Posted July 12, 2016

Kardwill
New User
Registered: Sep 2010
From France

Kardwill
New User
Registered: Sep 2010
From France
Posted July 12, 2016
It's never been that simple. When they were discovered in the early 1800, Ceres, Vesta, Pallas and Juno were listed as planets, until astronomers started to find a shitload of rocks in these parts, most of them quite small, and devised the words "asteroids" and "minor planets" ; Pluto was found in 1930 ; our perception of the "outer limit" of the solar system is steadily expanding with new stuff being added to the outer fringe...
Our knowledge of the solar system has always changed to aknowledge new discoveries. And honestly, thinking about all that is "out there", waiting to be discovered/explored, is quite exciting :)
Our knowledge of the solar system has always changed to aknowledge new discoveries. And honestly, thinking about all that is "out there", waiting to be discovered/explored, is quite exciting :)

TwoHandedSword
Sharp tongue, rapier wit, cutting sense of humor
Registered: Sep 2011
From United States
Posted July 12, 2016

For the TL;DR crowd: there's something out there synching up the orbits of the six furthest trans-Neptunian objects found so far. (It could be random chance, but the odds against that are at least 10,000:1).
The best mathematical fit appears to be a super-Earth, about 10x our mass, orbiting the sun about 20x farther out than Neptune. But it'd be so small and dim that scientists still need to narrow down where it most likely is, before they can even start to mount a serious telescopic search.
For those for whom even that was too many words, here's an infographic.

Lifthrasil
Bring the GOG-Downloader back!
Registered: Apr 2011
From Germany
Posted July 12, 2016
Yay! I'm on the map too. Thanks for helping me find myself!
Or it could be a cluster of asteroid-like bodies (like the Trojans, only not bound to a planet) instead of a solid planet. Only the total mass can be inferred, not that it is coherent.
Or it could be a cluster of asteroid-like bodies (like the Trojans, only not bound to a planet) instead of a solid planet. Only the total mass can be inferred, not that it is coherent.
Post edited July 12, 2016 by Lifthrasil

TwoHandedSword
Sharp tongue, rapier wit, cutting sense of humor
Registered: Sep 2011
From United States
Posted July 12, 2016
Possible, but extremely unlikely. Over the course of eons, either all of those individual bodies would have aggregated together anyway, or the counter-pull from Sedna and the other larger bodies would have slowly stripped such a cluster apart, one planetoid at a time.

te_lanus
A Hybrid
Registered: Jun 2012
From South Africa
Posted July 12, 2016

Gengar78
Pathologic 2 is good
Registered: Feb 2014
From United States

Cavalary
RIP GoodOldGOG:DRMfree,one price,goodies,community
Registered: May 2011
From Romania
Posted July 13, 2016

Edit: Strike that, seems to be media mixing up terms here. The IAU recognized the discovery and the discoverers considered it a dwarf planet, but I'm not seeing any formal statement that it was actually recognized as such. It'd be odd if it was, after all.
Initial release
Post edited July 13, 2016 by Cavalary

StationaryNomad
Truckin' Along
Registered: Mar 2015
From United States
Posted July 13, 2016
Intergalactic planetary, planetary intergalactic.
Another dimension, another dimension.
Another dimension, another dimension.

Kardwill
New User
Registered: Sep 2010
From France
Posted July 13, 2016


Post edited July 13, 2016 by Kardwill

Cavalary
RIP GoodOldGOG:DRMfree,one price,goodies,community
Registered: May 2011
From Romania
Posted July 13, 2016


So so far it's just a theory that will be hard to prove. And hard to know where to look, on such a large orbit, even if this one is true and not competing ones of multiple smaller planets, really pretty much impossible to prove with current technology, or I see a larger and closer one also suggested, but that seems very unlikely. Either way, there's a lot of space to scour for something that'd be less than 4x Earth size if an ice giant like Neptune or Uranus, less if icy world, even just 2x Earth size if rocky, and expected to reflect next to no visible light. Few, if any, current telescopes could spot it in infrared if it's in the outer parts of its orbit.

TwoHandedSword
Sharp tongue, rapier wit, cutting sense of humor
Registered: Sep 2011
From United States
Posted July 13, 2016

I used the term "super-Earth" because in the vastness of the Kuiper Belt, a rocky body seems more likely than a gaseous one: passing rocks can (given billions of years) eventually come close enough to merge, whereas the density of space makes gathering enough individual atoms to form a gas giant extremely unlikely at best.
But Cavalary is also correct: there's a fair likelihood that whatever's out there actually formed a lot closer to its parent star — whether that star was our own sun or another stellar body — and got kicked out or captured into its current orbit. In which case, all bets are off as to its composition.
Fun fact: Neptune used to be closer to the sun than Uranus, but it became the unfortunate victim of a resonance battle between Jupiter and Saturn; it got kicked out to its current orbit, and is actually lucky it wasn't ejected altogether. (A leading theory says that there may have been at least one other large body that wasn't so lucky, and did in fact become a rogue interstellar planet. That body is almost certainly NOT the object that scientists think they've found; if it were, it would've been orbiting the sun in the same plane as the other eight planets, not at the skew angle it appears to have.)

Cavalary
RIP GoodOldGOG:DRMfree,one price,goodies,community
Registered: May 2011
From Romania
Posted July 13, 2016
For a fun little example of how easy it is for orbits to change and bodies to collide or be ejected, toy around with this gravity simulator a bit.

Fillary
New User
Registered: Aug 2016
From United States
Posted August 08, 2016
Very interesting information. With each planet discovery we are in one step closer to solving the universe mystery . It's curious when we have the possibility to travel in a space like by plane. I like astronomy a lot.
Post edited September 14, 2016 by Fillary