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Astronomers are looking back at potential locations where the elusive hypothetical Planet Nine could be hiding, if it exists, and are once again narrowing down where to look.
Looking for planets orbiting other stars is a relatively easy task compared to looking for Planet 9, also known as Planet X. Basically, when a planet passes the star we are observing, we see a drop in its light. In recent years, thousands of exoplanets have been discovered around other stars using this transit method.
From our point of view, only Venus and Mercury pass through the host star, so this method is useless for finding planets (and other objects) in our solar system, and in any case these two could be seen with the naked eye. Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars were also discovered by “looking up and seeing bright objects.”
Uranus was similarly discovered in 1781 by astronomer William Herschel. After observing it closely, he noticed that a bright object was moving compared to other stars in his research. However, Neptune was discovered in 1846 by astronomer and mathematician Urbain Le Verrier, who noticed a difference between the observed orbit of Uranus and the orbit of Uranus predicted by Newtonian physics. Ta. Le Verrier proposed that this difference could be explained by another planet beyond Uranus, and made predictions about the object’s previously unknown orbit. Examining the location, German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle discovered the planet Neptune.
The reason why people are looking for the mysterious ninth planet in the first place is that in 2015, two astronomers from the California Institute of Technology discovered that six celestial bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune were “bound” by something with great force. This is because they have presented evidence that they are congregating in a way that suggests that they are Gravity. Now, the same research team has narrowed down where the object, which they say is two to four times the radius of Earth, might be located. Still, it remains elusive, and it has even been suggested that it may just be a statistical anomaly and selection bias by Caltech astronomers.
In a new preprint paper submitted to the Astronomical Journal, the research team uses data from the Pan-STARRS1 survey to identify possible locations that previous studies had identified as places to look for hypothetical planets. 78% were excluded. While this may sound disappointing and the discovery of a new planet would be good news for all but the most ardent Pluto fans, it does mean we have narrowed down where to look if a planet is found. Masu.
Regions of particular interest include near the galactic plane, some of which will be covered by future Vera Rubin Observatory surveys. Despite this, the research team investigated why this planet has not yet been discovered.
“Of course, there is a distinct possibility that Planet Nine does not exist,” the researchers wrote in their paper. “Such an explanation would require new explanations for the phenomena observed in the outer solar system. Until such explanations are available, we believe that Planet Nine is the most likely I continue to think that this is a highly plausible hypothesis.”
Another option is that Planet Nine is further away and more massive than previously thought, making it more difficult to discover. For now, the researchers believe such planets best explain the orbits of objects observed in the outer solar system.
“Although the set of orbital directions is best known, the large perihelion distances of many objects, the presence of highly inclined or even retrograde objects, and the highly eccentric orbits that traverse the interior of the orbit “They can be present in large quantities. Neptune,” lead author Dr. Michael Brown told Universe Today. “None of these should occur in our solar system, but they can all be easily explained as effects from Planet Nine.”
The study is available on the preprint server arXiv.
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