Why Can't Scientists Find the Enormous Planet X?

Hello 42, As science and technology continue to demystify the world around us, we humans have a bad habit of assuming we already know everything, but the truth is, we discover new things about the nature of our universe all the time. We've barely scratched the surface when it comes to knowing everything there is to know, there are many secrets waiting to be revealed and there's a good chance we'll

find

some of them in the most unexpected places. solar system, for example, it's easy to think that in 2021, thanks to millennia of stargazing and the recent introduction of some pretty nifty telescopes, we'll know exactly what's happening there and where, but the solar system is a big place and once As we pass its eight

planet

s and 200-odd moons, our understanding of our own cosmic backyard is surprisingly incomplete, so much so that some

scientists

believe the farthest reaches of the solar system hide a truly gigantic secret: an undiscovered ninth

planet

.

We are talking about a tiny would-be planet. like Pluto, sorry, Pluto or Ceres, if proponents of the nine planet theory are to be believed, the currently unidentified ninth member of our solar system is actually some kind of monster up to ten times the mass of Earth. and four times its radius, this postulated planet is portrayed as a kind of stealthy puppeteer that hinted at achieving its own existence by subtly adjusting the orbits of millions of distant asteroids and dwarf planets with gravity tendrils. It's quite intriguing, but how could such a huge planet remain hidden in our own solar system even today, when modern technology is helping us unravel the inner workings of galaxies in half the known universe to put some context around that question.

It is believed that planet nine is located about 600 astronomical units from the center of the solar system, with one astronomical unit being the average distance between the Earth and the Sun in the context of our solar system. 600 AU is a very long way, in fact, in By comparison, Neptune's orbit places it only 30 AU from the Sun, but in the context of the universe where distances are generally measured in light years, 600 AU is nothing. The most distant object from Earth ever detected is a galaxy known as gnz11 and it can be found 32 billion light years from where you are sitting right now.

When we focus our telescopes on gnz11, we are seeing the universe as it was. 400 million years after the Big Bang, it's true that galaxies are a little bigger and brighter than planets, but even the most distant exoplanets detected so far (any planet located outside our own solar system) are much further away. than the nine planets first observed in 2006. Scans 4 and 11 were found orbiting a star in the constellation Sagittarius and are approximately 27,700 light years from Earth, meaning they are the most distant planets known to humans. They are about three million times farther from Earth than planet nine is supposed to be.

Think of it as the astronomical equivalent of a cryptozoologist discovering a tribe of Yetis high in the cloudy peaks of the Himalayas without even realizing that one had been living in his garden the whole time and that slightly strange analogy takes me away. again to the same question: It's really possible that a giant planet could be lurking in our solar system without us realizing it before we get into all that. Why do people believe that planet nine exists? The search for the ninth member of our solar system began more than 100 years ago with a man named Percival Lowell who became interested in astronomy after reading a book about Mars.

Most stargazers buy one or two books and invest in some kind of simple telescope, but it turns out that Lowell is a member of that particular cross-section of Society knew him as rich people, so he started his new hobby by building an observatory on top of a mountain in Arizona. Lowell was a very smart guy, but it's fair to say that he was probably more famous for his crazy ideas than his good ones. The crazier side believed there was life on Mars and had found evidence to prove it, of course, the idea that perhaps life on Mars isn't particularly controversial even today, but Lowell wasn't talking about life on Mars anymore. microscopic variety.

The Little Green Men Another of Lowell's bold but possibly mental ideas was his belief in the existence of what he called Planet He hit a hypothetical ninth. Planet that he believed was hiding in our solar system Despite all of his brain schemes, Lowell seemed to have a pretty good reason to suspect that another planet might be lurking somewhere out there. He determined that the orbits of the solar system's outermost planets, Uranus and Neptune, were slightly different than what mathematics predicted based on our existing planetary model, almost as if they were being blown off course by some kind of distant massive object. .

Planet x Lowell began searching for this elusive celestial creature in 1906. He devoted all of his energy to the effort. but the years passed without success, it is said that hahaha became so obsessed with his search that his inability to

find

planet of Glow in 1916 as a stroke despite Lowell. His passion and a large portion of his money ensured that the search for Planetex continued after his death and in 1930 the breakthrough was finally achieved when Clyde Tombaugh discovered a new planet using Lowell Observatory's own telescope. in arizona. The newest member of our solar system was appropriately named Pluto, partly in homage to Percival Lowell, its first two letters matching his initials.

