Friday, 1 September 2023 – 17:31 WIB
LIVE Techno – The most distant part of the Solar System characterizes a dim realm. This region would be far from the light of the Sun, so even a relatively large planet could easily escape our notice.
A trans-Neptunian object (TNO), which scientists recently discovered beyond the orbit of Neptune, exhibits some strange clustering behavior that could indicate the presence of hidden worlds.
This prompted scientists to come up with the idea of Planet Nine, a large terrestrial planet hidden far beyond visibility.
Now, two scientists have offered an alternative explanation. The first is about a simpler world, like Earth, located closer to Planet Nine in an inclined orbit that has strange behavior because it is associated with something bigger.
According to planetary scientists Patryk Sofia Lykawka of Kindai University in Japan and Takashi Ito of the Japan National Astronomical Observatory, a frozen, dark world if far from the Sun, would be no larger than 3 times the mass of Earth, and no farther than 500 astronomical units from the Sun. .
“We imagine the existence of an Earth-like planet and several trans-Neptunian objects in strange orbits in the outer solar system, which could be signs of disturbances that are suspected to be happening to these planets,” he said.
Illustration of the ninth planet.
The most distant object scientists have ever discovered in the Solar System is at a distance of 132 astronomical units from the Sun. For comparison, Pluto is at an average distance of about 40 astronomical units from the Sun.
But beyond Neptune (30 astronomical units from the Sun), there are clusters of icy rocks and dwarf planets. This is the Kuiper belt, and the objects in it are TNOs.
In recent years, with more sensitive telescopes and surveys, they have been able to find more TNOs than previously identified, allowing scientists to start noticing patterns.
One such pattern is clustering. Several groups of TNOs clump together and move together in clusters of inclined orbits indicating that they are affected by gravity by something much larger than any smaller object we can find to date.
In 2016, Caltech astronomers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin pinpointed Planet Nine as the cause. The planet is estimated to be about 6.3 times the mass of Earth, and orbits at a distance of more than 460 astronomical units.
Supernova dust in Earth’s oceans.
Neither of them was the first to offer an explanation. Lykawka and his colleague Tadashi Mukai, then at Kobe University, noted the TNO grouping and promoted a hypothetically hidden Kuiper belt planet in 2008.
With more data on what’s out there, Lykawka and Ito have revisited the idea and refined it.
They have discovered properties of a hypothetical planet that could explain some of the oddities of the Kuiper Belt. Further observation can determine if they are right.
“We conclude that an Earth-like planet located in a distant, tilted orbit can explain three basic properties of the distant Kuiper Belt,” he explained.
These are prominent TNO populations with orbits outside of Neptune’s gravitational influence, large populations of highly tilted objects, and highly tilted objects where some of the extremes have odd orbits.
2023-09-01 10:31:01
#Earthlike #planets #hidden #solar #system
