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Recently, the Hubble Space Telescope found a celestial body that provides a hypothesis about Planet Nine. (Also read: Series of Space Missions and Natural Phenomena in December 2020 )
This eleven times Jupiter mass exoplanet is named HD 106906 b. It occupies an unexpected orbit around a double star 336 light years away.
“This raises questions about how these planets formed and evolved to end in their current configuration,” said the paper’s lead author, Meiji Nguyen of the University of California, Berkeley, quoted from NASA’s official website, Wednesday (16/12/2020).
This celestial body orbits its parent twin star at a distance of 68 billion miles, so it takes 15,000 years to complete its orbit.
The planet moves very slowly along its orbit, given the weak gravitational pull of its very distant host star. (Also read: Space is Dangerous to Health, Still Interested in Becoming an Astronaut? )
Planet Nine was first discovered in 2013 with the Magellan Telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert. But at that time astronomers knew nothing about the planet’s orbit. The Hubble telescope allows scientists to make accurate measurements, including historical information to calculate their orbits.
The home system for the gas giant is only 15 million years old. This suggests that Planet Nine – if there ever was one – could have formed very early in the 4.6 billion year-old evolution of the solar system.
(wsb)
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