There may be a massive disturber beyond Pluto

Matthew Riley
The Monitor Daily
Fri, 04 Sep 2015 06:29 UTC

After New Horizons probe's historic flyby of planet Pluto on July 14, 2015, NASA plans to get the tiny craft even further. New Horizons is now slated to reach a tiny icy body in the Kuiper belt on New Year's Day, 2019, but scientists believe that beyond that region a hidden planet may be lurking, the famous Planet X.

Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution of Washington explained that the some of the rocky bodies in the Kuiper belt are large enough to be qualified as dwarf planets, but none of the known KBOs (Kuiper Belt Objects) is larger than Pluto.

Yet, there's a chance that scientists missed out something since there are clues that a tenth planet may be lurking in our galaxy's outer reaches. Planet X may be larger than Pluto and our planet. Sheppard thinks that it may be as big as Neptune.

"I think there are definitely things out there bigger than Pluto that are yet to be discovered," he added.

Sheppard and a fellow researcher disclosed the theory in the journal Nature last year. According to the document, there may be a "massive perturber" located beyond the Kuiper Belt. Scientists believe that the mysterious planet is a dwarf planet that is located three times farther from our star than Pluto is. Astronomers based their theory on awkward disruptions in the orbits of several large space objects in the region.

Researchers explained that these objects share an identical orbital pattern that is unusual for space objects their size. For instance, all of them come to the periphelion at the ecliptic, and all of them come from below the plane. The two scientists wrote that this behavior cannot be random since there seems to be a pattern in how these very remote objects orbit the sun.

And the pattern can only have one explanation - there's a large object with incredible mass that disturbs their orbits. Sheppard called that object "the disturber."

A massive disturber can disturb the objects coming close to it, but it can also gravitationally lock objects into identical orbits. Scientists argued that the phenomenon is common to asteroids that come dangerously close to Earth. Most of them "prefer" certain orbital angles that prevent them from impacting our planet.

Nevertheless, the phenomenon may have another explanation, as well, since the sample of small objects analyzed by Sheppard and his team is quite small - a dozen. So, the team currently tries to extend research and see if their hypothesis is confirmed in the case of other "extreme" KBOs.

Reader Comments

rbateman1 · 2015-09-04T07:00:08Z

Planet X

Oh yeah, there is something out there much bigger than Earth, but try to find it. One of the biggest problems is a dark body that gives a very weak signal at great distance from the Sun.

Baybars · 2015-09-04T19:09:20Z

IBEX

Let me play devils advocate and suggest that our outer planets are affected by their proximity to the Heliosphere, [Link] the edge of the electromagnetically charged envelope that our sun, Sol, sets up to protect our system as it hurtles through the open space between other star systems in our arm of the galaxy [Link] .

Our part of space is like an ocean with waves of dense material compressed by the energy of near-by exploding stars. Our heliosphere protects us for most of our journey through the less dense parts but every now and then we collide with a dense wave which can push back our heliosphere inside the orbits of our outer planets. [Link] When this happens the outer planets and the rings of rock are disturbed. If the wave is very dense and our sun is in a weak period, like it is coming to now, the heliosphere can be pushed in towards the middle planets like Saturn and Jupiter, the planets with the most moons to shed. Given these findings there is some basis for Velikovskys' theories that Venus and even the Earth were at one time moons of Saturn and/or Jupiter.