A mysterious celestial body may be lurking in the frozen, far-flung reaches of the solar system, scientists say.
This is not the proposed “Planet Nine,” a ginormous body that Caltech scientists believe could be tugging at the orbits of the solar system’s most distant inhabitants. And it’s not Pluto. (Sorry, Pluto. You still don’t count.)
Instead, University of Arizona astronomers Kat Volk and Renu Malhotra say it’s a Mars-size body in the Kuiper belt, a swarm of small icy objects that extends beyond the orbit of Pluto. If both the Arizona and Caltech researchers are right, these proposed bodies could bring the total number of planets in our solar system to 10.
Volk and Malhotra haven’t seen their new planet, but they say they can sense its presence. In a paper due to be published in the Astronomical Journal, they describe an odd distortion in the orbits of objects in the outer part of the Kuiper belt, ones that are between 50 and 80 AU away. (AU stands for astronomical unit, or the distance from the sun to Earth, about 92 million miles.)
Though most of the nearer bodies in the solar system circle the sun in the same plane, largely thanks to Jupiter’s steadying heft, these far away Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) orbit at all kinds of wonky angles.
That in itself wouldn’t raise many questions. But when Volk and Malhotra analyzed these orbits in search of the average plane, they found that it was offset by about 8 degrees. Read more...
This is not the proposed “Planet Nine,” a ginormous body that Caltech scientists believe could be tugging at the orbits of the solar system’s most distant inhabitants. And it’s not Pluto. (Sorry, Pluto. You still don’t count.)
Instead, University of Arizona astronomers Kat Volk and Renu Malhotra say it’s a Mars-size body in the Kuiper belt, a swarm of small icy objects that extends beyond the orbit of Pluto. If both the Arizona and Caltech researchers are right, these proposed bodies could bring the total number of planets in our solar system to 10.
Volk and Malhotra haven’t seen their new planet, but they say they can sense its presence. In a paper due to be published in the Astronomical Journal, they describe an odd distortion in the orbits of objects in the outer part of the Kuiper belt, ones that are between 50 and 80 AU away. (AU stands for astronomical unit, or the distance from the sun to Earth, about 92 million miles.)
Though most of the nearer bodies in the solar system circle the sun in the same plane, largely thanks to Jupiter’s steadying heft, these far away Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) orbit at all kinds of wonky angles.
That in itself wouldn’t raise many questions. But when Volk and Malhotra analyzed these orbits in search of the average plane, they found that it was offset by about 8 degrees. Read more...