How Do We Know There’s a Planet 9?
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Are you having trouble keeping track of all the planets in the Solar System? Good news! Astronomers have found evidence that there’s another huge planet far out in the Solar System. Textbooks will need to be rewritten again. You’re welcome. Support us at: http://www.patreon.com/universetoday More stories at: http://www.universetoday.com/ Follow us on Twitter: @universetoday Follow us on Tumblr: http://universetoday.tumblr.com/ Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/universetoday Google+ - https://plus.google.com/+universetoday/ Instagram - http://instagram.com/universetoday Team: Fraser Cain - @fcain Jason Harmer - @jasoncharmer Chad Weber - weber.chad@gmail.com Created by: Fraser Cain and Jason Harmer Edited by: Chad Weber Music: Left Spine Down - “X-Ray” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tcoZNrSveE&feature=youtu.be At this point, I think the astronomy textbook publishers should just give up. They’d like to tell you how many planets there are in the Solar System, they really would. But astronomers just can’t stop discovering new worlds, and messing up the numbers. Things were simple when there were only 6 planets. The 5 visible with the unaided eye, and the Earth, of course. Then Uranus was discovered in 1781 by William Herschel, which made it 7. Then a bunch of asteroids, like Ceres, Vesta and Pallas pushed the number into the teens until astronomers realized these were probably a whole new class of objects. Back to 7. Then Neptune in 1846 by Urbain Le Verrier and Johann Galle, which makes 8. Then Pluto in 1930 and we have our familiar 9. But astronomy marches onward. Eris was discovered in 2005, which caused astronomers to create a whole new classification of dwarf planet, and ultimately downgrading Pluto. Back to 8. It seriously looked like 8 was going to be the final number, and the textbook writers could return to their computers for one last update. Astronomers, however, had other plans. In 2014, Chad Trujillo and Scott Shepard were studying the motions of large objects in the Kuiper Belt and realized that a large planet in the outer Solar System must be messing with orbits in the region. This was confirmed and fine tuned by other astronomers, which drew the attention of Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin. The name Mike Brown might be familiar to you. Perhaps the name, Mike “Pluto Killer” Brown? Mike and his team were the ones who originally discovered Eris, leading to the demotion of Pluto. Brown and Batygin were looking to find flaws in the research of Trujillo and Shepard, and they painstakingly analyzed the movement of various Kuiper Belt Objects. They found that six different objects all seem to follow a very similar elliptical orbit that points back to the same region in space. All these worlds are inclined at a plane of about 30-degrees from pretty much everything else in the Solar System. In the words of Mike Brown, the odds of these orbits all occurring like this are about 1 in 100. Instead of a random coincidence, Brown and Batygin think there’s a massive planet way out beyond the orbit of Pluto, about 200 times further than the distance from the Sun to the Earth. This planet would be Neptune-sized, roughly 10 times more massive than Earth. But why haven’t they actually observed it yet? Based on their calculations, this planet should be bright enough to be visible in mid-range observatories, and definitely within the capabilities of the world’s largest telescopes, like Keck, Palomar, Gemini, and Hubble, of course. The trick is to know precisely where to look. All of these telescopes can resolve incredibly faint objects, as long as they focus in one tiny spot. But which spot. The entire sky has a lot of tiny spots to look at. Based on the calculations, it appears that Planet 9 is hiding in the plane of the Milky Way, camouflaged by the dense stars of the galaxy. But astronomers will be scanning the skies, and hope a survey will pick it up, anytime now. But wait a second, does this mean that we’re all going to die? Because I read on the internet and saw some YouTube videos that this is the planet that’s going to crash into the Earth, or flip our poles, or something. Nope, we’re safe. Like I just said, the best astronomers with the most powerful telescopes in the world and space haven’t been able to turn anything up. While the conspiracy theorists have been threatening up with certain death from Planet X for decades now - supposedly, it’ll arrive any day now. But it won’t. Assuming it does exist, Planet 9 has been orbiting the Sun for billions of years, way way out beyond the orbit of Pluto. It’s not coming towards us, it’s not throwing objects at us, and it’s definitely not going to usher in the Age of Aquarius.
Comments
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Janus would be an amazing & fitting name for (supposedly) farthest major planet of the Solar System. 👌🏻
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We should name it wal-mart, and its moons in no particular order... coca-cola, nike, mcdonalds....
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Tahiyat it's from arabic
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I'd call it Gemini
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Name it Orcus, Nergal or Osiris
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What if the Planet nine is not a planet, but a very small sized black hole? Which is why despite of all the implications, we are not able to find it....?
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Isnt planet 9 Nibiru
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I suggest "Nibiru": it's the name that Sumerians gave it and the first ones to describe exactly our Solar System's objects (for them, it was 12 planets: Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and Nibiru - who took 3.600 years to give a complete circle around our sun).
It's not difficult to recognize that Sumerians were right about every single aspect - including physical ones - and said the gods gave them everything: maths, language, astronomy, agriculture, etc. Those gods were living beings and they would return.
The question is: why are they here? It's NOT to attack, fight or enslave us (the bankers already do that so well and nobody is scare of bankers, right? Should be...). They are here to teach us what they learned. -
I suggest we name the planet: Aether.
In greek mythology, Aether is father of Uranus (who was the father of Saturn, who was the father of Jupiter, who was the father of Mars). Therefore Aether would seem to fit nicely into this little scheme (skipping over Neptune, of course).
Also as Aether is the god of the "upper air" he seems to lend his name well to a planet in the furthest reaches of space. -
Tekto
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RIP Pluto.
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Nox: Goddess of night. Since planet nine is so far from our sun, it's basically in eternal night
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Janus: God of Beginnings, Endings, Transition, Doorways and Keys
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How about Tartarus.
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frezo
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It should be called Kurzgesagt or Kurgaset.
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What about Pythagoras? I think his life and contributions quite fit our unknown friend out there. Also, the most important argument for this is that it also, like Pluto, starts with P, thus making the beloved "My Very Educated..." mnemonic continue to live in our hearts and souls.
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Subbed love your channel.
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namek Best name for the planet 9
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dud just call it planet not x
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