Is there a Planet X?

New Scientist ^ | 31 January 2009 | Govert Schilling

[SunkenCiv]

Planet X would be the most significant addition to the solar system since the discovery of Pluto... Any new object would have to be well clear of the Kuiper belt to qualify as a planet. Yet intriguingly, it is studies of the belt that have suggested the planet's existence. Some KBOs travel in extremely elongated orbits around the sun. Others have steep orbits almost at right angles to the orbits of all the major planets. "Those could be signs of perturbation from a massive distant object," says Robert Jedicke, a solar system scientist at the University of Hawaii... Over the past 20 years, huge swaths of the sky have been searched for slowly moving bodies, and well over 1000 KBOs found. But these wide-area surveys can spot only large, bright objects; longer-exposure surveys that can find smaller, dimmer objects cover only small areas of the sky. A Mars-sized object at a distance of, say, 100 AU would be so faint that it could easily have escaped detection. That could soon change. In December 2008, the first prototype of the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) was brought into service at the Haleakala observatory on Maui, Hawaii.

[discostu]

Right now there isn’t even a planet IX.

[SunkenCiv]

Sez you. :’)

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3252989/posts?page=15#15

[SunkenCiv]

Note: this topic is from 02/18/2009..

join or quit view topics view or post blog bookmark post new topic subscribe