Recently, two Caltech scientists blew up the world by posting a paper in the Astrophysical Journal claiming evidence of a giant planet at the edge of our solar system, orbiting in a strange, elongated orbit 150 billion kilometers from the Sun. The new world, tentatively dubbed "Planet Nine", should be 15 times farther from the Sun than Pluto and 5,000 times more massive than the dwarf planet that was demoted and stripped of its planetary title in 2006.
"This should be the ninth planet," - explained in a press release professor of planetary astronomy Mike Brown, who found evidence of its existence with his colleague Konstantin Batygin. Unlike Pluto, Planet Nine must be so massive that its gravity literally reigns in this region of the solar system. In fact, it should be larger than other known planets - Brown considers it "the most planetary of the planets in the solar system."
But those who are not involved in space science do not understand a little. If Planet Nine is so huge, why are we still looking for it? Why hasn't anyone seen her? Themselves Brown and Batygin came to the conclusion about its existence using mathematical modeling and computer simulations, but not direct observation.
But when we think about such things, we are only convinced of how little we know about the enormous scale of our solar system and the possibilities of exploring this vast space. In fact, it might be considered a miracle if anyone ever discovers Planet Nine. To do this, you need not only to apply ingenuity, but also to go through a long string of failures and "previous discoveries", to bring together all the clues about the probable existence of a giant world.
What's particularly interesting about Brown and Batygin's discovery is that Planet Nine may be the first true planet (sorry Pluto) discovered since 1846. Then the German astronomer Johann Gottfried Halle officially observed Neptune for the first time. He knew where to look because two other scientists, John Cooch Adams and Urbain Le Verrier, noticed that the planet Uranus was moving slightly out of its normal orbit, and calculated that this effect must be caused by another unknown planet.
Astronomers often resort to these tricks in an attempt to make a discovery, since it is very, very difficult to observe objects the size of a planet at such a huge distance. When they discover exoplanets, for example, they usually do so by studying the behavior of a star as the planet passes in front of it.
Although Planet Nine should be closer than these worlds, it is still hundreds of times farther from the Sun than our planet. It is so far away that the sunlight that reaches it is 300,000 times weaker than the light that reaches us. An object that is so far away and reflects so little light will be extremely difficult to detect with a telescope, even if you know roughly where to look.
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The planet is distant and very "weak"
As Brown explained, astronomers have been looking for another planet at the edge of the solar system for 160 years. They spent this time studying the positions of known planets in search of clues, but it turned out that everything was in vain. A 1993 analysis showed that all the planets are exactly where they should be.
But astronomers' discovery of the Kuiper Belt in the early 90s, a region filled with thousands of small objects, provided new clues. In a March 2014 Nature article, astronomers Chad Trujillo and Scott Sheppard noted that several of the Kuiper Belt's most distant objects have unusual orbits, and suggested that the effect was caused by the gravity of a small planet. Then the idea was disproved using computer simulations, says Brown, but in September, Brazilian and Japanese astronomers found another set of Kuiper belt objects, possibly influenced by the gravity of an undiscovered planet.
When Brown and Batygin familiarized themselves with the findings of other scientists, they saw a new opportunity. According to a Caltech press release, they realized that the six most distant objects in Trujillo and Sheppard's exploration were following elliptical orbits pointing in the same direction of space, which is difficult to explain since the objects orbit at different speeds. Scientists have performed a series of computer simulations to test a number of possible explanations. “Computers are more powerful than they've ever been, so we can do simulations quickly,” says Brown.
In the end, scientists noticed that when simulating a hypothetical massive planet, when the planet's perihelion path is 180 degrees from all other objects and known planets in the solar system, six strangely behaving objects are aligned exactly as the observations showed.
Although Brown and Batygin have determined the rough orbit of Planet Nine, they do not know the exact location of the planet. So it will take a while before someone looks at it through a telescope. Brown says he would like to be the first to "discover" it and also hopes other astronomers would be happy to join the search. Would rather.