Is the solar system has a large, dark ninth planet somewhere beyond the orbit of Neptune?
Since 2016, many astronomers have said it is possible and point it to evidence for a large gravity source in the deep solar space. But a new article claims that this source of gravity is nothing more than a statistical mirror, the result of where in the night sky astronomers point their telescopes. The first physical (CK) tip of this hypothetical Planet Nine was a group of space rocks with similar orbits that were apparently grouped extraordinarily close together. These dull, distant, hard-to-perceive objects orbit Neptune and are known as “trans-Neptune objects” (TNOs).
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As these icy worlds in the solar system reflect far beyond the sun’s rays, they tend to unite in the brighter background of stars and galaxies that attract most astronomers’ attention, and only a handful have ever been identified and categorized. (The best known of these is the degraded dwarf planet Pluto, which orbits relatively close to the sun compared to many of its TNO cousins.)
But in 2016, astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology noted that six TNOs, including the dwarf planet Sedna, all had long elliptical and ‘eccentric’ orbits pointing in the same direction. Eccentric here means that their afelions, or the farthest points, are much farther from the sun than their perihelions, or the nearest points of the sun. And all six have aphelions on about the same side of the solar system. In a 2016 article published in The Astronomical Journal Batygin and Brown wrote that a planet with a mass of about ten times that of Earth, far beyond Pluto, and following a long elliptical path around the sun, the apparent grouping can be explained. Over time, they argued that the great gravity would pull these six TNOs into their grouped orbits.
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But in this new article, published on February 12th arXiv database, but not yet peer-reviewed, a large collaboration of researchers indicates that the TNOs were not specifically merged – they look the same because the Earth’s inhabitants show their telescopes. The researchers sampled 14 known “extreme” TNOs that travel very far, belonging to the family of objects that have had the greatest impact on Planet Nine research. They assume that they are part of a mostly unseen larger object family, which they are almost certain to be. is. They then analyzed how much time telescopes spent on different parts of the sky. They found that astronomers could detect this particular set of objects if all the TNOs at the outer edge of the solar system had a fairly uniform distribution – anywhere between 17% and 94%. (A 100% uniform distribution would mean that TNO orbits are evenly distributed between the suns.) In other words, the extreme TNOs (ETNOs) may seem to have been merged, but this is only because telescopes have focused their attention on them on average. . part of the space. Such a uniform distribution does not fit the Planet Nine hypothesis.
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This statistical analysis is similar to the kind of opinion polls that are done on an ongoing basis. If a survey of a few hundred Americans found that country music is the preference of 55% of the people, but then the data would be considered more closely that 40% of the respondents come from Nashville by chance, the poll could possibly adapt. because the sample was weighed so heavily on one area in the country. In this way, the opinion pollster can find that the great preference for country music disappears.
Dave Tholen, an astronomer from the University of Hawaii who searches for TNOs using the Subaru telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii and who was not involved in the study, said there is still too little data for anyone to draw any firm conclusions about Planet. Nine.
“We have a classic situation that I can describe as ‘the statistics of small numbers’. One discovery can not match anything. Two outlined orbits can easily be accidental. Three outlined orbits can raise the question, but it is definitely not enough to hang your hat, “Tholen said in an email to WordsSideKick. “How many aligned lines do you need before the chance of it falling by chance drops to a convincingly small number? And what is ‘alignment’? Should it be within ten [degrees] from each other? 30 [degrees]? 90 [degrees]? My own feeling is that we are still in the ‘suggestive’ stage. ‘
The grouping of TNOs suggests that there may be a planet they can attract, which is a hypothesis worth exploring. But the grouping seen so far is not good proof. On the other hand, the new study cannot exclude Planet Nine either, Tholen said.
The efforts currently underway will dramatically expand the catalog of well-known TNOs and provide firmer ground for any claims on the subject, Tholen said.
“Progress is slow,” he said. “Any paper reports on simulated surveys will always be out of date as long as we continue our observation work, as this does not include our latest air coverage.”
Tholen, his team says, is working to observe the air uniformly, specifically to avoid the kind of bias at the heart of the new newspaper’s argument.
Scott Sheppard, an astronomer studying TNOs at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC, and one of the first researchers to suggest that a large planet in the solar system could exist far beyond, largely agrees with Tholen.
“We just do not have enough bona fide ETO organizations to have a good statistical argument for or against the grouping,” he told WordsSideKick.
The new article ignores certain well-studied objects, such as Sedna, and says it makes the results less convincing, Sheppard noted. And some of the objects that the new article studied are probably influenced by the gravity of Neptune, which makes it a bad candidate to study Planet Nine.
“I would say we need to triple the current sample size of very far ETNOs to have reliable statistics about the angles of the orbit of this object,” Sheppard said. “If you do not have a large enough sample size, even if things are grouped strongly, the statistics will still correspond to a uniform distribution, simply because the sample size is too small.”
Kevin Napier, an astronomer and lead author of the University of Michigan, told the journal Science that he agrees somewhat with concerns about the sample size of his paper. Napier told Science that the statistical power of their methods is inherently weak with only 14 objects involved, and that when the sensitive Vera C. Rubin Observatory goes online in Chile in 2023, it should reveal hundreds of new TNOs that the Planet Nine question.
Originally published on Live Science.