Discovering Planet Nine

http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/discovering-planet-nine

by jwmerrill • 10 years ago

54 43 10 years ago

Cozumel• 10 years ago

Pluto is planet nine.

This is 'planet ten', it's called 'Nibiru', and the Babylonians, Sumerians and Akkadian among others have astronomical records of it over 3,600 years ago.

tin foil hat time I do wonder if that's why Pluto was demoted, so when the 'tenth' planet was found it'd actually be called the 'ninth' so nobody would be as concerned about all the doomsday myths surrounding it.

dalke8• 10 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibiru_cataclysm#Scientific_re...

If Pluto is #9, what numbers are Ceres, Sedna, Eris, Haumea, and Makemake? Ceres was considered a planet until the 1850s.

Astronomers think there are a few hundred more such dwarf planets, with 2007 OR10, Quaoar, Sedna, Orcus, (307261) 2002 MS4 and Salacia as likely candidates.

Which numbers are those?

The hypothetical planet the New Yorker mentions has an orbital period between twelve and twenty thousand years. Sitchin says the Babylonian religious texts say the period is 3,600 years.

These are not the same planet.

sandworm1012• 10 years ago

> If Pluto is #9, what numbers are Ceres, Sedna, Eris, Haumea, and Makemake?

I don't care about them. This is a cultural issue. There is no fundamental principal governing how humans are to name space rocks. This is map making. Exceptions and one-off special rules are made all the time. We accept europe and asia as separate continents. If that can be a thing, then Pluto can remain a planet.

Houshalter5• 10 years ago

I don't like the classification of dwarf planet. The classification should be based on its size, shape, and make up. Instead they classified it based on the number of objects in its orbit, which is so arbitrary and weird. If hypothetically we cleared up the objects and dumped them in Earths orbit, Pluto would suddenly become a planet and Earth would lose its classification.

Just bite the bullet and accept there are a lot of small planets in our solar system, or classify them based on size.

ChuckMcM• 10 years ago

Reminds me of the humorous article where Australia gets demoted to a dwarf continent, leaving only 6.

eivarv• 10 years ago

Do you have any sources to back up any of these assertions, e.g. that this is what Sumerians called 'Nibiru', or that they had astronomical records of this/an object?

If I remember correctly, the "Planet X" / "Nibiru" stuff is largely tinfoil-hat territory (see the link dalke posted, as well as other articles [1-4]) - a hodgepodge of speculation, conspiracy theories, pseudoscience and -history, and literal interpretation of myths - as made evident by a cursory search on Wikipedia.

Planet Nine, though, seems to be something other [5] than this mess entirely.

As for the doomsday myths, I find them equally ridiculous whether the planet in question would be number 9 or 10 on our somewhat arbitrary planet-system.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planets_beyond_Neptune

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_Long_Count_calend...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_phenomenon

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zecharia_Sitchin

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Nine

whybroke• 10 years ago

Clearly all the evidence for the Sumerians, Lumerians and Brobdingnagians knowledge of Nibiru was covered up by the knights Templar in order to hide the fact the world is going to end next Wednesday afternoon just after the Sleestaks take over.

sevenless• 10 years ago

I adore outlandish conspiracy theories and this is an excellent one. Now, are the astronomers and government secretly working with the Nibiru aliens themselves to cover up the impending cataclysm? Could the sinister New World Order really be a Nibiru beach head? And were Erich von Daniken and David Icke right about everything?

chrispeel• 10 years ago

I would love an update on efforts to find planet 9, unfortunately this article is from January 2016. See [1] for a Hacker News thread from Jan on Planet 9, and [2] for a blog from Batygin and Brown.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10939306https://news.yc...

[2] http://www.findplanetnine.com/

Isinlor• 10 years ago

If you are interested in latest research about planet 9 you can subscribe to https://www.reddit.com/r/planet9 - I'm trying to keep this subreddit up to date as much as possible.

zipwitch• 10 years ago

To quote Mike Brown (who has the best Twitter handle ever), "Weekly PSA: no, in fact the earth is NOT going to be destroyed by [fill in crazy thing seen on internet here] next week. Thanks for asking." https://twitter.com/plutokiller

mrfusion2• 10 years ago

This could be awesome for a slingshot manuever on the way to alpha cent, right.

Does anyone know how to calculate that?

InclinedPlane2• 10 years ago

It wouldn't, actually, because gravity assists only add as much as the body's orbital velocity, which would be tiny for an object in such a distant orbit.

mrfusion2• 10 years ago

That doesn't sound right because it got the voyagers to leave the solar system.

woodandsteel2• 10 years ago

It seems pretty unlikely it is in the right plane. And even if it is, with its extremely long orbit, we would have probably have to wait at least 10,000 years before it was in the right position.

tunnuz• 10 years ago

I'm no expert (and have not read the full article, just about half of it), but could an object like this affect Earth when it's orbit gets closer to the sun? I mean anything, from causing movements in Earth's crust or below, influencing tides, carrying massive pieces of rock in its trail etc.?

jschwartzi2• 10 years ago

If I remember correctly from the article, if this object were capable of perturbing Earth in any significant way, then we would be under much greater threat from Jupiter and Saturn, which are at least order of magnitude closer to us at any given time. Gravitation is a very weak force, and it scales as the inverse square of the distance between two objects. An order of magnitude reduction in distance would multiply the force by roughly 100 times. Thus, we would see these effects all the time as a result of our proximity to Jupiter and Saturn.

So no, what you're suggesting is impossible.

cmurf• 10 years ago

What was this nonsense I remember from gradeschool about planets aligning having a gravitation effect on the sun such that it'd start spewing fireballs at earth? Of course nothing happened. The amount of gravitational force from a mountain as you drive by it has more of an effect than the planets. It's kinda like, how does astrology affect us again? Can you be precise? I mean, other than for entertainment as by its own standard it's a real thing.

taliesinb• 10 years ago

The most interesting alternative to the Planet Nine hypothesis (and to my mind a more attractive one) is that there is a self-organizing dynamical process that applies to large ensembles of bodies in highly eccentric orbits that causes their argument of perihelion to become correlated.

There is a great SETI talk by the astronomer Ann-Marie Madigan that explains the idea, it should be easy to follow if you've ever taken a mechanics course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YW0Zb5gY0HA

Discovering Planet Nine

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