Is there a Ninth Planet? Strange orbits of distant objects

Is there a Ninth Planet? Strange orbits of distant objects

The artistic vision of the Ninth Planet is a hypothetical world capable of hiding in a distant outer solar system.

Some of the distant celestial bodies of the solar system exhibit bizarre orbital paths. But scientists believe that this can be explained without the need to include the idea of ​​the existence of the mysterious Planet Nine (Ninth Planet, X). Perhaps gravitational attraction comes from other trans-Neptunian objects (TNO), and not from one massive world.

The new theory is based on the fact that the Ninth Planet can be replaced by a multitude of small objects scattered around an extensive theory. Then collective attractions between them are also able to explain the eccentric orbits of TNO.

Seriously hunt for the Ninth Planet began in 2014. Then Chadwick Trujillo and Scott Shepard suggested the existence of a large invisible but influential body outside of Neptune, whose gravitational influence can explain the strangeness of the orbits of distant objects like the dwarf planets Sedna and 2012 VP113.

In January 2016, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown presented more evidence that responsibility could be placed on many trans-Neptunian objects. Calculations showed that the disturbing force (somewhere 10 times more massive than the Earth) is located at a distance of 600 a. e. from the sun. Since then, the idea has been reinforced, because scientists have found more and more clusters of TNO. Now they count about 30. However, the theory of the existence of the mysterious planet X is not empty. You just can not discard the option with a large number of small celestial bodies. In the new model, it is assumed that the force will work if the Kuiper belt's mass exceeds that of the earth by several dozen times. Of course, this is too much “if”, since estimates show that the total mass of the Kuiper belt reaches only 10% of the Earth’s index.

However, observations have shown that alien star systems have huge disks of material in the outer regions. And if we can not find the planet, it does not mean that it does not exist at all. The discovery of new TNO will allow to study this topic more deeply, but for now it remains to peer into the sky and search.

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