You see, you're only crazy until you're right, as you can probably imagine, the people at Lowell Observatory were very pleased with themselves with this development and a lot. Back-slapping and high-fives ensued, but those good vibes didn't last long because it turned out that the reason it had taken decades to find Pluto was that it was very, very faint and moving very slowly across the sky, which which suggested it was much further away. Larger than the other planets and probably quite small, these suspicions were confirmed in 1978 when Pluto's moon Sharon was discovered, allowing astronomers to definitively determine the planet's mass.

A tiny distant planet would have been as capable of knocking planetary heavyweights Uranus and Neptune out of their intended orbits as I would be of knocking Anthony Joshua to the canvas to become world heavyweight champion, which is to say, I wasn't very clear that Pluto was not the plenitex. Percival was looking, but wait a minute, if Pluto wasn't causing the orbital oddities of Neptune and Uranus, that meant something else was right, actually wrong, because it turns out the whole theory of Neptune and Uranus' dubious orbits has been a giant cosmic red herring all along. a fact that was demonstrated in 1989 when Voyager 2 visited Neptune and discovered that we had miscalculated its mass when astronomers plugged the correct values ​​into those complicated astronomical equations that everyone loves so much that they discovered that the orbits of Uranus and Neptune had been exactly where they were supposed to be all along and that was officially the end of planet x, the theorized ninth planet in our solar system, it had never been there in the first place.

If I had made this video a decade ago, it probably would have ended up here. and he obviously would have had a suit and a mustache, but in the last 10 years astronomers have started whispering about planet nine once again because, while Lowell's belief in a hidden ninth planet turned out to have been founded on a massive error, Oddly enough, it seems that the conclusion this false trail led him to may have been correct after all, perhaps the best-known planet nine theory today was put forward by astronomers Constantine Battigan and Michael Brown in 2016. And their hypothesis is not that different from Lowell's 100 years earlier, Batagan and Brown had also discovered orbital anomalies that were difficult to explain based on our current understanding of the solar system, although in this case the orbits were of extreme trans-Neptunian objects ethnos Instead of ethnos planets they are a group of solar system satellites that orbit the sun far beyond Neptune, in the most distant parts of a region called the Kuiper belt, we believe there are literally billions of these asteroids, although until now To date we have only found and cataloged about 2,000 of those we have found so far.

They seem to share some pretty unusual properties, we're talking about orbits that are perpendicular to those of the planets and almost everything else in the solar system, orbits that travel in the opposite direction around the sun to almost everything else in the solar system and perhaps most significant of all the orbits seem to be clustered in a very specific and non-random way, so what is causing all this weirdness? You guessed it, planet nine is back considering how bad things went with the first astronomical expedition to find planet nine, it's easy to be skeptical about it. After all, these claims and many people believe it, it is a strange coincidence that two completely separate observatories, 100 years apart, have led two very different groups of

scientists

to believe in the same giant planet hidden in the farthest reaches of the earth. solar system, but the Vatican and The Browns are certainly not crackpots dedicated to creating gravitational waves, they are incredibly respected in their fields and have a number of accolades to their names.

Constantine the Vatican was included in Forbes' list of 30 scientists under 30 who are changing the world in unpopular 2015. Science magazine named him one of the most brilliant people of 2016. Mike Brown, on the other hand, is quite ironic that The self-proclaimed Pluto-killer was instrumental in reclassifying our solar system's claimant to the crown of Planet 9 to a dwarf planet in 2006. He also co-discovered a dwarf planet of his own iris in 2005. Along with the more radical scientific theories that threaten to fundamentally change our understanding of established facts, there are a large number of skeptics on one side of the argument and a few eccentric and passionate believers. on the other, a bit like lowell and his belief in martians, but when it comes to planet nine, both sides of the debate are populated with genuine geniuses and they all seem to make sense when arguing for or against the existence of the planet nine, so how are we mere mortals supposed to figure out what to believe?

Just as Carl Sagan once said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and while there is some interesting evidence pointing to the existence of Planet Nine, to call it extraordinary would be stretching the truth a bit. Even basically and Browns themselves admit that they can't be sure that Planet 9 exists until they actually manage to find the damn thing, which brings us back to our important question: If Planet Nine really is out there, why is it? We haven't found it yet? I mentioned earlier that the two most distant exoplanets located so far are three million times farther from Earth than planet nine is supposed to be, but as is often the case with very large numbers, it's hard to imagine what that really means. , so let's reduce it to human scale, if you represent the earth, we are standing in Dublin, Ireland, and both sweep 4 and sweep 11 were in Moscow, where do you think you would find planet nine?

