Is there a giant planet in the depths of the solar system, disrupting the movement of the stars and we have not yet discovered? It seems highly coffee, but that’s the hypothesis launched by two astronomers from Caltech, the California Institute of Technology, USA. Michael Brown and Konstantin Batygin have not seen this planet. But they observed the movements of six trans-Neptunian objects, that is to say, the stars moving beyond the orbit of Neptune, that is to say large stones very far from here. And according to their strange configuration that is difficult to explain by chance alone, they concluded that the attraction of a large planet traveling in the area would be the most likely explanation.
Today ‘ hui, the solar system has eight officially planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus. But the list does not stop, because the more our observation instruments become powerful, the better our chances of discovering a new distant candidate. In the early nineteenth th century, we wondered about the strange orbit of the last planet of the solar system recorded then, Uranus, and it was calculating that an unknown neighbor was playing disturbing. It was Neptune, unearthed in 1846. But it does not explain everything and posed itself new questions. Rebelote: he had to look even further, a hypothetical “Planet X” in the words of astronomer Percival Lowell. Pluto was found in 1930, but not big enough to be Planet X Lowell. The poor has even been stripped of its planet status in 2006 because it is unable to “clean up” its orbit by agglomerating dust lying around there – it’s now a dwarf planet
Research. this planet X would explain all of orbits irregularities has never stopped since. We found other dwarf planets (Eris, Sedna …), but we expect better. A kind of “super-Pluto”, as theorized in 2008 and Tadashi Mukai Patryk Lykawka two researchers Kobe (Japan). In 2011, Americans John Matese and Daniel Whitmire announced that they have evidence that a planet as large as Jupiter four hides behind Pluto and baptize Tyche, in honor of the Greek goddess. Rumor Planet X returns in 2012 with Rodney Gomes of research in Brazil, and then in 2014 when Scott Sheppard and Chad Trujillo tiquent on a detail observing trans-Neptunian objects from the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii. Their study, published in Nature , showed that a number of distant stars shared the same orbital inclination: while the eight major planets in the solar system are traveling more or less on the same level, that ecliptic called, these small objects have an inclined orbit and appear to rotate at the same rate. They all cross the ecliptic plane when they are closest to the Sun, the “perihelion”. Then they travel at different speeds … As if a large magnet kept synchronized them. Sheppard and Trujillo presaged that “a massive disturbance may be” . A large planet, you know.
Image Caltech / R. Hurt (IPAC)
It is their job resume our two American astronomers, Michael Brown size (largely responsible for the removal of Pluto) and the young Konstantin Batygin in The Astronomical Journal . By choosing the six most distant stars, from the selection of Sheppard and Trujillo, they calculated that only 0.007% chance that their synchronized orbits are due to chance. “It’s almost as if you had six hands moving at different speeds on a clock and, when you look, they are exactly in the same place , tries to explain Michael Brown. There are about one chance in a hundred that happen. But in addition, they are examined in the same manner, inclined 30 degrees relative to the plane of the eight planets. It should not happen by chance “ The French astrophysicist François Forget has a simple image.” It’s almost as if we observed far from sheep and they all start move in the same manner. We say that there is a dog that guides them. “
A possible explanation was based on the presence of many small disruptive trans-Neptunian objects. But it was not right: the asteroid Kuiper Belt, where they would live, would be far too massive compared to what we know. Remains the giant planet. “Planet 9″ as researchers call it (for originality could use some work). They simulated orbit computer and claim that it could work: the unknown planet would be ten times heavier than Earth, twenty times further from the Sun than Neptune, and his revolution would last between ten thousand and twenty thousand years.
“If it exists, find it! I challenge you to “, launched their Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA, referring to the famous phrase of the astronomer Carl Sagan: ” Extraordinary ads require evidence extraordinary. “ Nothing will be confirmed until we have not had the planet 9 under the eyes, in the eyepiece of a telescope. However, it is not impossible that, if it exists, it has already left its mark on the photographs of the sky made for other occasions. But where to look? “Probably far , the researchers summarize on their blog. For more than 500 astronomical units [the Earth-Sun distance, note] . Less brighter than magnitude 22. And very possibly in the middle of the Milky Way “. It’s unclear. It will be more difficult to find in space that “u only planet emits no energy, so not much light, reminds the RTBF in January Cuypers, astronomer at Royal Observatory of Belgium. must be sought in the infrared, and that, one does so only in recent years. If we increase these observations in the coming years – five or ten years -, one can find objects of this kind “
Many astrophysicists are well put together the study released Wednesday. . “This is the first time we have a tangible indication of the existence of a new planet” , says Alessandro Morbidelli of the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in Nice. But that does not advance us much. Robert Massey, deputy director of the Royal Astronomical Society in London, recalls that “this is just a mathematical model” and that Planet X has a long history behind it, made of hopes and disappointments. Meanwhile, the complotistes still believe that NASA is hiding for years the existence of this giant planet, called Nibiru and Earth will destroy pouncing on him very soon.
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