New Evidence Found for Planet 9 with Konstantin Batygin

you've fallen into Event Horizon with John Michael Godier in today's episode John is joined by Dr. Constantine Bigan, assistant professor of

planet

ary science at the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Bigan graduated with a bachelor's degree in astrophysics in 2008 and won the Laurence Deck Prize for his thesis. dynamical stability of the solar system is on the 2015 Forbes list of 30 scientists under 30 who are changing the world Constantine pigan welcome back to the show thanks John, it's great to be back now that you have a new paper out and in my sights presents yet another case, another line of perhaps

evidence

for the existence of Planet 9 somewhere, can you give us an overview of the new paper and the angle you took to analyze it?

Of course, yes, this article presents the fifth and most statistically significant

evidence

we have to date for the existence of Planet 9. What we analyze in this article is a population of trans-Neptunian objects that we had ignored until now. These are populations of long-period IC asteroids that typically live beyond the

planet

. orbit of Neptune, so these are things that range from hundreds to thousands of astronomical units, but they have orbits that pierce the orbit of Neptune at its closest approach. Well, these are Neptune crosses and we also specifically looked at the subpopulation of these Neptune crosses that live.

They are close to the plane of the solar system now because they cross the orbit of Neptune because this ice giant kicks them, their orbits are unstable and if they were left alone they would disappear, okay, just because we see them. it needs some form of outside gravitational influence to sustain a steady-state flow of these bodies. What we show in this paper is that not only is Planet Nine up to the task, but the parelia distribution is the orbital distribution that the Planet 9 model predicts. It is perfectly consistent with what we see in the data. ; conversely, you can rule out a solar system without Planet 9 with a five sigma confidence, so that's the basic kind of nugget of what we present in this work, now we need to delve into what the meaning of five sigma is. is very true, that is true, even for a particle physicist, that might be satisfactory and they are rarely satisfied, very rarely the bar is much higher, it is three sigma and this is way above that, so that is very interesting.

And now what happens? The idea that interactions with the galaxy itself cause it, yes, so we look at it quantitatively in this article. He said there is an alternative scenario. The alternative scenario is that the galactic tide is the effective gravitational attraction on these distant bodies from the galaxy. cumulative potential of the galaxy itself that can modulate the eccentricities of the long-period orbits and can generate a stable state of these long-period Neptune crossings, the answer is good, but it turns out that in that scenario you obtain a distribution of orbits that They all stack up with perhelion distances, so closest approach distances that are very close to Neptune's orbit, okay, this is kind of equivalent to what happens with comets and Jupiter.

Jupiter has something called the Jupiter barrier, this is something like the Neptune barrier and these objects have a hard time crossing that barrier, conversely, what the observations say is that the peria distribution is quite flat between 30 Au, where There is Neptune today and about 15, so the easiest way to think of it is that between Neptune and Saturn there is a kind of flat distribution of the closest approaches between these long period orbits and that characteristic cannot be reproduced by the galactic tidal model. However, it can be perfectly reproduced by the planet nine model. It does this and I imagine the answer is no, but does this work for you?

Either way, you know the multiple lines of evidence that are now present, does that give you any way to narrow down where exactly Planet 9 could be? I guess you mean heaven, yeah where is it? Where are you pointing the telescope correctly? Well, then there are ways to constrain it, there's not a way to calculate it the way you could do with Neptune. Just with Neptune, the way he discovered Neptune was he looked for disturbances in Uranus and he was able to deduce that okay, the acceleration coming from that direction is correct and the reason you could do that is because you can see in the right data Uranus moving through a large fraction of its orbital arc.

In the case of the outer solar system, we don't have that right, all we have are orbits, so the simplest way to think about it is that if all you have are orbits, and in any case the orbits respond to Planet 9 a through a phase average, what we call secular dynamics, then all you can calculate from that is the mass of planet nine. and its orbit now, because its orbit is eccentric and it spends a larger fraction of its time away from the Sun, you can make statistical arguments about where it should be, plus you can use previous observational studies that have looked at large chunks of this type. and say well, since they haven't

found

it, it's probably ruled out from this part of the orbit or that part of the orbit and thirdly, you can use the spacecraft telemetry, particularly the spacecraft data Cassini, to make interesting inferences about where it may place.

