“Planet Nine” Might Indeed Be Real, According To The Latest Evidence

“Planet Nine” Might Indeed Be Real, According To The Latest Evidence
SHARE

The Planet Nine has more than 90 percent chances to be real, according to the latest results of a new study based on the observations made by astronomers in previous research conducted in 2014.

“Planet Nine really remains the only viable explanation for all the things we observe,” says Konstantin Batygin, a theoretical astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), one of the main supporters for the existence of this hypothetical new world at the edge of our Solar System.

“The evidence for Planet Nine is substantial. We calculated that the probability of the existence of this Plane Nite is more than 90 percent,” Batygin said.

In January 2016, Batygin and another Caltech researcher, Mike Brown, attempted to characterize the planet, estimating that it is perhaps ten times more massive than Earth and orbits the Sun at about 600 astronomical units (AU), on average.

Recent evidence shows that there are more than 90 percent chanced for the Planet Nine to be real

Astronomers have now seen 14 space bodies in the Kuyper Belt that bear the tug of a great disturber, as Batygin said. Basically, the elongated parts of the highly elliptical orbits of these objects point to the predictive models of Planet Nine.

There are less than 0.1 percent chances for such a configuration to develop only by fortune, reported Konstantin Batygin.

On the other hand, some other researchers have proposed that the clustering was due to the combined pull of many small objects in the Kuiper Belt. But a so-called “self-modulating” Kuiper belt would look very different from the actual belt we see, according to the Caltech scientist.

Also, a recent study suggests that the entire Kuiper Belt, without a Planet Nine within it, doesn’t hold more than 2 percent of the Earth’s mass, and that wouldn’t be enough to shape space objects’ orbits in the way observed by astronomers.


SHARE

Post Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.