The new study includes a 'treasure map' of the proposed locations of Planet Nine in Earth's sky the red area is where Planet Nine is at its slowest and is therefore most likely to be found.Īs Brown and his colleagues renew their search for Planet Nine with a better idea of where to look, some other astronomers remain skeptical that it even exists.
“It’s funny and it’s cute - but there is really zero reason to speculate that it might be a black hole.” “It was almost a joke when they wrote that paper,” he said. He dismissed the suggestion made by astronomers last year that Planet Nine might actually be a black hole orbiting the sun. While Planet Nine might have formed at such a great distance from the disk of gas around the early sun, it seems likely it formed about the same distance from the sun as Uranus and Neptune, but it was flung off into the outer reaches of the solar system by the strong gravity of Saturn, he said. But roughly six to 10 times Earth’s mass is the most common size of gas giants seen by astronomers elsewhere in our galaxy, although there are none - so far - in our solar system, Brown said. It would be smaller, however: Neptune is more than 17 times the mass of Earth. If Planet Nine does exist, it’s probably a very cold gas giant like Neptune, rather than a rocky planet like Earth. “So I’m excited that this is going to help us find it much more quickly.” “By virtue of being closer, even if it’s a little less massive, it’s a good bit brighter than we originally anticipated,” he said.
The closer orbit would make Planet Nine much brighter and much easier to see, Brown said, although their recalculations suggest it’s also a bit smaller - about six times the mass of Earth, instead of up to 20 times as big. As a result, some astronomers have suggested it doesn’t exist and the clustering of objects noted by Brown and Batygin is the result of “observation bias” - since fewer than a dozen objects have been seen, their clustering might be a statistical fluke that wouldn’t be seen among the hundreds thought to exist. The study has been accepted for publication by the Astronomical Journal, according to National Geographic.ĭespite years of looking, Planet Nine has never been seen. “If I were prescient enough to have had all these ideas ahead of time and then demoted Pluto and found a new Planet Nine, then that would be brilliant - but it really is just a coincidence,” he said.Ī study published online in August by Brown and his colleague at Caltech, astrophysicist Konstantin Batygin, re-examines the evidence for a proposal they first suggested in 2016: that the hypothetical Planet Nine could explain anomalies seen by astronomers in the outer solar system, especially the unusual clustering of icy asteroids and cometary cores called Kuiper belt objects. “It was definitely not the intention,” said Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and the author of the memoir “How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming.” Now, he hopes to fill the gap he created with what he predicts will be the discovery of a “Planet Nine” - a planet many times the size of Earth that might orbit the sun far beyond Neptune. Astronomer Michael Brown led the campaign that controversially demoted Pluto in 2006 from the ninth planet of our solar system into just one of its many dwarf planets.
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