New evidence found for Planet 9
New evidence found for Planet 9
A small team of planetary scientists from the California Institute of Technology, Université Côte d'Azur and Southwest Research Institute reports possible new evidence of Planet 9. They have published their paper on the arXiv preprint server, and it has been accepted for publication in ...
This same group has been pushing this theory for a decade with no direct evidence. Each paper is just confirmation bias in action.
Some amateur types have been pushing this for decades with zero evidence, but as the article says, a legit pair from Caltech finally found some circumstancial evidence it could be possible, and this expanded group is just throwing more on the pile. I think it's just one of those "Well...let's say it's possible, here's what we'd be looking at for evidence..." kind of deals.
Back in my day it was called Planet X, god dammit!
A new planet in a distant orbit, you say?
In before the signal is older than the universe itself.Invite me to the jam, I swear I can whistle well
Just call it Rupert already!
George
I find it amusing that we can prove the existence of black holes thousands of light years away and glean the state of the universe at its earliest moments, but we can't decide whether there's a rock big enough to count as a planet floating around the inside rim of the Oort Cloud.
It might be a miscalculation of orbital body models, which has happened before. Urbain Le Verrier was able to predict Neptune's existence. Then he tried to predict a planet between Mercury and the Sun, because the current Newtonian physics wasn't lining up to observations, a similar situation to how Neptune was found. Then Einstein's work on gravity modeled the orbital bodies more accurately, ending the debate if there was another planet closer to the sun than Mercury. Just a different food-for-thought point of view, as I don't know what the answer is obviously.
Science and history are fun because we keep adding new information and proving / disproving theories.
The team acknowledges that other forces could be at play that might explain the behavior that they simulated but suggest they are less likely.
Space Whales
These comments.
By all rights it should be planet 10. Pluto got shafted.
If Pluto (and others like it) were a planet, then it would be Planet 238 or something.
Unfortunately, Pluto was a victim of how hard it is/was for us to detect planets and other objects at that distance. It was the first one we saw for a while, but once we got a clearer picture, there was no way we could keep calling it a planet.
Nah, it's easy.
Pluto is a planet.
See? Not that hard.
Edit: My bad, I thought I was in [email protected]
Is Luna, our moon, a planet?