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NASA now says there is growing evidence for the existence of the mysterious Planet Nine, also known as Planet X and often associated with the doomsday planet Nibiru.
NASA now says there is growing evidence for the existence of the mysterious Planet Nine, also known as Planet X and often associated with the doomsday planet Nibiru.
Planet Nine seems to be out there, lurking invisible in the darkest outskirts of the solar system, according to a recent press release by NASA.
The existence of the mysterious planet has been the subject
of debate for years, until two American astronomers, Konstantin Batygin
and Michael Brown, began their quest to prove the planet nonexistent
once and for all. Ironically, instead, they found evidence that the
planet exists.
Since their initial 2016 paper on the issue, the evidence has just kept coming.
Batygin's graduate student, Elizabeth Bailey, has published
another paper claiming that Planet Nine might be the reason our planets
are tilted about 6 degrees relative to the sun's equator. Planet Nine's
gravitational field slowly influenced the orbits over the 4.5 billion
years since the solar system formed, Bailey says.
"Over long periods of time, Planet
Nine will make the entire solar-system plane precess or wobble, just
like a top on a table," Batygin said.
Another clue comes from the trans-Neptunian objects that
form the Kuiper Belt — a cloud of small, distant objects that orbit the
sun in an awkward directions, the most distant of which seem to orbit a
common point without an obvious reason. A picture published by Futurism.com
shows the supposed orbit of the six most distant Kuiper Belt objects
and Planet Nine, demonstrating how the latter explains the former.
"No other model can explain the
weirdness of these high-inclination orbits," Batygin said. "It turns
out that Planet Nine provides a natural avenue for their generation.
These things have been twisted out of the solar system plane with help
from Planet Nine and then scattered inward by Neptune."
According to Batygin, there are several natural phenomena that can be explained by the existence of Planet Nine.
"If you were to remove this
explanation and imagine Planet Nine does not exist, then you generate
more problems than you solve. All of a sudden, you have five different
puzzles, and you must come up with five different theories to explain
them."
What remains is to find the planet itself, NASA says.
According to the press release, Batygin and Brown are now using the
Subaru Telescope at Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii to try to do just
that.
The instrument is the "best tool" for picking out dim, extremely distant objects lost in huge swaths of sky, Batygin said.
Earlier this year, NASA issued a crowd-sourcing call
to astronomy enthusiasts, asking people to participate in finding the
elusive planet. The participants were expected to examine "flipbooks"
of images from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), according to the Smithsonian. NASA said that human eyes might find things that automated computer algorithms miss.
