By 
January 20th, 2016
This artistic rendering shows the distant view from Planet Nine back towards the sun. The planet is thought to be gaseous, similar to Uranus and Neptune. Hypothetical lightning lights up the night side.
Credit: Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)
Researchers at Caltech have found evidence of a giant planet tracing a bizarre, highly elongated orbit in the outer solar system.
Caltech’s Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown discovered the planet’s existence through mathematical modeling and computer simulations. However, the object has yet to be observed directly.
The new research is reported in the February 2016 issue of The Astronomical Journal.
Should-be-there world
This should-be-there world has been nicknamed Planet Nine by the researchers, and has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbits about 20 times farther from the Sun on average than does Neptune (which orbits the Sun at an average distance of 2.8 billion miles).
In fact, it would take this new planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make just one full orbit around the Sun, according to a Caltech press statement.
Start searching
Brown notes that the putative ninth planet—at 5,000 times the mass of Pluto—is sufficiently large that there should be no debate about whether it is a true planet.
Credit: Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)
Diagram was created using WorldWide Telescope.
“I would love to find it,” says Brown. “But I’d also be perfectly happy if someone else found it. That is why we’re publishing this paper. We hope that other people are going to get inspired and start searching.”
If Brown’s name sounds familiar, he played a significant role in the demotion of Pluto from a planet to a dwarf planet.
“All those people who are mad that Pluto is no longer a planet can be thrilled to know that there is a real planet out there still to be found,” Brown says. “Now we can go and find this planet and make the solar system have nine planets once again.”
The paper in The Astronomical Journal is titled “Evidence for a Distant Giant Planet in the Solar System.”
These findings by Batygin and Brown are available at:
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/0004-6256/151/2/22/pdf
Check out this informative video by the researchers at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8&v=6poHQ2h00ZA
A Planet Nine animation can be viewed at:
Posted in Space News
