The Science About Planet Nine, So Far

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/05/09/the-scientific-truth-about-planet-nine-so-far/#5d165fe7d84e

by rbanffy • 9 years ago

96 32 9 years ago

pc2g4d• 9 years ago

Interesting. I really feel these sorts of searches could be automated. Given a database of all known objects in space, attempt to infer likely objects that have not yet been observed. Then automatically direct telescopes to make observations at the inferred location. If they find something, then pass it along to a human for assessment.

Piece by piece the database would grow in coverage. As it does, its power to make predictions of unknown objects should grow, until we've reached the limit of our current instruments' ability to observe.

Yeah?

Meerax• 9 years ago

Preaching to the choir! .. however getting time on the correct telescopes at the appropriate times to check those inferred locations could be a problem.

cohomologo• 9 years ago

As it does, its power to make predictions of unknown objects should grow, until we've reached the limit of our current instruments' ability to observe.

Well that's kind of the problem already. For the objects that are interesting, we've either discovered them or they are hard (or impossible) to discover with current instruments. For the ones that are merely hard but not impossible, the process of finding them requires human cleverness or significant telescope resources (and human cleverness can be applied to figure out the best way to direct the limited resources). I'm not really sure that automation helps...

mturmon2• 9 years ago

A piece of this (automated object searches) has already happened, as you may know. For one of several operational implementations, see:

http://crts.caltech.edu/index.html

The original survey was built for near-Earth objects, but the extra-solar-system transients detected (e.g., supernovae) became the subject of many papers.

The supernova catalog that observations like these compiled -- but from other transient-detection networks -- became the basis of the 2011 Nobel Prize for the observational discovery of dark energy: https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/20...

You may be seeking after something harder, which is to use orbit anomalies to infer positions of objects - kind of an automation of all the orbital simulation efforts described in the article. That, of course, has not been done.

theoh• 9 years ago

Though of course this is the method that led to the discovery of Neptune: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_Neptune

flukus• 9 years ago

I wonder how they go inferring objects we do know about? If we had no knowledge of venus for instance, how much could we infer about it?

csours• 9 years ago

Why can't we just shine some radar out there?

trhway• 9 years ago

we can hardly shine more powerful radar than the one that is already shining - Sun.

blacksmith_tb• 9 years ago

I assume this is ironic, but if not, of course we could, if we had millions of years to take observations (and an enormously powerful source of EMR).

nerfhammer• 9 years ago

Might get the attention of the Borg

labster• 9 years ago

Because sonar would work just about as well.

danielvf• 9 years ago

When light travels, it spreads out as it goes, making it less powerful for a given area. This is the famous inverse square law.

Radar decreases the same way. However, radar is even worse in that it also decreases on the way back to the sender.

So if you double the distance to the target, the radar signal coming back is 1/16 as strong. If you increase the distance by a factor of 1,000, then the signal coming back is 1/1,000,000,000,000 as strong. And so on...

This makes radar a pretty poor tool for space exploration.

knodi123• 9 years ago

radar lasers

dzdt• 9 years ago

And it makes it amazing that we actually did use Earth-based radar to study the planet Mercury. Before the Messenger spacecraft, some of our best science about Mercury came from Arecibo radar observations.

nieksand• 9 years ago

If this topic interests you, check out the really awesome lecture by one of the original paper authors. It's both informative and very well done.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMCwezegPNg

Forbes does mention the blog, and that's worth following directly too:

http://www.findplanetnine.com/

X86BSD• 9 years ago

Thank you for the YouTube link!

mih• 9 years ago

Good speaker and a great talk! Thanks for the link

ansible• 9 years ago

And for more of a layman's introduction, The Verge also has done a small feature on it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qwz7Z5cUDuM

MaysonL2• 9 years ago

There's also a 20-minute lecture from his Coursera course on the Solar System.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-ktWBtt7sc&feature=youtu.be

darklajid• 9 years ago

Warning: This website started to play a random video in the upper left corner for me. With audio.

lucasmullens• 9 years ago

It was muted by default for me.

pluma• 9 years ago

It wasn't muted for me. Chrome on Linux with no ad blocking.

It actually took me a few seconds to find out where the sound was coming from because there was no indication or even volume control.

maxsavin• 9 years ago

Haha, funny thing is conspiracy theorists have been saying there is a planet 9 for long before all of this.

chimen• 9 years ago

Planet 9 discovery and early papers dates back to 1800s. Don't attribute this to "conspiracy theorists". It just so happens that they like to cling on "not yet fully understood" artifacts of theories and research fields so they can fuel their ramblings and lure people. It was the mayan calendar, the 9th planet or Nibiru how they like to call it and now they like to use the word quantum a lot.

jecjec• 9 years ago

Forbes = auto-close tab

aaron695• 9 years ago

I'm still blown away the highest ranking story about planet nine only has 883 votes on HN

The Science About Planet Nine, So Far

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