Any mention of the possible existence of a hypothetical world in orbit in the external solar system and the tabloid press immediately suggests the worst: the world is about to explode. It became even worse when scientists hinted that one such hypothetical planet could cause mass extinction due to comet bombardment. After this, the headlines came to the conclusion that, oddly enough, we will all die this month.
I am begging you…
Most of these silly fantasies can quickly be refuted with an ounce of logical thinking, but since the announcement in January of a possible discovery of a world far beyond the orbit of Pluto, many ideas have arisen regarding how Planet Nine affects Solar the system.
In this latest "Planet Nine can do strange things" episode, scientists of the Côte d'Azur Observatory and the Paris Observatory are ready to attribute the influence of the gravitational field of Planet Nine to the orbit of NASA's Cassini mission, which is currently orbiting Saturn's gas ring giant Saturn. Their work was published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. Astronomical history is replete with examples of the discovery of worlds, observing their gravitational effects on other planets in the Solar System. Indeed, looking at the orbital perturbations of Uranus, astronomers in the mid-19th century were able to pinpoint the location of Neptune. So, is there a massive (still undiscovered) planet in the outer solar system, and can its presence be detected using Cassini instruments?
Alas, seeing the opportunity to emphasize how little chance this will happen, NASA went to the record to say no, Planet Nine still affects the Saturn probe.
“Although we would very much like Cassini to be able to discover a new planet in the solar system, we don’t see any disturbances in our orbit, and we cannot explain this with our current models,” said in-house newsletter Heise Maiz. , project manager Cassini of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
“A non-open planet beyond Neptune’s orbit, 10 times the mass of the Earth, will affect the orbit of Saturn, not Cassini,” added William Faulkner, a planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “It could make a change in Cassini’s orbit around Saturn if the planet were close enough to the Sun.” But we do not see any inexplicable signatures above the noise measurement level in Cassini data taken from 2004 to 2016. ” This, of course, is an interesting idea, but at least in this case there is little evidence of the presence of gravitational tugs in Cassini orbit.
However, the hunt for Planet Nine continues.
As Caltech astronomers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin showed in January, it seems that there is something moving in the orbits of distant objects in the Kuiper belt - areas of icy objects outside the orbit of Neptune (the area within which Pluto inhabits) . At present, it is believed that we have yet to directly see the planets 10 times the mass of the Earth, and at least having 200 a. e. (200 distances from Earth to the Sun) from the Sun.
How many more surprises hiding on our cosmic threshold?
