# Tag Info

29

It's too dim to be seen during a normal survey during the majority of its orbit. The paper gives potential orbital parameters of $400-1500~\textrm{AU}$ for the semi major axis, and $200-300~\textrm{AU}$ for perihelion. Since the paper doesn't give a most-likely case for orbital parameters, I'm going to go with the extreme case that makes it most difficult ...

25

Brown and Batygin, the authors of the paper on the possible planet, have a webpage addressing this. A few reasons not already covered: It moves quite slowly - the authors estimate 0.2-0.6 arc seconds per hour - so standard surveys may not notice the movement and fail to recognize it as a solar system object. Eris, which is the most distant confirmed ...

18

This graph from XKCD says a lot about why that is the case The bottom line is, the 9th planet is too small to be detected through WISE, and too far/small to have been detected through visible observation. Most likely this hypothetical planet is a long ways away, possibly as far as 1200 AU, and not particularly large, making it difficult to see. WISE was ...

16

There are many normal methods that we use to detect exoplanets, but none of them work well in the case of the 9th planet. Here are some of the main ones. Radial velocity. The Sun is not moving significantly with respect to Earth, and the hypothetical planet is too far away from the Sun to have much of an impact. Transit. This is obviously impossible, as ...

15

From an exoplanet-finding point of view, the Sun has between one and three planets. The major exoplanet-finding techniques in current use involve watching for either periodic Doppler shifts as the planet's gravitational pull causes the star to wobble, or periodic brightness shifts as the planet transits the star. Both require that the planet is large ...

12

What else could it be? Very simply, it could all be a coincidence... What they have done is noted that objects in the outer solar system have their orbits grouped in interesting ways. Someone suggested this might indicate there was a heavy planet (or core of a giant protoplanet) that influenced their orbits in this way; the recent announcement is the ...

8

The possible planet 9 is thought to be about 10 Earth masses and is unlikely to be a gas giant (it may be the core of an "interrupted" gas giant). As such, it will not be generating significant luminosity itself and would be rocky, or more likely, icy in character. It would thus only be seen by reflected light. The considerations for what wavelength to ...

8

Those are model calculations, which hint to the existence of a possible body of about 10-times the mass of Earth. Calling this a discovery would clearly be premature. The confidence level is just a little above the "evidence" level of 3 sigma, under the assumption, that the discoveries of the KBO objects leading to the inference aren't observationally ...

8

The parallax is found from a triangle with the Earth's orbit at its base. The annual parallax here would then be between 1/200 and 1/1000 radians ($\sim$ 1000 to 200 arcseconds) which is indeed enormous and much bigger than the likely proper motion during a year.

7

The position of the hypothetical object is not known with any certainty, so it's hard to know where to point your telescope. The paper proposes a wide range of orbital distances anywhere from 400 to 1500 AU semi-major axis, with a perihelion (closest approach to the sun) of 200-300AU. This is 8 times as far as Neptune. (I didn't read the article closely ...

7

According to Caltech there is possibly a planet 10 times the mass of earth in a 15-20 thousand year orbit at an odd angle. It hasn't been observed yet. There's a search for it ongoing.

7

Possible reasons that the planet has not been picked up previously: It's not there. Photographic proper motion surveys cover the whoke sky. To avoid these planet 9 would have to be fainter than about 18th or 19th magnitude. This puts a lower bound in the size/albedo/distance combination for any planet 9. The proposed planet could easily be fainter than ...

7

Thommes et al. (2001) ran simulations and found that, at optimal conditions (namely, a planet of ~ 10 Earth masses), migration can be complete with ~ 100,000 years. Note that this was done before in-depth research was done on the Nice model, which is very similar. However, the mechanisms are different, as are the planet masses. The difference in timescales ...

7

Ceres is 2.76 AU away from the sun, so the sunlight is seven times weaker. That is comparable to the levels of illumination 30 minutes before sunset on Earth, so you are not going to have any problem seeing the surface. The albedo of Ceres is quite low, comparable to worn asphalt. But it is still easy to see it.

6

There are two basic ways to detect such an object. First is to detect it through reflected sunlight. Second is from the heat that it produces. We already know that the reflected light of such an object likely would be around a 16.5 magnitude. To determine the infrared, we have to estimate the temperature The temperature very much depends on the composition. ...

