"The existence of a giant planet beyond Neptune -- referred to as Planet Nine (P9) -- has been inferred from the clustering of longitude of perihelion and pole position of distant eccentric Kuiper belt objects (KBOs). After updating calculations of observational biases, we find that the clustering remains significant at the 99.6\% confidence level. We thus use these observations to determine orbital elements of P9. A suite of numerical simulations shows that the orbital distribution of the distant KBOs is strongly influenced by the mass and orbital elements of P9 and thus can be used to infer these parameters. Combining the biases with these numerical simulations, we calculate likelihood values for discrete set of P9 parameters, which we then use as input into a Gaussian Process emulator that allows a likelihood computation for arbitrary values of all parameters. We use this emulator in a Markov Chain Monte Carlo analysis to estimate parameters of P9. We find a P9 mass of 6.2 (+2.2, −1.3) Earth masses, semimajor axis of 380 (+140,−80) AU, inclination of 16±5∘ and perihelion of 300+85−60 AU. Using samples of the orbital elements and estimates of the radius and albedo of such a planet, we calculate the probability distribution function of the on-sky position of Planet Nine and of its brightness. For many reasonable assumptions, Planet Nine is closer and brighter than initially expected, though the probability distribution includes a long tail to larger distances, and uncertainties in the radius and albedo of Planet Nine could yield fainter objects."
Could it be a small black hole?
Or is it just a matter of us not spending the time/effort to find it. I know time on instruments like Hubble is very, very tight and scheduled out years in Advance. But they have been talking about Planet X since like the 80s at least, and probably earlier.
Even Pluto was detectable relatively early and it’s on a crazy orbital plane and elliptical orbit.
It could, the relevant part of the whole thing is the object's mass (and therefore its gravitational influence) and its orbit.
Lex Fridman did a podcast interview a few months ago with Konstantin Batygin [0] about the topic of Planet Nine and he poses this exact question of whether or not it could be a black hole [1].
More specifically, he asks if it could be a primordial black hole which would make it a double discovery since primordial black holes are still only theoretical.
I get that Pluto was demoted, but it's still a planet, if dwarfish, so it should still be Planet X (X as in ten, but X can also mean undetermined number, which is perfect).
Nemesis is a hypothetical star, not Planet 9/X, explaining different phenomena; it would be farther out.
But, yes, Planet 9 is more recent name for the same hypothetical object as Planet X:
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/hypothetical-planet-x/i...
How far out can a planet be if it has a roughly circular orbit? At some point outwards neighboring heavy things will make it unstable.
For the Sun it's a bit more than 1 light year, but in practice almost all orbits will be quite a bit under this: less than 0.8 ly.
...so I would imagine that anything even 1ly out would be unstable, over several hundred million years. Solar systems may even exchange very outer outer "planets".
The distances between the planets fit nicely on a log scale.
Something very noble and approachable to it. Good job. Find that planet for us! We appreciate it.
There are so many other visually appealing options [0] that are attractive while still being perceptually uniform. There's even Google's Turbo [1] colourmap for those who refuse to give up rainbow-like colourmaps.
[0]: https://matplotlib.org/stable/tutorials/colors/colormaps.htm...
[1]: https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/08/turbo-improved-rainbow-col...
There is so many alternative that it is hard to know which replacement you should pick. If you pick the wrong one you are a moron, if you stick with the bad default it's way less noticeable, even if it is a strictly worse choice.
I guess women are better suited to science work after all. ;)
Since it's showing a probability density, wouldn't it make most sense to just use a grayscale in this case? As the probability density approaches zero the visual would disappear as well. This is more intuitive, as the probability is zero off the edge of the graph/page
I think you only need this color vomit if you have a change between two states, or you have multiple intermediary states and want some visual "clustering".
You can actually see the problem very clearly b/c it ends up having a weird dark-blue to white cut is some of the plots.
This wouldn't even be half the mass of the smallest gaseous planet, but would be much larger than the largest terrestrial planet. Which do astronomers think it would be?
If it's not Hydrogen, it's rocks.
Then pump the known history of the solar system in and find out with what it fills the gap.
Probably not due to nine being such a outlier, would have to arrange the model to not filter out rare events.
If you got really lucky, there could be public data from telescopes that had already recorded whatever regions of space were of interest, and evidence of planet nine might have been disregarded as noise.
An easy approximation:
What is this telling me?
Essentially it's a common physical scientist way of expressing a point estimate with a confidence interval. (In the life and social sciences they tend to just provide the point estimate and confidence interval explicitly.)
Relative to the Earth, P9 and background stars don't move much at all relative to one another.
For all we know it formed billions of years ago in another system, and then was ejected from its home system from some near miss with its sister gas giant.
And 6 times mass of earth. Where Uranus and Neptune are x15 of earth.
Inclination 6 degrees are comparable with other planets.
Makes you wonder if maybe the interstellar space is just filled with tons of these little rocky planets.
That's not even three-sigma. I'm not sure if this is real evidence of a planet nine. Just a chance alignment of orbits seem like the most plausible explanation.
(No, not the original Bode's Law, which was just a first approximation! Mathematician Mary Blagg did the real work in the early 20th century, but was mostly unacknowledged until nearly 70 years later.)
It works, not just for the solar system, but also for the satellite systems of Jupiter and Saturn; but no one knows precisely why...
