Gadgetory

have you heard another planet may be lurking in the distant shadows of our solar system it's not out of the realm of possibility in fact a couple of scientists think it's basically a certainty at this point say hello to Planet nine or Planet X well you can't really say hello to it because we haven't seen it yet but to researchers at Caltech mike brown and konstantin batygin are convinced it's out there based on the way objects are moving around at the edge of the solar system and if it does exist it's a pretty sizable planet the to estimate it's about 10 to 12 times the mass of Earth so kind of like a smaller Neptune and it orbits way out there at its farthest from the Sun the planet is somewhere between 500 and 1200 a use for reference Pluto's farthest distance is less than 58 years from the Sun so it's possible that this planet takes up to 20,000 earth years to complete just one orbit right now the stranger is mostly going by the name of planet 9 but not everyone is keen on that title I don't like I'm calling it planet 9 astronomer that discovered Pluto his name clyde tombaugh he did it in 1930 he was 24 years old and people had looked for a generation and nobody could find the planet they were looking for so the reason I don't like the term planet 9 went by my count the next one would be about planet 29 is it a diminishes clyde tombaugh's legacy what he did was absolutely an amazing feat for 20th century astronomy and I think it's insensitive and a little bit rude to try to diminish that but Planet 9 is the name that stuck so I guess we'll go with it for now anyway the search really gained steam in 2014 when Mike and Konstantin decided to look at the outer solar system a little bit more closely they were inspired by the discovery of a new object of the Kuiper belt that's the cloud of icy bodies that orbits past Neptune the announcement of this new object called their attention to the most distant objects in the solar system these are the ones that take more than 4,000 years orbit the Sun they noticed a strange pattern with six of these far-out objects including the one that had just been found they all had common argument of perihelion don't worry the Kuiper belt objects aren't in a fight or anything the argument of perihelion is this really obscure orbital feature and it basically means whenever these objects make their closest approach to the Sun they're all at the same angle to a plane of reference that was immediately strange because this parameter should basically be random for each object it was the first indication that their orbits had been manipulated possibly by another planet then a closer look showed even more interesting similarities all of their orbits lie in the same plane and they're all kind of tilted away from the plane of the solar system by about 20 degrees plus they're all highly elliptical and swing out from the Sun in the same direction normally these objects would trace out randomly in a flower like pattern it's as if some thing had arranged these objects so that they cluster in space together that something had significant gravitational influence so the two researchers set out to figure out what was behind this strange pattern at first they rejected the idea that a planet was the culprit can't just be pulling planets out of thin air I mean the vacuum of space but after ruling out all the other mechanisms that could be causing these objects to cluster they decided there was no other explanation except for a planet set a totally crazy idea either Neptune was predicted purely through math in 1846 so inspired by that process Constantine came up with a model of the solar system as it evolved over four billion years you through planet 9 into this model sure enough evolved beautifully to the solar system we see today and since this first discovery even more objects have been found in the outer Kuiper belt that fit this pattern but there are extra clues that Planet 9 exists two for one it may be responsible for why the Sun is tilted for many years now we've known that the sun's axis is tilted or oblique by about six degrees in relation to the rest of the solar system basically all the planets orbit in same flat-plane around the Sun but the Sun looks like it's spinning at a slight angle in relation to everything else it's been a long-standing mystery for a while but the Caltech researchers say planet 9 could be behind this the planets gravity has torqued the solar system out of alignment with the Sun so basically all of us are the ones that are tilted then there's another clue a bunch of objects right next to Neptune are orbiting the wrong way in the solar system one recently discovered object niku is basically perpendicular to the rest of the solar system and it's going in the opposite direction of most other objects konstantin says planet 9 is responsible for this - it's doing something called the koozai effect it's actually tilting the orbits of objects on their sides and with the help of Neptune they end up orbiting the Sun in the wrong direction alright so we have all this evidence for planet 9 but we still don't have the smoking gun seeing the damn thing the Caltech researchers have been observing the night sky with Subaru a huge telescope located in Hawaii the goal is to completely map out the orbit of the planet so they can eventually catch it it's a process that may take a while probably a couple years and it may be hampered if planet 9 is orbiting against the backdrop of the Milky Way since this planet is so far away from the Sun it's super faint so it'd be much harder to see against a bunch of really bright stars but it's not so ridiculous to think that this planet might actually exist one of the biggest findings from NASA's Kepler mission is that smaller Neptune's like planet 9 are very common throughout the galaxy so having one in our neighborhood actually makes us pretty normal konstantin says he's confident we're going to find it eventually but we may just have to wait a while that's no fun in fact Mike Brown is actually referenced in another video that we did about what makes a planet a planet because he's often credited with helping demote Pluto to a dwarf planet so the irony here is that he got rid of one ninth planet and then replaced it with his own night 2 planet