Hunt for Planet X back on

[Eric Mc]

Interesting news - the hunt for Planet X is back on. Old Percival Lowell might be proved right after all.


http://www.space.com/31672-planet-nine-evidence-an...

[Eric Mc]

ash73 said:

I hope he's wrong and ends up with egg on his face. Then we can reinstate Pluto to its rightful place.

That won't happen.

Pluto was not "demoted". It was reclassified into a class of object that has only recently been discovered.

[Eric Mc]

That's the great thing about it. Always something new and unexpected just around the corner.

[Eric Mc]

callmedave said:

I laughed when my mrs told me 'they have discovered a ninth planet'

if there is anything its a 10th planet, but i dont believe this 10th planet exists, it orbits further out than Pluto, yet its bigger than earth, and they never saw it before? yeah ok.

It is probably WAY out further than Pluto (or Neptune). When you consider that it could take between 10,000 years and 20,000 year to orbit the sun and Pluto orbits the sun once every 248 years, that gives you an idea of how far away such a planet might be.
And we have found a number of "wandering" non solar system planets much further away already.

Also, even if it is a Uranus/Neptune class planet, the light levels out there will be so dim that seeing this thing from earth would be very, very difficult using old style observational techniques.

It's certainly worthwhile organising a search - now that there are some calculations that can give us its approximate location in the sky. And with automated surveillance system available, it could be found quite quickly, once you know roughly where to start looking.

[Eric Mc]

Exactly, we haven't systematically hunted for remote planets since the 1930s as far as I am aware. And we certainly haven't systematically been looking since the advent of automated computerised scanning techniques.

I reckon there may be quite a few genuine planets (as opposed to Dwarf Planets and KBOs) out there in the far outskirts of the Solar System - and many of them will be in highly eccentric and inclined orbits - which will make them that bit more difficult to find.

The Solar System is turning out to be a lot more complex and interesting than was thought even only 40 years ago.

[Eric Mc]

Herschel wanted to give it a name that recognised its modern discovery - and to honour his patron, George III. He didn't quite want to call it "George". His suggested name was "Georgium Sidus" - which translates as "The Georgian Star".

Naturally, many objected to this, especially the French

I think referring to this possible new giant planet as "George" is quite a nice touch.

[Eric Mc]

When was that survey conducted?

Did they look outside the plane of the ecliptic?

[Eric Mc]

Thanks.

I watched The Sky at Night listed above and one of the scientists featured mentioned WISE. He said that even though WISE did cover most of the sky, it's equipment was not sensitive enough to spot any [planets smaller than Saturn i.e. it could not have seen a Neptune or Uranus.

These new calculations are looking at planets around 10 times the size of earth - much smaller than Saturn.

[Eric Mc]

Yes - mass would have been a better word to use.