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Evidence of controversial Planet 9 uncovered in sky surveys taken 23 years apart
- bikenaga 1y agoOriginal paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.17288 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.17288
- codethief 1y agoNon-PDF link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.17288 https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.17288
- DiogenesKynikos 1y agoThey forgot to change the title from "Overleaf Example" in their LaTeX source file.
- perihelions 1y agoIt's "hello, world!" planetary science with "hello, world!" tooling!
- metalman 1y agowe already have a 9'th planet, but due to the greatest pedantic campain of all time, pluto got demoted. Though given the current situation, ha!, that could change.....perhaps the naming commity will get noticed, and be offered a chance to do a deal, and Make Pluto A Planet Again,(MPAPA)
- brookst 1y agoThis is especially important if it turnes out there is a black hole acting as an additional planet, since it justifies the “Planet X” name.
- chess_buster 1y agoPluto for planet! https://www.planetarium-hamburg.de/en/pluto-for-planet https://www.planetarium-hamburg.de/en/pluto-for-planet
- rini17 1y agoThe same happened to Ceres first. To be fair, Make Ceres A Planet Again!
- metalman 1y agoYa, I know but Ceres is going to get pushed into an intersection with Mars to generate an atmosphere and a hydrological cycle .......testing on fusion rocket drives is ongoing https://newatlas.com/space/pulsar-fusion-rocket-design-slash-space-travel-times/ https://newatlas.com/space/pulsar-fusion-rocket-design-slash...
- QuadmasterXLII 1y agoI mean, if you’re pushing ceres around, teller and ulam already designed the ideal fusion rocket
- Qem 1y agoHopefully the energy released would also remelt it and restart it's magnetic field, to avoid volatile loss again.
- rini17 1y agoRemelting whole planet is such a nonsense, it would take millions of years for the large body as Mars to cool enough for surface to be usable. By the way, the loss of atmosphere takes millions of years too. The popular "we must restart mars magnetic field" trope likes to omit the fact. In the end occassional replenishment of volatiles would probably be cheaper.
- juped 1y agoYes, Pluto is the tenth planet. To discover Planet 9, simply open your ephemerides and look for "Neptune".
- db48x 1y agoBack in the day Mercury, Venus, Earth, Ceres, Pallas, Vesta, Juno, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune were the 12 planets. You could kinda consider Pluto to be the 13th planet, but in 1930 when it was discovered there were already over 1000 named asteroids. So Pluto is the 1146th planet.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rollcat 1y agoThe definition is pretty arbitrary. It's more interesting, what can we learn by studying that object. Even the trivia, like tidal locking, it was one of my 10000 moments (https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/).
- gus_massa 1y agoIf you add Pluto, you must add also Eris and a few more, like 5 or more, and perhaps also Ceres. Here is a nice graphic that excludes Ceres https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_planet#Population_of_dwarf_planets https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_planet#Population_of_d...
- ryao 1y agoWe should add those planets to the official list too. Gauss considered Ceres to be a planet and I believe him over living astronomers. The motivation for this dwarf planet nonsense was to try to keep the official planet list small so children could memorize them with ease, but that is absurd. We do not remove countries from the map to make it easier for children to learn geography and there are over 100 of them.
- nonethewiser 1y agoI mean… there has to be more to it than that right? But im also open to being red pilled on pluto.
- gonzobonzo 1y agoThat's mostly it. If you want to dive into the details, I recommend this debate[1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AFtgZP6Aa8&t=803s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AFtgZP6Aa8&t=803s
- db48x 1y agoFor a generation, schoolchildren everywhere memorized the names of the 12 planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Ceres, Pallas, Vesta, Juno, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The list was stable at 12 for about 40 years, but started growing again in the middle of the century. By 1868 there were 100 named asteroids. Not a single one has people living on it, so making children memorize their names was seen as a waste of time. Teach them about the asteroid belt and then move on to more important things. Likewise with the TNO: teach them about the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud and then move on to more important things. No need to make them memorize Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, Gonggong, Quaoar, Sedna, and Orcus, nor any of the hundreds of other named TNO.
