Planet 9?! Even much more evidence (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, May 18, 2018, 22:27 (2380 days ago) @ David Turell

Another orbiting body has been found that fits the planet nine theory:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-worlds-extraordinary-orbit-points-to-planet-nine-2...

"Now, astronomers are reporting that they have spotted another distant world — perhaps as large as a dwarf planet — whose orbit is so odd that it is likely to have been shepherded by Planet Nine. The object confirms a specific prediction made by Konstantin Batygin and Michael Brown, the astronomers at the California Institute of Technology who first argued for Planet Nine’s existence. “It’s not proof that Planet Nine exists,” said David Gerdes, an astronomer at the University of Michigan and a co-author on the new paper. “But I would say the presence of an object like this in our solar system bolsters the case for Planet Nine.”

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"The Dark Energy Survey first detected evidence for the new object in late 2014. Gerdes and his colleagues have spent the years since then tracking its orbit and trying to understand its origins. In the new paper, they describe how they ran many simulations of the object within the known solar system, letting the clock run forward and backward 4.5 billion years at a time. Nothing could explain how the object landed in such a tilted orbit. It wasn’t until they added in a ninth planet — a planet with characteristics that perfectly match Batygin and Brown’s predictions — that the wacky orbit finally made sense. “The second you put Planet Nine in the simulations, not only can you form objects like this object, but you absolutely do,” said Juliette Becker, a graduate student at Michigan and the lead author on the new paper. A strong and sustained interaction with Planet Nine appears to be the only way to pump up the object’s inclination, pushing it away from the plane of the solar system. “There is no other reasonable way to populate the Kuiper belt with such highly inclined bodies,” Batygin said. “I think the case for the existence of Planet Nine is now genuinely excellent.”

"Other astronomers aren’t so certain — in part because the early solar system remains a mystery. Scientists suspect that the sun was born within a cluster of stars, meaning that the early planets might have had many close encounters with other stars that sent them on paths that seem impossible today. And even once the stars dispersed, the early solar system likely contained tens of thousands of dwarf planets that could have provided the gravitational nudges needed to push 2015 BP519, as the new object is called, into such an odd orbit. “To me, Planet Nine is one of a number of ways that the solar system could have unfolded,” said Michele Bannister, an astronomer at Queen’s University Belfast who was not involved in the study. “It’s a potential idea.” But at the moment it is just that — an idea.

"Yet when astronomers examine the larger universe, the idea doesn’t seem all that surprising. Planets between two and 10 times the mass of Earth are incredibly common throughout the galaxy, which makes it odd that our solar system doesn’t harbor one. “If it wasn’t in our own solar system — if the stakes weren’t so high — I think that the hypothesis would almost certainly be correct,” Laughlin said. “It’s only the fact that it’s so amazing that tends to give me pause.'”

Comment: This increases the possibility for planet nine. Good theories are predictive of confirmatory results.