Astronomer says he has found a possible candidate for the ninth planet in the Solar System – Sidereal Messenger

Digging through old data from the infrared satellite Iras, a British astronomer looking for the hypothetical Planet 9 says he has found a possible candidate. The nickname was given to a star who supposedly existed beyond Neptune, as predicted by a pair of US researchers in 2016.

The whole story began when Michael Brown and Konstantin Batygin, astronomers at Caltech (California Institute of Technology), pointed out a strange alignment in the orbits of some trans-Neptunian objects, boulders residing in the depths of the Solar System. According to them, the alignment could only be explained by the gravitational influence of a ninth planet, larger than Earth, installed in a superlong and oval orbit.

Since then, researchers have searched for Planet 9, without success. And the strategy adopted by Michael Rowan-Robinson, of Imperial College London, was to hunt through the data of Iras, a NASA satellite that scanned much of the sky in the 1980s.

Rowan-Robinson created a protocol to reanalyze the images for potential candidates who may have missed the original studies of the data. After reprocessing the entire package, he came up with a single remaining potential candidate. It would be around the celestial coordinates 319 degrees of straight ascension, 60 degrees of declination (for those unfamiliar with the terminology, these are celestial analogues of longitude and latitude, respectively).

If such a candidate is not some observation artifact, it could correspond to a planet located more than 200 astronomical units from here (1 AU is the average Earth-Sun distance, 150 million km).

“A docking orbit would suggest a distance of 225 AU (about 15 AU) and a mass 3 to 5 times that of Earth,” wrote Rowan-Robinson, in an article accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. He acknowledges that the candidate is probably not a real object, but indicates that it might be worth pointing telescopes in that direction to see if there is actually something there. “A search of a 2.5-by-4 degree radio ring centered around the 1983 position in visible and near-infrared wavelengths can be valuable.”

PROBABLY NOTHING
Although he is the most enthusiastic search for Planet 9, Mike Brown is the first to point out that this is not the star predicted by him and Batygin in 2016. “The candidate would be in an orbit that is totally inconsistent with our predictions and would not be able to gravitationally perturb the Solar System far from the ways we suggest”, he says. “But, of course, that doesn’t mean it can’t be real!”

The researcher takes the opportunity to make a distinction between an opportunity discovery and an actual scientific prediction. He recalls that Pluto was discovered in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh in exactly the same way. The astronomer then looked for Planet X, predicted by Percival Lowell, but ended up accidentally finding Pluto. That doesn’t make Pluto the predicted Planet X (which, by the way, doesn’t exist).

Likewise, if such a candidate is now real, it will not be the so-called Planet 9 of Brown and Batygin. “If someone discovers a planet other than Neptune inconsistent with our predictions, we didn’t predict it, and it’s a totally unrelated (and incredible) discovery,” explains the researcher.

That’s the rigor that separates a scientific hypothesis from the claims of any crazy person who says “there’s a planet out there somewhere” (and it’s full of people like that out there). Therefore, it is already possible to believe that Rowan-Robinson, when looking for that Planet 9, did not find it. But it may still have found a ninth planet in the Solar System — although the odds are against it. To be checked.

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