Showing posts with label Mike Brown. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mike Brown. Show all posts

Saturday, October 22, 2016

Mysterious ‘Planet Nine’ Causing The Solar System To Wobble?

Mysterious ‘Planet Nine’ Causing The Solar System To Wobble?
“Because Planet Nine is so massive and has an orbit tilted compared to the other planets, the solar system has no choice but to slowly twist out of alignment...”

     Astronomers can't see “Planet Nine.” But it makes its presence known.

The massive hypothetical object, which supposedly looms at the edge of our solar system, has been invoked to explain the strange
By Sarah Kaplan
The Washington Post
10-20-16
clustering of objects in the Kuiper belt and the unusual way they orbit the Sun.

Now Planet Nine predictors Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown of Caltech, along with graduate student Elizabeth Bailey, offer another piece of evidence for the elusive sphere's existence: It adds “wobble” to the solar system, they say, tilting it in relation to the sun.

“Because Planet Nine is so massive and has an orbit tilted compared to the other planets, the solar system has no choice but to slowly twist out of alignment,” lead author Bailey said in a statement.

Thursday, April 07, 2016

Is Mysterious 'Planet Nine' Tugging on NASA Probe?

Is Mysterious 'Planet Nine' Tugging on NASA Probe?

     Astronomers are homing in on the whereabouts of a hidden giant planet in our solar system, and could discover the unseen beast in roughly a year
By Shannon Hall
ScientificAmerican
4-5-16

The hunt is on to find “Planet Nine”—a large undiscovered world, perhaps 10 times as massive as Earth and four times its size—that scientists think could be lurking in the outer solar system. After Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, two planetary scientists from the California Institute of Technology, presented evidence for its existence this January, other teams have searched for further proof by analyzing archived images and proposing new observations to find it with the world’s largest telescopes.

Just this month, evidence from the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn helped close in on the missing planet. Many experts suspect that within as little as a year someone will spot the unseen world, which would be a monumental discovery that changes the way we view our solar system and our place in the cosmos. “Evidence is mounting that something unusual is out there [...]