6

The amount of light reflected from Jupiter and Saturn depends on their distance to the Sun, and that distance doesn't change if you move to Mars. The relevant distances (that I got from NASA's Planetary Fact Sheet) are: Earth semi-major axis $d_\mathrm{E} = 1.00\,\mathrm{AU}$ Mars aphelion$^\dagger$ $d_\mathrm{M} = 1.64\,\mathrm{AU}$ Jupiter semi-major ...

6

Inner. The entire asteroid belt is in the Inner Solar System (now). The definition of "Inner" vs. "Outer" is non-arbitrary, based on the current "frost line", approx. 5 a.u. radius. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frost_line_%28astrophysics%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System#Inner_Solar_System

5

The recent possible discovery of Planet Nine by Batygin & Brown (2016) has caused quite a stir, in the astronomy community, Astronomy Stack Exchange, and the rest of the world. This is, of course, in part because any mention of such a discovery will cause a stir, but it is also in part because of the claimed probability if the movements of the ...

5

Citing the original article: We find that the observed orbital alignment can be maintained by a distant eccentric planet with mass $\geq \approx 10$ m⊕ whose orbit lies in approximately the same plane as those of the distant KBOs, but whose perihelion is 180° away from the perihelia of the minor bodies. and As already alluded to above, the precise ...

5

The clipping above from the Albuquerque Journal doesn't really answer your question, but astronomers have been hunting for a largeish planet beyond Pluto for quite some time now. See also: http://www.zetatalk.com/theword/tword26b.htm http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/hercolobus/esp_hercolobus_2_02.htm (under "United States Naval Observatory ...

5

Given that Kepler has detected stars with 5 or 6 planets that exist in an extremely flattened plane and much flatter than the solar system, then we can be reasonably sure that stars with more than 4 planets are reasonably common. Given the many mechanisms for scrambling the orbital inclinations out of a perfectly flat configuration, and that seeing multiple ...

5

We can't detect whether there are or are not objects of similar "small" sizes orbiting other stars. We simply lack that level of ability. From a scientific point of view I'd simply say "don't know". From a practical point of view I would expect other stars to have systems with a huge variety of things in orbit - there's no reason not to expect this, but ...

4

Direct reflection of sunlight is the most likely scenario for a ninth planet discovery, however that does not hold if the object has a very low albedo. I assume you are interested in what wavelengths the planet would radiate. For the surface temperature, the rotation of the planet is important. If it is locked with one side facing the sun, or rotates very ...

4

There may be Sednoids there. Sednoids are a hypothetical class of "inner Oort Cloud objects" named after their prototype, Sedna. Sedna's aphelion is ~936 AU, bringing it close to the inner boundary of the Oort Cloud. Sednoids may have aphelions ranging from about 100 AU to 1,000 AU. The problem is, only two Sednoids have beet detected to date, 90377 Sedna ...

3

Maybe the Gaia space telescope has already caught it? First data release in mid-2016.

3

What is the future of our universe? Like StephenG said, nobody knows for sure. But we do have confidence that the universe is expanding, and we also have confidence that the expansion is speeding up. So extrapolating from that, the future looks cold and lonely and bleak. A bit like life for the older generation! Is the universe heading towards a ...

3

The primary source of comets for our solar system comes from the Oort Cloud, a smaller amount coming from the Kuiper belt. The Oort cloud is thought to have originated from the remnants of a proto-planetary disk. This paragraph explains this better: The Oort cloud is thought to be a remnant of the original protoplanetary disc that formed around the Sun ...

3

Page 12 of Batygin & Brown (2016) says that a speculative formation scenario can be drawn from recent solar system formation simulations by Bromley & Kenyon and by Izidoro et al. These suggest that the core of a nascent ice giant may have been ejected very early in the solar system's history in order to explain the properties of the observed planets; ...

3

One thing that is, if not unique, unusual about the Sun is the size of it. It belongs to the top 5% brightest stars, meaning that 19 out of 20 stars are smaller than the Sun. Having a Jupiter size planet is certainly not unique, and plate tectonics we know nothing about for exoplanets.

3

Other than being kind of in the "Goldilocks" range, meaning, not too big, not too small, (not to be confused with Goldilocks-zone, that's something else), there's nothing special about our sun. There might be something a little unusual about Jupiter's movement over the last 4 billion years and perhaps, something unusual in the just right formation of our ...

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