Thoughts about Planet "9".

What’s a planet, exactly?  Astronomers claim to have found “good evidence” of a (***)>>mysterious ninth planet in the far reaches of the outer Solar System,  which they believe has for decades escaped ...Today, two scientists announced evidence that a body nearly the size of Neptune—but as yet unseen—orbits the sun every 15,000 years. During the solar system’s infancy 4.5 billion years ago, they say, the giant planet was knocked out of the planet-forming region near the sun. Slowed down by gas, the planet settled into a distant elliptical orbit, where it still lurks today The claim is the strongest yet in the centuries-long search for a “Planet X” beyond Neptune. The quest has been plagued by far-fetched claims and even outright quackery. California Institute of Technology (Caltech) astronomer Michael Brown and planetary scientist Konstantin Batygin released a report on (1)>>The Astronomical Journal on Jan. 20 saying that they may have found evidence that supports the possibility of another planet in our solar system. The researches came to this conclusion after observing a cluster of Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) that seem to be following a certain orbit and the only explanation is that they are orbiting a distant exoplanet. "We have found evidence that there’s a giant planet in the outer solar system," astronomer and "Pluto Killer" Mike

Brown told Popular Science. "By 'giant' we mean the size of Neptune, and when we say 'outer solar system' we mean 10 to 20 times farther away than Pluto."Since 2003, Brown and other astronomers have discovered six new dwarf planets orbiting on the fringe of the (2)>>Kuiper Belt. They all appear to follow a similar orbital pattern, albeit a really strange one. Well, for one thing, it’s not definitively a planet just yet. For now, (3)>>Planet 9 is a bunch of clues that all seem – to the eyes of the researchers following it – to point in the direction of a previously-unknown planet. Scientists are extrapolating a possible conclusion from odd data they have collected. Which is definitely not the same thing as coming to a firm conclusion.Even if Batygin and Brown can convince other astronomers that Planet X exists, they face another challenge: explaining how it ended up so far from the sun. At such distances, the proto planetary disk of dust and gas was likely to have been too thin to fuel planet growth. And even if Planet X did get a foothold as a planetesimal, it would have moved too slowly in its vast, lazy orbit to hoover up enough material to become a giant Instead, Batygin and Brown propose that Planet X formed much closer to the sun, alongside Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Computer models have shown that the early solar system was a tumultuous billiards table, with dozens or even hundreds of planetary building blocks the size of Earth bouncing around. Another embryonic giant planet could easily have formed there, only to be booted outward by a gravitational kick from another gas giant. How Planet 9 found itself in so remote a place is unclear. It’s unlikely that it formed in situ, essentially coalescing out of the primordial cloud of dust and gas that formed the rest of the solar system, since there probably would not have been enough raw material to form so big a world out that far. Rather, the new planet might have accreted closer in like the other planets, and then been ejected by their gravitational forces. If this planet is found, this would force a reincarnation of our current solar system model which has been around since 2006, after Pluto was officially named a dwarf planet.Professor Sir Martin Rees told The Telegraph that the planet will be detected by their telescopes if it exists, so they just have to wait until their instruments do the job.Mike Brown, the astronomer who discovered this evidence, said that what they found is so big that the conclusion is obvious. The 9 planet’s gravity dominates its surroundings in the solar system, unlike the smaller ones. This is one of the key tests to classify a planet. So while Planet 9 is by no means the only answer to the question of the Kuiper Belt’s odd orbital mystery, it is far from being an impossibility. But until we get a telescope trained in that direction – exactly in that direction – we won’t know for sure. Even then, there won’t be a lot of light from the far-distant sun, so spotting it will be tricky.

Our Sun's MYSTERIOUS COMPANION STAR.

