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Is an Unseen Planet Skirting Edge of Our Solar System?
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A planet four times the size of Earth may be skirting the edges of the solar system beyond Pluto, according to new research. Too distant to be easily spotted by Earth-based telescopes, the unseen planet could be gravitationally tugging on small icy objects past Neptune, helping explain the mystery of those objects’ peculiar orbits.
The claim comes from Rodney Gomes, a noted astronomer at the National Observatory of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro. Gomes presented his recently completed computer models suggesting the existence of the distant planet at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Timberline Lodge, Ore., earlier this month.
This artist’s conception illustrates a giant planet floating freely without a parent star. Astronomers recently uncovered evidence for such lone worlds, thought to have been booted from developing star systems. The sun may have captured such a planet, which new work shows may reside at the edge of the solar system.
Astronomers who attended the talk find Gomes’ arguments compelling, but they say much more evidence is needed before the hypothetical planet can be crowned as real.
For several years, astronomers have observed that a handful of the small icy bodies that lie in the so-called “scattered disc” beyond the orbit of the planet Neptune, including the dwarf planet Sedna, deviate from the paths around the sun that would be expected based on the gravitational pulls of all the known objects in the solar system.
Sedna, for example, swings around the sun in an extremely elongated orbit — tracing out a very long oval. “Sedna’s orbit is truly peculiar,” said Mike Brown, an astronomer at Caltech who led the team that discovered Sedna in 2003.
However, when Gomes ran the same calculations with the addition of the gravitational pull of a massive planet at the outskirts of the solar system, Sedna and the other anomalous objects’ expected orbits fell in line with observations. The unseen planet would be too far away to perceptibly perturb the motions of Earth and the other inner planets, but close enough to the scattered disc objects to sway them. [ The True Stories of 5 Mystery Planets ]
Unknown entity
Several planet types could fit the disturbances seen in Gomes’ calculations. For example, a Neptune-size planet, about four times bigger than Earth, orbiting 140 billion miles (225 billion kilometers) away from the sun would influence the anomalous objects in the observed manner. Or, a Mars-size planet with a highly elongated orbit — but one that always kept it well beyond the orbit of Pluto — could yield similar results. As for how it got there, the planet could have been born in and expelled from a distant star system and later captured by our sun’s gravity, Gomes said, or it could have formed near our sun and gradually been thrust outward through gravitational interactions with the other planets.
2013-02-21 20:07:57
Source: http://truthisscary.com/2013/02/is-an-unseen-planet-skirting-edge-of-our-solar-system/
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