# Tag Info

51

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 ...

36

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 ...

30

It's too dim to be seen during a normal survey during the majority of its orbit. Update: Scientists at the University of Bern have modeled a hypothetical 10 Earth mass planet in the proposed orbit to estimate its detectability with more precision than my attempt below. The takeaway is that NASAs WISE mission would have probably spotted a planet of at ...

26

Between $1/40,000$ and $1/8,000,000$ of the brightness as seen from Earth, depending on what the actual orbit would turn out to be, and where the planet is in its $15,000$ year orbit period. Brightness drops as $\dfrac{1}{r^2}$ with distance from the light source. Earth is at $1~\textrm{AU}.$ The theoretical planet is at $200~\textrm{AU}$ when it's closest ...

23

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 the ...

17

The ninth planet can absolutely be a "virtual", in the way you describe it, meaning observed data indicating the gravitational influence by an object is not actually caused by such an object. A simple visualisation of this is the case of a two-body system, where we observe two objects orbiting a common barycentre. From the observed data, one can get the ...

16

Short answer Short answer is no, it can't prove or disprove the existence of Planet 9. The reason is because, even if there is a significant difference between the barycenter of the solar system with and without Planet 9 we wouldn't be able to tell without hundreds if not thousands of years of precise data. If we don't have Planet 9 as a reference and are ...

14

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 ...

13

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 20th ...

13

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 biased....

13

No, they can't. Gravity waves from a small, simple object moving slowly are very, very faint, to the point of being undetectable with current (or foreseeable) technology. The waves that have been detected come from the merger (a very fast movement in the last orbits) of two black holes (two very big masses). And they were just detected over the noise level....

11

If such a planet exists, WISE should observe it. WISE is an infrared satellite that imaged the entire sky. In particular: it was able to detect anything with a temperature above 70-100 K, whereas the coolest known exoplanets are in the 100 K range (see histogram below, taken from the Exoplanets Catalogue); it was able to detect objects larger than 1km up to ...

11

It's hard to say much about this planet, given that most of its properties are unknown. It hasn't been directly observed; instead, its effects on Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) have been simulated and match observations. That said, its mass can be estimated, which is why it is conjectured to be the core of a giant planet. One of the papers that Batygin &...

11

If it exists, then the orbit has a perihelion of maybe 300 au and an aphelion of perhaps 2700 au. You can then just scale from the brightness $m=-26.7$ of the Sun at the Earth. It would be between 12.4 and 17.1 magnitudes fainter. So still much brighter than the next brightest star in the sky.

10

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.

10

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 Trans-...

8

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 ...

8

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.

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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

This is certainly a problem for any hypothesis that form planet 9 by ejecting it from the inner solar system. The issue (for those wondering) is that if you simply scatter an object out of the inner solar system, but it is retained in a bound elliptical orbit, then it should come back! The proposed planet 9 needs to have a perhelion distance beyond 200 au ...

8

If they knew exactly where to point Mr. Hubble, then yes, it should be easily visible, though at that distance, it would still be blurry, not a clean image. The estimated apparent magnitude of Planet Nine varies based on which website you believe, Google provides ranges from 20 to 25 with Wikipedia saying >22. Higher numbers mean less visible. Hubble can ...

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It was the first thing I thought too, but I would say it won't count in the statistics. The earlier paper by Batygin & Brown was talking about bodies orbiting further out. 2015 RR245 orbits between 33.7 and 129 AU. The "cluster" of bodies considered in the paper have aphelion distances from 150 AU upwards. So I think it would be a mistake to try and ...

7

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 ...

7

It is a planet - either a gas giant core, a mini-Neptune, or a super-Earth. First off, Mike Brown has stated outright “It is a planet—there’s virtually no doubt,” he said. “What we now call planets are objects that can gravitationally dominate their neighborhood. Pluto is a slave to the gravitational influence of Neptune. By area, Planet Nine dominates ...

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

Adding to the other excellent answers here, if there were an unobserved "Planet 9" the possibility of it being a difficult to observe primordial black hole has been raised. According to Phys.org's Scientists propose plan to determine if Planet Nine is a primordial black hole if Planet 9 were a primordial black hole it could be detected by the Vera ...

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Estimates of Planet 9's orbit currently suggest that it doesn't have any major effect on the Kuiper Belt, because its orbit is too far away and on a different plane than the Kuiper belt, and from the inner Oort cloud, at 200 and 1200 aphelion and perihelion, However it does have an effect on Trans-Neptunian objects that transit through the Kuiper belt. It ...

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There are two primary reasons Planet Nine (if it exists) is extremely hard to detect: it's very dim and its position is not well constrained. Brightness - We are able to see planets in our solar system because they reflect light from the sun. The amount of light they reflect depends on how large the object is, how reflective it is, and (most importantly) ...

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That was a rather recent (16 January 2021) change to that wiki page made by a user named Mariofeds, who does not have a wikipedia user page and who has just one contribution to wikipedia. It may well have been vandalism. The associated talk page explicitly excludes adding the hypothetical Planet Nine as an unconfirmed planet. In line with this discussion, ...

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