Planet Nine tagged posts

An artist’s concept of a trans-Neptunian object(TNOs). The distant sun is reduced to a bright star at a distance of over 3 billion miles. Credit: NASA

The mysterious Trans-Neptunian Object (TNOs) lie beyond the orbit of Neptune. For years, astronomers have been discovering bodies and minor planets in this region which are influenced by Neptune’s gravity, and orbit our sun at an average distance of 30 Astronomical Units. In recent years, several new TNOs have been discovered that have caused us to rethink what constitutes a planet, not to mention the history of the solar system.

The most recent of these mystery objects is called “Niku”, a small chunk of ice that takes its name for the Chinese word for “rebellious”...

This is an artist’s conception of Planet Nine. Credit: Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)

Earlier this year scientists presented evidence for Planet Nine, a Neptune-mass planet in an elliptical orbit 10 times farther from our Sun than Pluto. Since then theorists have puzzled over how this planet could end up in such a distant orbit. New research by astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) examines a number of scenarios and finds that most of them have low probabilities. Therefore, the presence of Planet Nine remains a bit of a mystery.

“The evidence points to Planet Nine existing, but we can’t explain for certain how it was produced,” says CfA astronomer Gongjie Li...

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)

Evidence has been found of a giant planet tracing an elongated orbit in the outer solar system, nicknamed Planet Nine, has a mass ~10X that of Earth and orbits ~20X farther from the sun on average than 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. Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, discovered the planet’s existence through mathematical modeling and computer simulations but have not yet observed the object directly.

“T...