Do you remember the never-ending quest (and controversies) about the hypothetical Planet Nine (or Ten, depending on the way you count them)? Well, get ready. We have finally got something solid.
A distant dwarf planet, soon nicknamed The Goblin, has just been discovered far beyond Pluto’s orbit, in the region known as the Oort Cloud. All the excitement is due to the fact that the newly found planet appears to be under the gravitational influence of a giant, unseen object: probably, Planet Nine.
The discovery has been made by Carnegie Institution for Science, which has located this remote icy world with an extremely distant aphelion and approximately 300 kilometres of in diameter.
“2015 TG387 takes 40,000 years to orbit the Sun and has a highly elongated orbit that takes it no closer than 65 astronomical units (AU) to the Sun, and the same orbit takes 2015 TG387 as far out as 2300 AU (or 213.8 billion miles) from the Sun. For comparison, Earth orbits 1 AU (93 million miles) from the Sun, and Pluto is currently at 38 AU from the Sun. Ultima Thule, the Kuiper Belt Object that the New Horizons spacecraft will fly past on January 1, 2019, is 43 AU from the Sun now.” (NASA Press release, 3 October 2018).
“This can be an indicator of a larger object further out, such as “Planet 9/Planet X” shepherding these bodies, though the discovery paper cautions that more discoveries of “low bias” objects are needed to confirm that this clustering is not random. Dr Sheppard’s team ran computer simulations showing that 2015 TG387’s orbit was stable throughout the life of the solar system and that there was shepherding by the unseen object similar to that found in other bodies. The team believes that this strengthens the case for the hypothesized “Planet X”, and Dr Sheppard believes there is an 85% chance that “Planet X”, a “super-Earth” world believed to be approximately 10 earth masses orbiting between 200-700 AU from the Sun, is real.”
Read more about this amazing discovery here.
These are the times when I’m amazed in learning how much we DON’T know about our system, and how much we might be able to learn… And it’s a great feeling 🙂
Thanks for sharing!
It’s incredible, isn’t it? But I think this Planet Nine (or X) does exist after all. Not nearby, but enough to feel the pull.
It really is SUCH an exciting time to be alive with all these discoveries coming thick and fast… Thank you for flagging them up, Steph:)
My pleasure. I think more it’s to come 🙂
I think so too! *wriggles excitedly*