Planet Nine is a
theoretical, undiscovered giant planet in the mysterious far reaches of our solar system.
The presence of Planet Nine has been hypothesized to explain everything from the
tilt of the sun's spin axis to the
apparent clustering in the orbits of small, icy asteroids beyond Neptune.
But does Planet Nine actually exist?
© ShutterstockAn artist’s concept of a hypothetical planet with a distant sun.
The Kuiper Belt is a collection of small, icy bodies that orbit the sun beyond Neptune, at distances larger than 30 AU (one astronomical unit or AU is the distance between the Earth and the sun). These Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) range in size from large boulders to 2,000 km across. KBOs are leftover small bits of planetary material that were never incorporated into planets, similar to
the asteroid belt.
The discoveries from the most successful Kuiper Belt survey to date, the
Outer Solar System Origins Survey (OSSOS), suggest a sneakier explanation for the orbits we see. Many of these KBOs have been discovered to have very elliptical and tilted orbits,
like Pluto.
Mathematical calculations and detailed computer simulations have shown that the orbits we see in the Kuiper Belt can only have been created if Neptune originally formed a few AU closer to the sun, and
migrated outward to its present orbit. Neptune's migration explains the pervasiveness of highly elliptical orbits in the Kuiper Belt, and can explain all the KBO orbits we've observed, except for a handful of KBOs on
extreme orbits that always stay at least 10 AU beyond Neptune.
Comment: As Pierre Lescaudron details in a series of fascinating articles, there is strong evidence that cosmic catastrophes have helped shape life on our planet: The Seven Destructive Earth Passes of Comet Venus
See also:
- Last mammoths plagued by genetic defects
- Australian aboriginal stories of ancient sea level rise have survived for 10,000 years
- Australian Aboriginal people were baking bread and farming grain 30,000 years ago
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