Thursday 21 January 2016

Ninth Planet?

Someone give Pluto a hug, a true ninth planet has been found... sorta. The evidence for the new planet, estimated to be 5000 times heavier than Pluto with a year tens of thousands of earth years long,  rests on the odd orbits of a handful of tiny icy objects waaaaaaay out on the edge of the solar system.

Infographic from space.com

Call me a spoilsport, but people wouldn't believe I'd found Bigfoot because I'd found one unexplained track... that's a bit unfair, the guys behind the original paper have done their work well. But you get my point: This isn't a 'find' regardless of what the headlines say. Even so, I'll be following this with interest, it'd be amazing if this really did turn into a 'Planet 9' discovery.

Below is NASA's director of planetary science on the subject, and as he puts it:
"What we really have here is an early prediction of a new planet, based on computer modelling"



No comments:

Post a Comment