Why do scientists think something could be hidden beyond the edge of our solar system?What if I told you that our sun was part of a binary relationship to a shadowy, hidden star theorists have referred to for 20 to 30 years as Planet X or Zechariah Sitchin’s Nibiru?  There was also recently discovered a dwarf planet, known as  (4)>>Sedna, that has a very unusual, and highly elliptical, orbit. At its farthest point it is nearly 1000 times further away from the Sun than the Earth is from the Sun. Scientists are baffled by its very existence, claiming that it could not possibly remain in its current orbit unless it is being influenced by another, massive object. So it would seem that even though no companion has yet been confirmed, it would seem likely given the observational data we have thus far.  At the time of Sedna's discovery in 2003, it was the farthest body ever seen in our planetary club. Its peculiar path—it never ventures near the giant planets—suggested an equally peculiar history. How did it get there? The Binary Research Institute (BRI) has found that orbital characteristics of the recently discovered planetoid, "Sedna", demonstrate the possibility that our sun might be part of a binary star system. A binary star system consists of two stars gravitationally bound orbiting a common center of mass. That if  this object actually exists and that NASA has been analyzing it now for over 30 years appears to be close to certain. In official circles the object has been called a ?hypothetical? gas giant living in the far reaches of the Oort cloud, which astrophysicists and NASA callTyche, but NASA now claims in a more recent infrared satellite search for it they couldn’t find it so therefore it must not exist. Other names being used run the range of Planet X, (4.1)>>The sun may have snatched Sedna away from another star, new computer simulations show. Our solar system is surrounded by a vast collection of icy bodies called the (5)>>Oort Cloud. If our Sun were part of a binary system in which two gravitationally-bound stars orbit a common center of mass, this interaction could disturb the Oort Cloud on a periodic basis, sending comets whizzing towards us.John Matese, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, suspects Nemesis exists for another reason. The comets in the inner solar system seem to mostly come from the same region of the Oort Cloud, and Matese thinks the gravitational influence of a solar companion is disrupting that part of the cloud, scattering comets in its wake. His calculations suggest Nemesis is between 3 to 5 times the mass of Jupiter, rather than the 13 Jupiter masses or greater that some scientists think is a necessary quality of a brown dwarf. Even at this smaller mass, however, many astronomers would still classify it as a low mass star rather than a planet, since the circumstances of birth for stars and planets differ.The Oort Cloud is thought to extend about 1 light year from the Sun. Matese estimates Nemesis is 25,000 AU away (or about one-third of a light year). The next-closest known star to the Sun is Proxima Centauri, located 4.2 light years away. The case for the companion star is perhaps solid enough to score a victory in a court of law, but in the court of science, the ultimate proof will be in the finding it . The probability of a companion star also gains support by the fact that more than 50% of stars in a galaxy are in a binary system, Of course there is no guarantee on these speculations, above all because we do not know all the astronomical data with enough thoroughness  and everything is based on clues come out in the course of the search for Planet X and Nemesis (a Dark Star, perhaps a brown dwarf) carried out by NASA, by U.S Naval Observatory and by other scientific institutions involved in the last century. The same existence of Nibiru beyond Neptune is not sure and accepted by modern Astronomy yet.Much of the Physics of the theory that the our Sun has a Unseen binary companion has been studied by scientists , not giving the probability that a low mass star orbits the sun at a vast distance no farther than 1 light year in an elongated orbit has not yet been detected visually . The "evidence" for this object is based on the gravitational effects it has on objects , so far long period comets with long elongated orbits , some of the recently discovered dwarf planets provided us with a clue that something is really out there. FOR more discussion see this web site .    (http://planetxnews.com/2015/07/30/the-suns-dark-companion-according-to-physics/)

NOTES AND COMMENTS:

 (***)>>mysterious ninth planet .Others, like planetary scientist Dave Jewitt, who discovered the Kuiper belt, are more cautious. The 0.007% chance that the clustering of the six objects is coincidental gives the planet claim a statistical significance of 3.8 sigma—beyond the 3-sigma threshold typically required to be taken seriously, but short of the 5 sigma that is sometimes used in fields like particle physics. That worries Jewitt, who has seen plenty of 3-sigma results disappear before. By reducing the dozen objects examined by Sheppard and Trujillo to six for their analysis, Batygin and Brown weakened their claim, he says. “I worry that the finding of a single new object that is not in the group would destroy the whole edifice,” says Jewitt, who is at UC Los Angeles. “It’s a game of sticks with only six sticks.”(1)>>The Astronomical Journal.

The far reaches of the Solar System ,
new discovered "dwarf planets" have
mysterious orbits that
hide the presence of large
planet far beyond Pluto.