Planet 9 and not have it show up as a significant sense of error in the emities, you can play all these games, but at the end of the day they don't give you a location in the night sky where you can just point a telescope and find a damn thing, you they give a pretty wide range now you have it and this goes back to the previous work have you been able to eliminate areas? They say it's very unlikely to be there or there oh, I absolutely have been able to do it from the other direction, yes.

Yes, absolutely, yes, there are certain areas that we are in. I wouldn't say certain, but we think it's unlikely that Planet 9 will be okay. He said the area where it is likely to be is wide enough to require a substantial amount of observing. cover the whole thing and we've been doing it for the last five six years, but it's really a challenge because the right part of the sky is up in December, you know, January, November and in the northern hemisphere the weather is It wasn't amazing during those months, as you can imagine, the efficiency of our search that we have been doing together with Mike Brown, my partner in crime and a few other people, they are right that the efficiency of that search is not too high.

That's why I'm excited about the launch of the Bar Rubin Observatory because since it's online, even though it doesn't reach all the northern latitudes that we would like in the search for the planet, it makes the observations over and over again every night correctly and that leads to a very, very efficient search, that's one of the things I think we should do, we should build an identical telescope, another telescope like the Ver Ribbon observatory in the northern hemisphere, because that's what it would look like to me, I mean, I can't think on a more exciting telescope than these survey telescopes, but as far as I know, there are no real plans for it.

I say we go to One Step Beyond and build like 20 at least as a starting point in orbit. Yeah, well, I mean, why? no, yes, yes, that's another impossible dream. I think we should have made the Kepler space satellites and used them to cover more than one small spot, there you have to build a bunch of identical satellites and look everywhere, although I guess in Some Sensory Tests they do that, but still, yeah, Yes, but that test is not that deep. Kepler's field is still unique and there are still weird things there and anyone can look at Kepler's light curves and see amazing things, the variability. and stars that you can just and that's one of the things that was a minor hobby of mine, I was as a planet hunter looking at the Kepler light curves and you can see flares in the stars, you can see, you know the variables, I see it had variables. and things like that as I click, it was really amazing and then there were weird things like KS 8462852 and some others, yeah, now with Planet 9, what's the estimated mass?

So that's about five Earth masses, as time has gone on our estimate has dropped by about a factor of two, in the first article we put in 10 Earth masses because, well, it was a nice round number, but in articles Later we realized the machinery of how the disturbances worked, of how Planet 9 was sculpting the patterns of the distant Kyper Bel. The objects that we were looking at we realized that ah 10 the mass of the Earth is an overestimate that would result in too narrow a set of orbits, you know, and then adjusting it, you know six five, that's the current best fit, uh , better now when the Reuben version is up and running and the first light is on.

I think at the end of this year, are you going to jump in and start looking at the data at all and I think the data becomes public immediately? I mean, I think there are about six or 12. I don't remember exactly how many hours of delay there are, but yes, the data is made public immediately. It's going to be a really exciting time. I think it will be revolutionary for this problem. The problem of the planet. I think it has. In this case, we will also immediately find things that evade the explanation of any model, because until now, for the most part, most studies have been limited to the plane of the ecliptic, while we have been looking in the plane of the ecliptic. the solar star solar system, but if Planet N9 is there and the statistical evidence is now really starting to suggest that Planet 9 is outside the plane of the solar system, then the kind of dynamics that it generates that are three-dimensional in nature is really quite remarkable and So starting to get observational control over distant tenos populations that are very tilted to the plane, which will tell us really interesting things and I bet we'll get really confused for the first year, yeah, that's just one of many things, I mean, that telescope is going to find things like UAA, we're going to see more of what you know and things you know, really interesting things now, if Planet 99 is very tilted, what does that say about its history , in other words? presumably it's something that was ejected from the inner solar system at some point, but how does that happen?

How does an ejected object leave the plane of the solar system in which it formed? First of all, it's a fantastic question and it seems like these days, there is a pretty compelling resolution to this question and now, to be clear, this is not my work, it is a work directed by Andre Zoro, but he came and gave a nice colloquium in Calac a few months ago and I was really impressed with what he and his collaborators are doing, indeed, the scenario appears as follows: first we know that the solar system was formed in a cluster of stars, the system solar did not form an isolation, we know that for multiple reasons, first of all, stars generally do not form.

On their own, they tend to form in associations and secondly, the presence of aluminum 26 in the early solar system, for which there are multiple lines of evidence indicating that the solar system must have formed alongside other stars that could have formed. contaminated in this short time. element lived now, since the solar system formed in a cluster, any object that Jupiter and Saturn eject, including Planet 9, has the possibility of being disturbed by the passing stars and the general tital field of the cluster on its exit and what Andre and company have shown is that you can reproduce exactly this orbit of planet 9 very well.