- randomtoast 1y agoI find one theory regarding Planet 9 especially interesting, and that is that it could be a primordial black hole with a Schwarzschild radius on the order of just a few centimeters. So basically, just a golf ball-sized black hole. This would explain why we can see the gravitational effects on the other objects as described in many papers, and it would also explain at the same time why we have no direct observation of this object, because it's simply too tiny and black.
- api 1y agoI really hope this is true, because it would mean there is a black hole close enough it could be examined and studied. This might allow us to test physics ideas that can’t be tested any other way, and maybe even to “finish” physics. It could also allow gravity and Oberth effect acceleration of small probes to meaningful fractions of the speed of light for interstellar flyby missions. Imagine the Oberth effect boost from thrusting in such a deep gravity well.
- TheOtherHobbes 1y agoI really hope it isn't true because if there's one out there, there will be others, and I'd rather not meet one in person. We don't have enough data to see whether there are unexpected instabilities in detected planetary systems. But it would be an interesting project to look for those.
- api 1y agoThey're not dangerous unless you get too close. A black hole is not a cosmic vacuum cleaner. If the Moon were suddenly transformed into a tiny black hole with the same mass, it would continue to orbit the Earth at the same distance. Ocean tides due to its gravity would continue normally. There would not be much effect except that it would no longer be visible with the naked eye and would no longer reflect the sun's light back to Earth. If you found it in a telescope, you might see gravitational lensing as it passed in front of the star field. Objects like probes or old spacecraft stages orbiting the Moon would continue to do so. The only danger would be that if things fell into it I suppose you might get dangerous X-ray and gamma ray emissions from its accretion disc that would be a problem at such a close range. That would not be an issue with a primordial black hole much further away. If there were such an object we could send probes to orbit it and study it, and some experiments may involve firing objects or shooting lasers or beams of particles into it to attempt to learn about the quantum effects at the event horizon. This could be massive for physics, allowing us to access and observe conditions and energies not replicable here on Earth with any current technology. BTW we don't have any hard evidence that primordial black holes exist, but many theories predict them. So far such predictions around black holes have a pretty good track record. If you made me bet, I would bet on them existing. They are a candidate for some or perhaps even all of dark matter, though even if that's not the case they might still exist. It's possible that the dark matter haloes we can spot with gravitational lensing are clouds of these things. ("Clouds" of course is a misnomer-- the distance between them would be many light years.) If planet nine is a PBH it means that at some point one was captured by our solar system into a Kuiper Belt orbit. Even if planet nine isn't one, there still may be small asteroid mass PBHs in our solar system, so we still might find one. They would require extremely sensitive X-ray or gamma ray telescopes or highly accurate gravitational models of the solar system to detect.
- AIPedant 1y agoI think “15 times further from the Sun than Pluto” is more meaningful for most readers than “700 times further from the Sun than Earth.” If it exists, it’s way way way out there.
- ck2 1y agoThere's an episode on "Space & Beyond" where they show all the planets in scale to the realworld on an actual football field. Then to show Planet 9 distance they have to get in a car and drive a few miles. That worked for me.
- 7373737373 1y agoMy favorite: Cody'sLab's "How far away are the nearest stars": https://youtube.com/watch?v=dCSIXLIzhzk https://youtube.com/watch?v=dCSIXLIzhzk Also gives an intuition for how incredibly bright stars shine
- oxidant 1y agoI think Bill Nye has something similar, too.
- WillAdams 1y agoYeah, when the solar system was introduced to my class in grade school, we had an outdoor excursion where the teacher brought out a golfball and place it at one end, then brought out various tiny things (noting scale was very approximate) and paced off each to show the relative distances.
- Nevermark 1y agoI have a set of twelve books by an artist, titled "Astronomical" (one book for each letter). The first page shows the sun, then the rest of the books are almost all simply black pages, but with the planets and asteroid belt entities shown with accurate distance and size scale. It communicates the scales really well, while only taking up a little over a foot of bookshelf space when not being "navigated". I have two heavy metallic retro looking rocket bookends for it.