 The discovery of the world that Brown and Batygin refer to in The Astronomical Journal simply as “Planet 9” began in 2003, with the discovery of a far more modest object named Sedna. A dwarf planet even smaller than Pluto, Sedna is a Kuiper Belt object (KBO), like Pluto one of a vast band of icy, rocky objects that surround the solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune. Brown was part of the team that found Sedna too, and if anything made the new world remarkable, it was its extreme distance from the sun—one that has it completing a single orbit in 11,400 years, compared to Pluto’s 248. There is more to the Planet Nine story:  “A predicted consequence of Planet Nine is that a second set of confined objects should also exist. These objects are forced into positions at right angles to Planet Nine and into orbits that are perpendicular to the plane of the solar system. Five known objects  fit this prediction precisely.” (2)>>Kuiper Belt. Another curious feature of the distant scattered disk is the lack of objects with perihelion distance in the range q = 50–70 AU. It is yet unclear if this property of the observational sample can be accounted for by invoking a distant eccentric perturber such as the one discussed herein. but it's looking likelier that there is an undiscovered planet orbiting beyond the Kuiper belt. If it's there, it's big, far, and slow. It would be roughly 10 times the mass of Earth (or about half the mass of Neptune), likely never gets closer to the Sun than about 100 200 AU, and takes more than 10,000 years to orbit the Sun.(3)>>Planet 9 is a bunch of clues that all seem. The evidence for 'Planet X' - the mysterious hypothesized planet on the edge of our solar system - has taken a new turn thanks to the mathematics of a noted astronomer.Rodney Gomes, an astronomer at the National Observatory of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro, says the irregular orbits of small icy bodies beyond Neptune imply that a planet four times the size of Earth is swirling around our sun in the fringes of the solar system.Planet X - perhaps mis-named now that Pluto has been demoted to a dwarf planet - has been widely hypothesized for decade, but has never been proven.Gomes measured the orbits of 92 Kuiper belt objects - small bodies and dwarf planets - and said that six objects appeared to be tugged off-course compared to their expected orbits. (4)>>Sedna. The trans-Neptunian object Sedna has an extra-long and unusual elliptical orbit around the Sun,ranging between 76 and 975 AU. Sedna's orbit is estimated to last between 10.5 and 12 thousand years. Its discoverer, Michael Brown of Caltech, noted in a Discover magazine article that Sedna's location seemed to defy reasoning: "Sedna shouldn't be there", Brown said. "There's no way to put Sedna where it is. It never comes close enough to be affected by the Sun, but it never goes far enough away from the Sun to be affected by other stars."---Brown therefore postulated that a massive unseen object may be responsible for Sedna's anomalous orbit.  (4.1)>>The sun may have snatched . In a paper published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, lead author Eric Mamajek from the University of Rochester and his collaborators analysed the velocity and trajectory of a low-mass star system nicknamed “Scholz’s Star.”The star’s trajectory suggests that 70,000 years ago it passed roughly 52,000 astronomical units away (or about 0.8 light-years, which equals 8 trillion kilometres, or 5 trillion miles). This is astronomically close; our closest neighbour star Proxima Centauri is 4.2 light-years distant. In fact, the astronomers explain in the paper that they are 98% certain that it went through what is known as the “outer Oort Cloud” — a region at the edge of the Solar System filled with trillions of comets a mile or more across that are thought to give rise to long-period comets orbiting the Sun after their orbits are perturbed. While the close flyby of Scholz’s Star likely had little impact on the Oort Cloud, Mamajek points out that “other dynamically important Oort Cloud perturbers may be lurking among nearby stars.” The recently launched European Space Agency Gaia satellite is expected to map out the distances and measure the velocities of a billion stars. With the Gaia data, astronomers will be able to tell which other stars may have had a close encounter with us in the past or will in the distant future. (5)>>Oort Cloud. The Oort Cloud is a theoretical spherical cloud of predominantly icy planetesimals that is believed to surround the Sun at a distance of up to around 100,000 AU (2 ly). This places it in interstellar space, beyond the Sun’s Heliosphere where it defines the cosmological boundary between the Solar System and the region of the Sun’s gravitational dominance.  The Oort Cloud is an extended shell of icy objects that exist in the outermost reaches of the solar system. It is named after astronomer JanOort, who first theorized its existence. The Oort Cloud is roughly spherical, and is the origin of most of the long-period comets that have been observed. Like the Kuiper Belt and the Scattered Disc, the Oort Cloud is a reservoirs of trans-Neptunian objects, though it is over a thousands times more distant from our Sun as these other two.