Uranus?
I think 50 posts just might be a record for a thread like this.
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