- perihelions 1y agoThis cannot be evidence of Planet 9 (the Batygin and Brown hypothesis)—it's outright incompatible with it. https://bsky.app/profile/plutokiller.com/post/3lnqm2ymbd22r https://bsky.app/profile/plutokiller.com/post/3lnqm2ymbd22r If those two spots are the same object, that object is on a high-inclination orbit; but the pattern the Planet 9 hypothesis explains is only compatible with a low-inclination object.
- raverbashing 1y agoNah, if it is big, and at that distance, and follows an elliptical orbit then yes it will be "Planet 9^W 8"
- sph 1y agoThe guy killed Pluto and still he isn't done :( Seriously though, is he one of the people responsible for Pluto's demotion to dwarf planet?
- ufo 1y agoHis team discovered Eris and many other trans-neptunian objects, which did fuel the discussion behind pluto's demotion: greatly increase the number of planets, or demote pluto? They're also behind the Planet 9 theory that's discussed in the article.
- db48x 1y agoNobody killed Pluto. Back in the early 1800s children used to memorize the names of the 12 planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Vesta, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. But then in 1845 astronomers discovered Astraea, and now there were 13. In 1847 three more were discovered: Hebe, Iris, and Flora. Then Metis, Hygiea, Parthenope, and Victoria by 1850. The 100th asteroid was discovered in 1868, and the pace only got quicker from there. Somewhere along that line people started using the words “asteroid” and “asteroid belt” and schoolchildren were mercifully spared the pointless task of memorizing hundreds, and later many thousands, of names of asteroids. The same thing happened to Pluto. Just as Ceres was the first discovered asteroid, Pluto was the first discovered TNO. There are now hundreds of named TNO and thousands more that are just numbered. Nobody should force schoolchildren to memorize them all. Just tell them that there are an unknown number of objects in the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud and they’ll know as much as they need to know. Give them bonus points if they know the names Ceres and Pluto, and more if they know why these two were discovered first of all the objects in their class: they’re the biggest. Otherwise there’s nothing special about them.
- K0balt 1y agoI hope this turns out to be wrong. I’m still holding out for a primordial back hole Planet X. That would be soooo cool and unbelievably useful.
- jsbisviewtiful 1y agoWhy useful? Considering how hard of a time astronomers are having to simply find it it’s hard to imagine it being easy to study.
- jiggawatts 1y agoA black hole reachable in a human lifetime with ordinary chemical rockets would be an amazing laboratory for extreme physics.
- tcmart14 1y agoWhat's the first thing we throw in?
- Ylpertnodi 1y ago>What's the first thing... Naah, boring. Who's the first person we throw in?
- mrshadowgoose 1y agoA black hole in our solar system is basically "in our backyard" in relation to typical interstellar distances. Sure, we wouldn't be able to get there for many decades, but "within a century" would be feasible. There are so many unknowns surrounding the nature of black holes. Having one in our backyard would give us a chance to test our guesses.
- andrewflnr 1y agoYeah, finding it is hard, but once you've found it, sending a probe would be totally doable. I think it would be worth it.
- anthk 1y agoWell, 9front guys now have a fancy release name.
- doublerabbit 1y agoCan I move to Planet9? Anywhere is better than this planet.
- Qem 1y agoWith current spaceships you would die of old age long before arrival.
- rvz 1y agoEven before that since the food on the spaceship is finite and once it runs out; you would stave to death before the first year during the journey.
- goku12 1y agoAny such ship is going to grow its own food. They may need to carry some extra matter to compensate for accidentally or inevitably lost biomatter. But otherwise they would be able to recycle the same biomatter repeatedly to create food. The only limiting factor is energy. You'll need to add energy in every cycle. Recycling isn't going to happen for it. Of course, all of this comes with the caveat that nothing like this may exist yet. Sealed mass ecosystems exist in glass jars, but something on the scale of a ship is going to be an entirely different ballgame.
- tiahura 1y agoHow can we spot planets in other galaxies when we can’t even be certain how many planets are in our solar system?
