planetary mass object tagged posts

1. A yet to be discovered, unseen “planetary mass object” makes its existence known by ruffling the orbital plane of distant Kuiper Belt objects, according to research by Kat Volk and Renu Malhotra of the UA’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. The object is pictured on a wide orbit far beyond Pluto in this artist’s illustration. (Image: Heather Roper/LPL)
2. A planetary mass object the size of Mars would be sufficient to produce the observed perturbations in the distant Kuiper Belt.
Credit: Heather Roper/LPL

An unknown, unseen “planetary mass object” may lurk in the outer reaches of our solar system, according to new research on the orbits of minor planets. This object would be different from – and much closer than – the so-called Planet Nine, a planet whose existence yet awaits confirmation...

This is an artist’s conception of SIMP J013656.5+093347, or SIMP0136 for short, which the research team determined is a planetary like member of a 200-million-year-old group of stars called Carina-Near. Credit: Image is courtesy of NASA/JPL, slightly modified by Jonathan Gagné.

Sometimes a brown dwarf is actually a planet – or planet-like anyway. A team led by Carnegie’s Jonathan Gagné, and including researchers from the Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx) at Université de Montréal, the American Museum of Natural History, and University of California San Diego, discovered that what astronomers had previously thought was one of the closest brown dwarfs to our own Sun is in fact a planetary mass object.

Smaller than stars, but bigger than giant planets, brown dwarfs are too small...