Reviewing back...
-Pat Brennan
A Planet Nine has possibility to
get closer into our solar system even it hovers at the edge of our solar
system. However subtly pulling strings behind the scenes: stretching out the
orbits of distant bodies, perhaps even tilting the entire solar system to one
side. It is a possible "Planet Nine" can brings "days of
darkness" because it is perhaps 10 times the mass of Earth and 20 times
farther from the sun than Neptune. Surveys of planets around other stars in our
galaxy have found the most common types to be "super Earths" and
their somewhat larger cousins, bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.
Caltech professor Mike Brown and assistant professor Konstanin Batygin have
been working together to investigate Planet Nine. Batygin and his co-author,
Caltech astronomer Mike Brown, described the first three breadcrumbs on Planet
Nine’s trail in a January 2016
paper, published in the Astronomical Journal.
Brown realized that five such
objects already known to astronomers fill the bill. Eventually, a second
article from the team, this time led by Batygin’s graduate student, Elizabeth
Bailey, showed that Planet Nine could have tilted the planets of our solar
system during the last 4.5 billion years.
To find Planet Nine itself
Batygin and Brown should do the remaining step where they use the Subaru
Telescope at Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii to try to do just that. Though
they did it, they still have a big question which is "where did Planet
Nine come from?" In order to find it, Batygin says he spends little time
ruminating on its origin, whether it is a fugitive from our own solar system
or, just maybe, a wandering rogue planet captured by the sun’s gravity.
Other scientists offer a
different possible explanation for the Planet Nine that a recent analysis based
on a sky mapping project called the Outer Solar System Origins Survey suggests
that the evidence also could be consistent with a random distribution of such
objects. In fact, the analysis from a team led by Cory Shankman of the
University of Victoria still could not rule out Planet Nine.
If Planet Nine is found, it will
be a homecoming of sorts, or at least a family reunion. Yet these common,
garden-variety planets are conspicuously absent from our solar system. The
proposed Planet Nine would make a good fit, and Planet Nine could turn out to
be our missing super Earth.
by Dini Dwintika Karuniati
16611042
Science Article
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