Scientists are looking for new clues that will help them in their search for a possible ninth planet (It is also planet X, the existence of which was categorically denied by scientists, and when it became impossible to hide its existence, they acted simply - they deprived the title of the planet Pluto and the new planet is no longer associated with the very same one " Planet X ") on the outskirts of our solar system, in the Kuiper belt - a field of ice debris beyond Neptune. New calculations suggest that the alleged planet may be brighter than thought, and therefore it will be a little easier to find.
So far, there is very little evidence for a ninth planet, but mostly the apparent ordering of the orbits of the six farthest inhabitants of the Kuiper belt. Their oval orbits are all directed approximately in the same direction and lie approximately in the same plane, suggesting that they were driven into this trajectory by a planet hiding in the dark, five to twenty times more massive than Earth.
Planetary scientists Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin of Caltech announced the discovery of this evidence in January. Now they are relying on them to clarify the properties of the ninth planet and narrow the range of its possible location. The latest results of the scientists' work appeared on June 20 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Planet Nine's average distance from the Sun is likely 500 to 600 times the distance from Earth to the Sun, Brown and Batygin report. Its orbit is highly elongated and tilted 30 degrees relative to the rest of the solar system, which leaves the planet far above and below the orbits of eight known worlds. Right now, it appears to be at its farthest point from the Sun - 250 billion kilometers - in a large patch of sky near the constellation Orion.
But all this scientists have extracted on the basis of the strange orbits of six frozen worlds. "The assumption that there is a planet is not iron," warns Renu Malhotra, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. - I think it's worth continuing to study. There is ample reason not to ignore this evidence. There is no need to get depressed if the planet is not there."
Malhotra and her colleagues sought independent evidence for the existence of a ninth planet. And they think they have found another clue: the orbital periods of those six bodies are roughly synchronized with each other, scientists reported in the same journal. For example, the farthest, dwarf planet Sedna, orbits the Sun five times, while its neighbor 2010 GB174 completes eight orbits. Such synchronized orbits usually indicate a gravitational link between all the bodies involved. But these tiny worlds are too small to influence each other, says Malhotra, which means there must be a more massive accomplice.
A planet 10 times more massive than Earth and orbiting the Sun about once every 17,117 years would be in sync with four of these bodies, Malhotra and her colleagues found out. Consequently, the "ninth planet" is about 100 billion kilometers from the Sun, or 665 times farther than the Earth from our star.
The synchronized orbits are "very intriguing and very interesting," says planetary scientist Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institute of Science in Washington. "But more of these objects are needed to tell if it's statistically significant or not." Sheppard and Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Hilo in Hawaii also suggested in 2014 that the orbits of a dozen worlds (including the aforementioned six) in the Kuiper belt could be explained by a ninth planet.
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“We want to find more of these small bodies that could lead us to a bigger body,” Sheppard says. He and Trujillo hunt distant Kuiper Belt objects with telescopes in Chile and Hawaii. And not without success: we added a few blocks of ice to the lists. The orbits of the new open bodies are also aligned relative to each other and relative to the previous ten. But to confirm this, more observations and analysis are needed. Sheppard and Trujillo have already reserved their telescopes for several this fall when the constellation Orion will be visible. “Let's look for more distant objects,” he says. "Maybe a bigger planet."
If the new objects help astronomers determine the position of planet nine, they may be able to see it directly as well. Its cold atmosphere (below -220 Celsius) can only contain hydrogen and helium, which reflect light well. This was reported by Jonathan Fortney, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in a June 20 article in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“We expect the planet, if it's there, to be some kind of mirror,” says Fortney. "We think it should be bright with a whitish tint." Its atmosphere should reflect 75% of the sunlight that reaches it. Depending on its size, planet nine may be bright enough to be captured by the Dark Energy Survey, a project to survey galaxies and supernovae in the southern sky.
“The problem is, we don't know where to look,” says Fortney.
Brown and Batygin believe they have narrowed the search to 2,000 square degrees in the sky near Orion. “This is not as much as one might think,” says Batygin. Hawaii's Subaru telescope, large enough to detect planet nine, could cover this chunk in just 20 nights. “This is a big request. But the reward can be the expansion of our planetary family.”