We need to explain all this in a very coherent way. Those calculations don't know anything about planet N9, so to speak, they're just asking. the question of as planet formation develops in the outer solar system and a fraction of a few five Earth mass embryos disperse, where they got parked by the cluster and a good fraction of them park where Planet 9 is , so I think that's the most compelling question. formation scenario to date and ultimately if Planet 9 is there and I suspect there's a good chance it's the best formation theory we have, maybe we don't need another one now, which is actually a field Really fascinating in their own right are researchers who are looking for sister stars of the Sun that are chemically similar to the Sun and

found

some candidates that might actually be from the same birth cluster, yes, to see that maybe Planet N9, yes, maybe the position of Planet 99 is a relic of those days, an interaction with another star.

Now, that's not the only time we can have that, although in the case of the star Schula recently in past geological time, you know, within the Orc Cloud, that can cause dynamic things, you know, whenever we We found another star up close, so it sure can cause dynamic things. but that is different in terms of goodsreal estate from where Planet 9 lives, or the Cloud itself extends to almost 100,000 astronomical units. Planet n is like 600 away, so when you have stellar encounters through cloud o and they actually happen all the time. They perturb the O Cloud, but not the inner O Cloud, which is material, say, a thousand Au on the semimajor axis, so there is a distinction between the type of icy debris populations that can form early in the evolution of solar systems while it is still embedded within the cluster and the type of dynamical interactions that can develop later and there are two differences that are critical number one, of course, in the solar birth environment, the number density of stars is drastically higher, even in average are 1,000,000 times higher than in the countryside.

The second important thing is that stars travel slowly in birth associations; Its typical dispersion speed is about one kilometer per second. Conversely, in the solar frame, typical passing stars fly by at about 40 km/second, so the impact of a stellar flyby on a cluster is It is also amplified by the fact that it lasts longer in a cluster, so that's why. if you want to create Planet 9, create the interior or the Cloud, you have to do it early, you don't have the opportunity to do it later. Now I'm constantly going to do an experiment something a little different than what I usually do. the show and I'm going to ask, yeah, we have questions from the audience, let's do it, open lines, like YouTube's modern version of open lines where I tell people who's going to be on the show and then they send questions about patreon and YouTube memberships and we have several so let's see what we have here fantastic Jackal hit asks if Planet 9 exists can we call it manura it retains a naming convention for planetary bodies and our solar system and she was the goddess of wisdom can we call it minurva and if not, have you?

I even thought I'd name it if you find it, so it's a great question. The question about the name arises all the time. I imagine something else in the solar system is already called manura last time we checked what it was, I don't know. In about 2016, among the Greco-Roman gods and goddesses, like the shul demigod unleashed, he was still available I think, but with the exception of that one, I think they were all absorbed by the asteroid belt, the Kyper belt and other things now . There was a petition on Change.org addressed to me, Mike, and IU.

I'm thinking about naming planet 9 after David Bowie and at first I wasn't sure, but then I think it's a good idea because I think about it. Having Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and David Bowie like that would be amazing, so that's where my tub goes. Barry White, that's what I would suggest, or Robert Goulay, Robert G, you'll be there. TRUE. Titan asks if it could have moons. in fact, I hope so because if so, we can probably observe them with HST and if we observe them with HST, then we can directly calculate the mass of planet 9, if you discover it, look at it and say: oh. yes, there is a mass, we do not know its mass, the moons are the way to measure the mass of the planet KN, now the next question is going to be very complicated, I suspect that I think I already know the answer, gas giant or solid, not the we know.

I know well, there is no way to do it, first of all, gas giant in the sense of Jupiter, it is not true, we gas giants are not formed with five Earth masses, but I think the question is: do we know if the rocky core is surrounded by a hydrogen helium? massive gaseous atmosphere and the answer is we don't really know there's reason to suspect that it might be because if it formed in the outer solar system then why wouldn't it have captured a Hellenic hydrogen atmosphere? But then strange things can happen during ejection. events so that's nonsense I'll say and I personally hope it has a hydrogen helium envelope because then it will be easier to detect if it's just a bare rock with a low white we could be in trouble you know there are so many There are so many possibilities within that because if it's just a bare rock but it has a lot of water ice, you know, yeah, and it was originally in the inner solar system, it could have once been a water world, you know, I mean, you would have There are so many things.

