Mike Brown, Konstantin Batygin, and Surhud More just spent time at the Subaru telescope looking for Planet Nine. This thread summarizes their search and what they'll do if they don't find it: <a href="https://twitter.com/plutokiller/status/1071978898458464256" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/plutokiller/status/1071978898458464256</a>
It's interesting how space research technology works, right now we can detect planets around distant stars many light years away but we are still unable to detect a planet several times larger than earth that is likely orbiting our own sun.<p>I wonder if it's possible to send a probe out beyond the orbit of Neptune and try and detect planet 9 using gravitational lensing the way we do with planets in other solar systems.
Wasn't Pluto predicted before it was discovered? And wasn't the mass of Pluto less than what was predicted?<p>Plutos wikipedia page seems to support this (under mass estimates).
<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto</a><p>Ps when its discovered, can the planet start with a P so the rhymes still work?
From Mike Brown's Twitter:<p>> My biggest fear, though, is the Milky Way galaxy. There are SO MANY stars that we tend to avoid even looking there. But our predicted region goes through the Milky Way. So we are going to have to deal. We're testing a little of that this week, (Dec 9)<p>If it is indeed in that region it may be a long time before we detect P9. But I'm optimistic that they'll find it in their latest survey they did. Mike Brown is extremely experienced at finding objects in the outer solar system so if he's confident that they'll find it soon than so am I.
I am an idiot who doesn't know anything about astronomy, and I always assumed that if you were looking for something like planet 9 you would attempt to deduce its position from the gravitational effects it might have on nearby known entities.<p>What am I missing in this context?
They’ll just find it, add it as a “planet”, then discover dozens or hundred of others just like it that aren’t on the same orbital plane as our first 8, and demote it again.
My layman-scifi-loving hypothesis is that its not a planet that we are looking for but the remnants of the novae which birthed the solar system. this star core is likely mostly iron and other heavier elements, and as such is incredibly dense. It will probably be a super earth only a few times the Earth's radius but with mass over 10x that of earth. While detecting gas giants is easier due to their infrared signature, one such dense star core in (or beyond) the Oort cloud would be practically invisible to us in the infrared searches and using starlight occlusion (due to its much smaller size).
This is almost certainly an oversimplified question born out of ignorance, but I've always wondered why we have to rely on the light of the Sun to find distant, dark objects. Why would it not be possible to fashion an extremely powerful laser and sweep it across the sky in an area where gravitational clues indicate a dark object may reside? Unless the object was utterly black on its surface, I'd think we would be able to monitor wherever the beam traverses and look for tell-tale spectra coming back in our direction due to the laser being scattered by a solid object's surface.<p>Again, I know I am oversimplifying a complex problem, and I could speculate on factors that might render this impractical, such as atmospheric effects or the necessary power needed for a laser strong enough to travel to such a distant point (it might not be physically possible to create a laser large enough to exceed the light we would already see reflected back from the already formidable output of the Sun), but I don't have the requisite knowledge of physics to really make solid assumptions about such things.
Is there any possibility there's more than one one Planet 9? This is, in searching for a single unseen planet, the calculations, estimates and such will be wrong if there's actually two (or more?) extra planets.
Since Pluto is <i>clearly</i> Planet Nine, I'm assuming this was written before 1930.<p>(I'm only being a little facetious. According to <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Chasing-New-Horizons-Inside-Mission-ebook/dp/B076H7LK8Y/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1545245406&sr=8-1&keywords=new+horizons" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Chasing-New-Horizons-Inside-Mission-e...</a>, plenty of scientists consider Pluto a planet still.)
I'm on my phone... Hope this link works. Around 9:30 there's a question about planet 9 and the NASA scientist says Pluto is Planet 9.<p><a href="https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=257826325089507&id=79209882917&refsrc=https%3A%2F%2Fm.facebook.com%2F&_rdr" rel="nofollow">https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=257826325089507&...</a>