Astronomers from the University of New Mexico (USA) have published a hypothesis about the appearance of a ninth planet in the solar system, the search for which has not yet been crowned with success.
Their conclusion is that a theoretically existing object may turn out to be a planet formed "outside", which, however, "caught" in a distant orbit near the Sun. This and other versions of the appearance of a mysterious planet in the solar system, writes RNS.
No one has ever seen the ninth planet. In early 2016, astrophysicists Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin of the California Institute of Technology announced that they had found it by analyzing disturbances found in the outer part of the solar system. The location of cosmic bodies in the so-called Kuiper Belt made it possible to assume the impact of a large planet on them. The mass of the hypothetical planet is 10 times the mass of the Earth.
According to the version put forward by Brown and Batygin, the planet could have formed in the solar system, and then it was pushed into a more distant orbit due to the action of the gravity force of Jupiter or Saturn. They also calculated that moving around the Sun, the ninth planet is maximally removed from it at least a thousand times further than the Earth. And it makes one revolution around the star in a period of 10 to 20 thousand years.
Based on this data, James Vesper and Paul Mason of New Mexico State University have built 156 computer models of the behavior of a large celestial body. In 40% of cases, the planet, as suggested by its discoverers, was fixed far beyond Pluto's orbit and began to orbit the Sun. In 60% of cases, the planet passed through the solar system and continued its movement through space.
It is believed that the so-called "orphan planets" or "wanderers" are formed outside the planetary systems. Also, some of them form in other star systems, but then leave them, for example, if they are pushed out due to the influence of the gravitational force of other planets. From time to time, breaking out into open space, the "orphans" can even take with them a "companion" - small planets, which they pull with their gravity.
Lost planet
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The discovery of "space orphans" was predicted in the early 1990s. They began to find them already in the XXI century. The number of planets wandering in the universe is amazing: it is estimated that their number could reach 400 billion. The difficulty of detecting them is due to the lack of research methods. So, if exoplanets are mainly found by periodic oscillations and darkening of the stars around which they revolve, then with wandering planets everything is somewhat more complicated. So far, scientists can only detect those "wanderers" whose size is not less than the largest in the solar system Jupiter or Saturn.
The report by Vesper and Mason presented at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society has not yet been peer reviewed. However, according to Konstantin Batygin, the version of his colleagues from the University of New Mexico is quite likely. "Without knowing the exact orbit, it is difficult to unambiguously confirm or reject this version, but the possibility that the ninth planet is indeed an object captured by the solar system is definitely there," Batygin explained. Other scientists made a similar statement in the summer of 2016.
Physicists at Lund University in Sweden have calculated that 4.5 billion years ago, the Sun with its planets could have approached another planetary system. As a result, our star probably "stole" one of the planets.
Their calculations were prompted by the unusual location of the hypothetical ninth planet. It seemed incredible that it would form at such a distance from our star and continue to orbit around it.
It should be noted that a number of scientists are skeptical about the very hypothesis of the presence of another planet in the solar system, but Batygin is confident in its reality. "The number of seemingly unrelated mysteries in the life of the solar system, which are solved by the assumption of a ninth planet, is too large to be a mere coincidence," he objects. Immediately after the joint discovery with Brown, Batygin predicted that the work to detect the ninth planet using telescopes would take up to eight years.