- userulluipeste 1y agoIt has everything to do with the available means that we have, for now. For the record though, we haven't yet been able to spot planets in other galaxies, just in our own Milky Way. The spotted ones just happened to be there when we decided to look, twice. To spot an astral body properly sized to fit the definition of planet, which we yet suspect to orbit around our own star, we should be lucky enough to look exactly at it and not at something else.
- bagels 1y agoI thought the same, but amazingly, there are some early results that suggest a transit was observed in another galaxy: https://science.nasa.gov/universe/exoplanets/exoplanet-discoveries/first-evidence-of-a-planet-identified-beyond-our-galaxy/ https://science.nasa.gov/universe/exoplanets/exoplanet-disco... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extragalactic_planet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extragalactic_planet
- rootsudo 1y agoWhen did Planet X become planet 9? Is it because Pluto was a planet and now no longer is so the X was really a Roman numeral vs a variable (if)?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- xattt 1y agoThe article explains that Planet X is a possible explanation for the apparent regularity of mass extinction events. Planet 9 is a separate concept to explain the bunching of Kuiper Belt objects, like Sedna.
- goku12 1y agoIn other words, PlanetX was a hypothetical rogue planet that appeared unexpectedly from the abyss of deep space and ambushed the unsuspecting Earth every once in a while. It has a dormamu vibe. I see why the scientists didn't like it.
- vpribish 1y agoI can clearly see the object as a bright group of pixels in the IRAS image, but I don't see a damn thing at the spot they hilight in the AKARI image. Like, are they kidding or is this a crap article with the wrong image or something?
- sigmoid10 1y agoYou'd have to read the actual paper [1] to understand this. It does not appear as a physical source in the plot because of how the dataset works. The image is only for reference regarding the position. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.17288 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.17288
- Nimitz14 1y ago[flagged]
- tomhow 1y agoPlease don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- _heimdall 1y agoPluto will always be the 9th planet, I don't care what Neil Degrasse Tyson says.
- astar1 1y agoit's a Mass Relay
- ForOldHack 1y agoIt. Is. Not. A. Planet. Not.
- goku12 1y agoBy the same celestial laws that stripped Pluto of its planet label, this one would be a planet. Unless you decide to change the rules again.
- gitroom 1y agolove how nerdy this whole thread gets - so much hot debate for basically a frozen rock way out there. you think we're ever gonna agree on what counts as a planet or is it always just moving goalposts?
- marsten 1y agoThis would be a planet by anyone's definition, if it's near the predicted 9 times the mass of the Earth. By comparison the entire Kuiper belt – including Pluto – is estimated to have a total mass of about 10% of Earth's mass.
- interludead 1y agoKinda funny how "Planet X" keeps getting rebranded every generation
- alex_duf 1y ago700 times further => isn't it farther rather than further? Non native english speaker here, but last I checked further was a metaphorical distance, when farther was a literal distance. You can push a concept further, but you walk farther right? Or did I miss something?
- williamdclt 1y agoYou’re right in theory, but in practice further is used a lot for literal distance. I don’t think I ever hear farther used at all actually
- dmos62 1y agoIf these words have identical etymology (do they?), then the distinction adds no value, in my eyes.
- iamthemonster 1y agoYou speak English too well - you have surpassed English speakers. None of us know the difference between further and further.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- YeGoblynQueenne 1y agoThey're the same :P
- stevula 1y agoThis is, I think, a learned distinction and not universally observed. I only learned this distinction in university.
- ashoeafoot 1y agois such a excentric orbitting body not like a giant guitar string when it comes to the gravitational influence of "passing bye" solar systems and black holes?
- rietta 1y agoMy lay scientist feel is still that Pluto is a planet, or at the very least have been grandfathered in. The New Horizons reporting 10 years ago just solidified this in my mind. The geological processes are more telling than having cleared the orbital neighborhood. That would just mean that get far enough out and nothing can be a planet no matter how massive. All that said, this massive of an object that far out is very interesting. It would be a very, very cold out there. Would even a gas giant be a solid at that distance? Are there any geological processes possible?