What to think about that is really mind-blowing and then you have to think about this, you know, this object that is well Beyond the Helium hiatus for four and a half billion years, what does the interstellar medium do to it? How does that change the surface anyway? Yes, you are absolutely right that there are beautiful questions there. Know. I would hope it was Ren. Wouldn't it just be being in the interstellar medium like that? That's the conventional wisdom. Yeah come on. to find out, I think the next question is not conventional wisdom, it's out there and I like it, okay, Richard Nichan asks: is there any chance it's a drop of Dark Matter?

Is there any chance it could be a drop of Dark Matter? So I'll be honest, I don't know. what dark matter is made of, in principle yes, and you know, there are ideas about cosic dark matter and things like that, so things that are a few earth masses that are au size are that plausible. I suspect the answer Yes, one of the things I have to admit is that planet n being a planet is the most boring scenario you could come up with. I mean, really think about it if we found it tomorrow and then, you know, look back on everything.

In 20 years we would say how boring the story is that we found some asteroids that were gravitationally perturbed and then said why, oh, there's an extra planet and then there was one, right, there wouldn't be anything fundamentally unusual. about that, we have a lot of asteroids perturbed by planets, we have a lot of Kyber belt objects, we know they are perturbed by planets, so yeah, it's fun to think about the other exotic scenarios, could it be a mass of dark matter? an asymmetric Dark Matter Halo could be there have been questions in the literature about whether it could be a primordial black hole that has five Earth masses or whatever and it's fun to speculate about all this at the UN but unfortunately we can't calculate the composition , as well as a Scientist, I can't really answer that question because it doesn't fit well with the machinery I have on hand to answer that question.

First you have to find it and take a good look at it, if it is a dark mass. we're going to have a hard time finding it directly, I think not, but that would be not yet, but the cosmologist would love it because that would really shed light on an obviously very dark substance, oh yeah, at least it tells you. I can do weird things, yeah, I mean, that's going to be yeah, I don't want to dwell on this too much, but you know, imagine a scenario where the Rubin bar comes online and confirms every line of evidence we have for the Planet.

N9 and let's say it's okay, everything. This is what you actually know for sure, it's true and then years go by and we don't detect it correctly, so we have all this gravitational evidence for it and there's no direct optical evidence or electromagnetic evidence for it, what do you do then? I think eventually you'll have no choice but to start speculating about more exotic phenomena and that brings us to some recent work which is anyway a recent paper that says this may have something to do with Mand and actually this could be much more Big than a planet.

It could be something completely different. What is your point of view on that hypothesis? Yes, I read that there are a couple of articles. I read them both quite carefully. You know, I'm not an M expert by any means, and it was actually interesting. exercise to learn how Mand works, so my understanding is that while this is an exciting and speculative idea, recent work published by David V and David N and David and Scott Tain suggests that if you adopt that model and if you look at the behavior about comets, you get the totally wrong answer, like either Spike leaves, the solar system will look completely different, so I think that was a good idea.

I don't think it falls short. explanation for Planet 9, but I want to congratulate the authors for really thinking outside the box and doing the quantitative exercise of showing that yes, you know, if M worked the way they imagine it, then it would align the orbits towards the galactic , you know, towards the galactic center, which is kind of what we see, you know, it's not exactly what we see, but it's close enough that I can argue that that's what you see, so I really enjoyed reading that article. No, I think that's ultimately not the explanation, but you know, it was a good idea.

I also thought the real Boy Wonder asks how long the estimated full rotation around the Sun is for Planet 9 based on current estimates. In other words, do we have? Do you have an idea of ​​its orbital period, yes, it's about 20,000 years, maybe 10,000, 10 to 20,000 years, it's a long year. Yeah, you have to live like a movie or something to really fully appreciate the length of that. Revolution now, a Twitter question that is always interesting: Does any of this work rule out the brown dwarf or the small black hole? Theory: are they still standing according to their current article?

Okay, so the brown dwarf idea is not ruled out not by this work but by the The Wise Mission results are fine and have been ruled out since 2009 or 10, something like that. I remember I was in graduate school, but Mission Wise basically proved that there are no brown dwarfs, no Jupiter, and no Saturn in the outer solar system. It's hard to rule out a small black hole because, well, a small black hole like a five Earth mass black hole would have a short shield radius of about 10 cm, so how can you rule that out? Said that there have been searches for males.

