Scientists just found more evidence that Planet 9 exists

[senona]

*UPDATE*




'Planet Nine' Can't Hide Much Longer, Scientists Say


Scientists who have been studying and researching the elusive Planet 9, think that it may be discovered by next winter - 2017.

Planet Nine's days of lurking unseen in the dark depths of the outer solar system may be numbered.
The hypothetical giant planet, which is thought to be about 10 times more massive than Earth, will be discovered within 16 months or so, astronomer Mike Brown predicted.


"I'm pretty sure, I think, that by the end of next winter — not this winter, next winter — I think that there'll be enough people looking for it that … somebody's actually going to track this down," Brown said during a news conference Wednesday (Oct. 19) at a joint meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) and the European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) in Pasadena, California.


Brown said that eight to 10 groups are currently looking for the planet. [The Evidence for 'Planet Nine' in Images (Gallery)]

At the "next one of these [DPS-EPSC meetings], we'll be talking about finding Planet Nine instead of just looking for it," added Brown, who's based at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena.

The possible existence of Planet 9 first came about in 2014, put forth by astronomers Scott Sheppard and Chadwick Trujillo, of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., and the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, respectively.

Sheppard and Trujillo noted that the dwarf planet Sedna, the newfound object 2012 VP113 and several other bodies far beyond Pluto share certain odd orbital characteristics, a coincidence that would make sense if their paths through space had been shaped by an unseen, giant "perturber" in the region.


The researchers suggested that this putative planet is perhaps two to 15 times more massive than Earth and lies hundreds of astronomical units (AU) from the sun. (One AU is the Earth-sun distance, about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers.)


This interpretation was bolstered in January of this year by Brown and fellow Caltech astronomer Konstantin Batygin, who found evidence of a perturber's influence in the orbits of a handful of additional distant objects. This "Planet Nine," as Batygin and Brown dubbed the putative world, likely contains about 10 Earth masses and orbits on a highly elliptical path whose aphelion (farthest distance from the sun) is about 1,000 AU, the researchers said. (For perspective, Pluto gets just 49.3 AU from the sun at aphelion.)

Astronomers have said Planet Nine is perhaps four times wider than Earth, and such an object would be easily visible with professional-grade equipment if it were relatively close to Earth, Brown explained.

"This is well within reach of the giant telescopes," he said. "The Subaru telescope, I think, on Mauna Kea, [in Hawaii] — the Japanese national telescope — is the prime instrument for doing the search. But there are a lot of other people who have clever ideas on how to find it, too, that are trying with their own telescopes."

So which research team will ultimately find Planet Nine? Brown said he isn't sure, and he stressed that getting credit for the historic discovery should be a secondary concern for astronomers. 

"There are a lot of people looking, and we are trying as hard as we can to tell people where to look," he said. "We want it to be found."

Sure he says that whoever discovers the planet when the time comes,  it won't matter who gets credit, being as they all just want it found.

However, deep down, one has got to hope that 'they'  are the ones to make the wonderful discovery of finding the elusive Planet 9 when the time comes.

What an exhilarating moment that would be, truly!
To know you changed what we know of our planets forever.

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