The answer is also in Dublin and, in fact, much closer, it would be less than a meter from the tip of the nose, when you put it in those terms, it is easy to assume that if we have not yet found planet nine it is because we have not is there, it should be literally staring us in the face, it's easy to assume that but none of us are idiots so we probably shouldn't, in reality the fact that we have been able to locate such distant exoplanets has no real relevance to the search for the planet nine.

We found 4 scans and 11 scans using a method called transit photometry that involves monitoring a bunch of stars over a long period of time and keeping an eye out for any small dips in the intensity of the emitted light that might indicate a planet is crossing or transiting. through the surface of the star, we use these types of techniques because exoplanets are essentially invisible to us. here on Earth they simply aren't bright enough to be seen directly, so we can only detect them by keeping an eye out for any impact they may be having on their parent star, which makes the search forExoplanets are very unpredictable and when I say Hit and Miss what I really mean is a lot of misses interspersed with very, very occasional hits to detect an exoplanet through transit photometry the Earth, the planet and its parent star have to be perfectly aligned, otherwise a transit will not occur if you were To pick a random star similar to ours somewhere in space, the chances that we could detect an Earth-like planet orbiting at 1au using transit photometry would be a little less than half a percent.

Think of transit photometry as a raw star. The force approach to fighting exoplanets monitors thousands of stars over the course of a few years and you are sure to locate a few exoplanets here and there despite the relatively high odds if, on the other hand, you wanted to find a specific planet orbiting a single star . Transit photometry would be almost useless in our own solar system. Transit photometry could only help us find planets with narrower orbits than our Mercury and Venus, basically, and both are visible to the naked eye when it comes to searching. Planet Nine and other distant objects in the Kuiper Belt and beyond we have to rely on old, regular telescopes, which makes the whole thing a very complicated business.

Earlier this year it was confirmed that the most distant object currently known in our solar system is a planetoid called far far away, which is only 140 au from the sun, which is only a quarter of the way to planet nine, it is true that very distant is also much smaller than what planet nine is supposed to be, but still the point is that we have never detected an object. as distant as planet 9 within our own solar system, not even close, which means that just because we haven't found it yet doesn't mean it's not out there, the solar system is very, very big and the vast majority of him by The volume is still basically unknown to us.

The Vatican and Brown believe that Planet Nine is so faint that it will barely be visible with our current technology, given the perfect atmospheric conditions that can occur only a few times a year, so for now all we can do is try to predict. where we think it should be and then focus our best telescopes on that part of the sky and I hope that earlier you compared not being able to find planet nine in a world where we have already tracked planets dozens of light years from Earth to finding Yetis. in the Himalayas without realizing that one has been living in the garden, but actually that analogy is a little off because it turns out that if there is a yeti in our garden, it is chronically shy and likes to dress in full camouflage clothing , while the few Yetis we discovered in the Himalayas are in exactly the right place at the right time and we are singing at the top of our lungs.

I should note that there are other possible explanations for what could be causing the unusual orbits of the races we've found so far, perhaps the most interesting being the idea that a black hole hidden within our own solar system could be the culprit before. before you start worrying that the Earth is about to be sucked up by a giant cosmic vacuum cleaner. The hole in question would be a small primordial black hole and, so far, a purely theoretical variety that may have formed shortly after the Big Bang. This particular flavor of black hole is much smaller than the average type of collapsed star, being only the size of a grapefruit but with a mass five to ten times that of the Earth as interesting as this and the planet nine theory They sound like the truth may actually be much simpler.

Remember how the evidence that led Lowell to believe in planet The Vatican and Brown are basing their assumptions on the very small sample size of Ethians we have been able to study so far. We are talking about tens of the total population in billions and drawing big conclusions. In fact, small sizing from small data sets is a dangerous business, no matter how convincing they may seem on the surface; ultimately, in science, the burden of truth falls on whoever is making the claim. In theory, however, they think it's just a matter of time, so I guess that means all we have to do is watch this space, literally, thank you for watching, you can get my book, stick a flag on Amazon or audible links to both in the description below thanks