I think it dates back to the '90s as a candidate for dark matter, which suggests that the number density of such objects would be quite low, so I don't know exactly what the numbers are on that, but I think the hole idea primordial black, although it is not ruled out. The output is speculative now Frank Cadillac asks a very spooky question O How could Planet N9 affect the cloud dynamics and potentially the impact frequency of comets and asteroids on Earth? It's really a small correction if you're worried about things. impacting the Earth there is a planet that you should worry about and it is Jupiter because Jupiter is not 500 Au away, it is F, you know, 5 Au away and it is not five Earth masses, it is 300 Earth masses, right, and fact the Jovian resonances are in the asteroid belt responsible for you know, ultimately sending meteorites to Earth.

Meteorite asteroids move by radiative effects towards the Kirkwood gaps, which are the resonances with Jupiter. There they reach chaotic orbits that diffuse upward in eccentricity until they cross the orbit of Mars and then you know they move on. This chaotic route to Earth is by far the biggest problem we have. Planet 9 is not important to our survival, it would have already shown up as a problem, but that brings us back to what we talked about before. Estrella Solsa that could have been a problem and we won't know for a while yet but I could have sent a lot of comments this way that are on the way oh not at all I don't remember so there are worse things in the planet.

N9 says that can happen and it may have already happened, for all we know, what is the planet n concert, so back in 2017 I had the pleasure of meeting Eduardo Mar, director of the Miami Symphony, who was inspired in this research and I wrote a beautiful extension of Holes Planets Sweet and I had the honor of playing guitar along with the Miami Symphony because the main part of that piece of that song is for electric guitar and it was the best thing we played in a couple of live shows. in Miami in 2019, then during the pandemic we recorded it asynchronously and then we played it for the astronauts floating around the International Space Station and, you know, talking to them and that was really cool and, in fact, we are doing again. doing it in May together with the Caltech Orchestra and I'm very excited about it, it's something that someone you know could go see or get a recording of, yeah, so the recording with the Miami Symphony is on YouTube if you type Planet 9 miso miso or Planet 9 Miami Symphony, you'll find it, it's great, you know, well done video, well done audio and I think the Caltech the Caltech presentations will be open to the public.

I'm not sure, but I think we'll now put a link to that YouTube video in the description below so everyone can find it now. Yeah, great, Constantine, what's the next step? Will it be the first or is there something you can do? before that, to once again help narrow down where Planet 9 might be, where we might discover it, that's a big question, so we're certainly going to try, ultimately we're limited by, you know, by our imagination and our ability to build things, build models correctly. We, in parallel, should say that there are a lot of things that are not published andthat we try and they don't work, so we're always trying to find new angles, but the exciting thing is that Horizon for the first time is online and providing this new The remarkable new amount of data is so short that I suspect the data will beat us and the Most of the time progress in astronomy is achieved thanks to new observational data that reaches theorists who sit back and say: My God, what is going on here? is unexpected and then say oh of course I should have seen this years ago and then work backwards so I actually do Wonder on a Perpetual, do we generally as a field suffer from the collective phenomenon of the drunk searching for his keys under his the light because that's where the drug dealer can look for his keys and suddenly it'll be like the whole parking lot lights up so I'm excited about that, absolutely me too and one last question also from Frank Cadillac, how could the discovery of the Planet 9 influences our understanding of planetary formation in other star systems in other star systems well, that's a good and deep question.

Let me start by saying that, of course, one of the things we've learned from the Kepler data and from the testing. and all this wonderful fun on extrasolar planets over the last three decades is that the most typical planet that seems to make up the Galaxy is one that has three four five Earth masses, so the closest we'll get to that in our solar system if To discover Planet 9 is Planet 9, studying its properties will be the best window we will have to learn about what extras the Solar Planet is or what analogues of extrasolar planets can look like in general, more generally, I think it will really solidify some of our understanding. of what happens on the outskirts of planetary systems when they are born in star clusters and how the really icy long-period dynamics of planetary systems develop, for that we don't really have good observational control for exoplanets, so This would be something that would pave the way and open the broader discussion about what happens at the outer edges of planetary systems.

Okay, we ran out of time and that was great. I can't wait because I really think and believe it. I know it's not scientific to say this, but I think Planet 9 is there and I think it will be interesting to have a discovery of a major solar system planet during my real life. It hasn't happened since the 1930s so I'm looking forward to the I need and found this, thanks John.