Planet X is back. It’s not a superhero but the mysterious member of our Solar System has always been drained them astronomers but that is part of several stories New Age .
The find was announced yesterday by scientists at the California Institute of Technology, USA and published in the journal The Astronomical Journal . But the discovery was not made with the powerful ground-based telescopes and the Hubble mythical, the eye that man has in space.
Click on image to see the chart in full size.
The “discovery” came from rigorous calculations and simulations on powerful computers. According to mathematics, the orbit of this body is very distant, so that goes around the sun every 15 thousand Earth years. Its size. 10 times that of Earth, Neptune almost
“It’s not the first time that the presence of another planet in the solar system is postulated. What is new is that it is based on a quite elaborate computer simulations, but it does not mean I have discovered, “says Dante Minniti, graduated astronomer at the National University of Cordoba (UNC) and expert in worlds outside our solar system.
“It looks very interesting study, but we still need the final evidence: we need to discover the planet, get a picture and study it properly,” the expert
The authors of the research are Batygin and Konstantin. Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology. The latter was responsible for Pluto stop being a planet, the ninth, to become a dwarf planet.
The idea that there is a planet X was always going around among scientists, but the issue He added esoteric nuances. “If you say: ‘we have evidence that Planet X exists’, almost any astronomer will say,’ Is this new? These guys are crazy ‘. I would too. But why is it different? This is different because this time we are right, “Brown said.
The discoverers hypothesis is that the new planet formed closer to our star in the early years of the solar system. But he was expelled to the outskirts of our neighborhood by a series of gravitational carambola and was forced to make a good elliptical orbit.
According to the authors, in their lower distance from the Sun is 200 times the distance between the Sun and Earth (200 astronomical units -ua- or 30 billion kilometers). And estimate that extends to its route 600-1200 UA, far beyond the Kuiper Belt where Pluto is located.
Celestial Mechanics
Batygin and Brown inferred presence of a rare grouping of six previously known objects orbiting beyond Neptune. “They found a small and far away in the distant solar system bodies that have similar orbits. That’s very rare, and these new simulations designed to explain these anomalous orbits suggest that these objects are being influenced by the gravitational pull of a giant planet like Neptune, “Minniti said.
That is, the discovery was made indirectly from calculations of celestial mechanics. Something similar happened with the discovery of Neptune. The German Johann Galle first observed the planet in 1846. But its location was predicted through mathematical calculations by the French Urbain Le Verrier and John Couch Adams English.
Brown knows that no one will believe really in the discovery of Planet X until it appears in the viewfinder of a telescope. “Until there is a direct detection, is a hypothesis, even potentially a very good hypothesis,” he says.
And estimates it will take about five years to monitor most of the area where it could be the tenth planet The best telescope for this mission is the Japanese Subaru, eight meters in diameter and located in Hawaii.
Brown says it would be very rushed and thinking about how to call it. X remains the planet.
“No we have to excite much”
view. “we must not excite much, until it is discovered truth. That will be difficult because being so far would be very weak and its orbit is tilted relative to the plane of the solar system, “says Dante Minniti, he graduated astronomer at the National University of Cordoba (UNC) and now a researcher in Chile.
Issues. “We need to explore a large area of sky. With modern telescopes we can go very deep, but the field of view is small, “he said.
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