Planet 9?! Even more evidence (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, April 05, 2016, 20:06 (3153 days ago) @ David Turell

Now the Saturn orbiter Cassini is picking a pull:-http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mysterious-gravitational-tug-on-orbiter-may-help-find-planet-nine/?WT.mc_id=SA_DD_20160405-"Just this month, evidence from the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn helped close in on the missing planet. Many experts suspect that within as little as a year someone will spot the unseen world, which would be a monumental discovery that changes the way we view our solar system and our place in the cosmos. “Evidence is mounting that something unusual is out there—there's a story that's hard to explain with just the standard picture,” says David Gerdes, a cosmologist.-***- "So Fienga and her colleagues compared the updated model, which placed Planet Nine at various points in its hypothetical orbit, with the data. They found a sweet spot—with Planet Nine 600 astronomical units (about 90 billion kilometers) away toward the constellation Cetus—that can explain Cassini's orbit quite well. Although Fienga is not yet convinced that she has found the culprit for the probe's odd movements, most outside experts are blown away. “It's a brilliant analysis,” says Greg Laughlin, an astronomer at Lick Observatory, who was not involved in the study. “It's completely amazing that they were able to do that so quickly.” Gerdes agrees: “That's a beautiful paper.”-"The good news does not end there. If Planet Nine is located toward the constellation Cetus, then it could be picked up by the Dark Energy Survey, a Southern Hemisphere observation project designed to probe the acceleration of the universe. “It turns out fortuitously that the favored region from Cassini is smack dab in the middle of our survey footprint,” says Gerdes, who is working on the cosmology survey. “We could not have designed our survey any better.” Although the survey was not planned to search for solar system objects, Gerdes has discovered some (including one of the icy objects that led Batygin and Brown to conclude Planet Nine exists in the first place).-***-“'I really want to see what it looks like,” says Batygin, who adds that his aspiration drives him to search for the unseen world. But Laughlin takes it a step further: “I think [the discovery] would provide amazing inspiration for the next stage of planetary exploration,” he says. We now have another opportunity to see one of the worlds of our own solar system for the first time. “If Planet Nine isn't out there, we won't have that experience again.'”-Comment: Wow! Exciting.