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New Planet Discovered... in our system!

G

Gnug215

New Member
arg-fallbackName="Gnug215"/>
Well, almost confirmed, it seems.

And it's huge! 4 times the size of Jupiter. Well, "our system" apparently includes as far out as the Oort cloud, which is supposedly where it's hiding.

The article is here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/up-telescope-search-begins-for-giant-new-planet-2213119.html

It looks interesting, but needs confirmation.

But so, what does it mean? Well, for one, I was googling around a bit, and it looked like the 2012/Niburu nuts already had their hands, and warped little minds, on it. Swell.

On the other hand, this could be good news for those that have had problems pointing to actual sightings of something in the Oort cloud. As some of you may know, some creationists deny the existence of the Oort cloud, most notably NephilimFree, if I remember correctly.
Well, anyway... it will be nice if we could show some of them an actual picture, because that seems to be what they want as evidence (although this doesn't apply when it comes to evidence for the Bible, of course.)
 
arg-fallbackName="lrkun"/>
o.o Aliens.

Seriously, this is so cool. :) A planet beyond pluto (rip planet Y>Y)
 
arg-fallbackName="lrkun"/>
Duvelthehobbit666 said:
we should call the planet Rupert.
Click to expand...

Why rupert? It hasn't been named yet?
If you grew up thinking there were nine planets and were shocked when Pluto was demoted five years ago, get ready for another surprise. There may be nine after all, and Jupiter may not be the largest.

The hunt is on for a gas giant up to four times the mass of Jupiter thought to be lurking in the outer Oort Cloud, the most remote region of the solar system. The orbit of Tyche, as it is provisionally called, would be 15,000 times farther from the Sun than the Earth's, and 375 times farther than Pluto's, which is why it hasn't been seen so far.
Click to expand...
 
arg-fallbackName="Pulsar"/>
Sigh, another over-hyped astronomy article. Will the media never learn?

There's a possibility that there's a giant planet lurking in the Oort cloud, but this is by no means certain at all.

The question is this: where do long-period comets come from? There's a general consensus that they originate from the (still undiscovered) Oort cloud. But what causes Oort cloud objects to change their orbits and become comets? What disturbs them?
There are many hypotheses: the passage of nearby stars, perturbations by giant molecular clouds, the galactic tide, and yes, an unknown distant planet. The authors in the article, Matese & Whitmire, have been researching the "Planet X" hypothesis for a very long time (the earliest I could find is a Nature article from 1985).
All very interesting, and they might be right, but it's still one possibility among many others. And there's no direct evidence for it.

The sudden renewed interest comes from the fact that NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) should in theory be able to spot this planet. The data will be analysed over the next two years. Three possibilities:
If the planet shows up in the data, that would be awesome, and a long-standing question will have been answered. If it doesn't show up, the planet still might exist, but the satellite didn't see it. Or, there is no planet after all. Time will tell.

Phil Plait also wrote about it.
 
arg-fallbackName="televator"/>
WFT? With a title like that, I expected a freaking planet discovery. That was all speculation instead... I want my money back! ....or a real planet multiple times the size of Jupiter gotdamit! :p
 
arg-fallbackName="RigelKentaurusA"/>
televator said:
....or a real planet multiple times the size of Jupiter gotdamit! :p
Click to expand...
I trust you mean mass as opposed to size. Mature gas giants don't typically get much larger than Jupiter before gravitational compression reverses the trend of the mass/radius relationship for a non-fusing body. Hot Jupiters are often an exception as metal ionisation in their atmospheres results in resistance via interaction with their magnetic field ("Ohmic dissipation"), dumping energy into the planet and inflating it to much larger sizes. We've seen planets up to 2 R[sub]J[/sub].
 
arg-fallbackName="televator"/>
^^ I totally said "size" without thinking about it so now I stand corrected.

....I still wanna see a massive planet (as described) though...
 
arg-fallbackName="RigelKentaurusA"/>
Given the distances involved, it won't look much different than a dot.
Would you settle for images of multi-Jovian-mass planets around other stars?
HR8799crop.jpg

(HR 8799 system, planets b, c, d, and e have masses of ~8, ~10, ~10 and ~10 Jupiter-masses, respectively)
 
arg-fallbackName="BrainBlow"/>
I hate this case. Why?
Planet X/Niburu.
The conspiracy theorists go crazy over this.
 
arg-fallbackName="SagansHeroes"/>
televator said:
WFT? With a title like that, I expected a freaking planet discovery. That was all speculation instead... I want my money back! ....or a real planet multiple times the size of Jupiter gotdamit! :p
Click to expand...
BrainBlow said:
I hate this case. Why?
Planet X/Niburu.
The conspiracy theorists go crazy over this.
Click to expand...
Yeah I felt pretty much the same to both of those.

The first thing I though was "AWESOME"... then immediately followed by immense scepticism, (which was only affirmed by reading the article), and then followed by the dread of how this would excite the conspiracy theorists.
 
arg-fallbackName="televator"/>
RigelKentaurusA said:
Given the distances involved, it won't look much different than a dot.
Would you settle for images of multi-Jovian-mass planets around other stars?
HR8799crop.jpg

(HR 8799 system, planets b, c, d, and e have masses of ~8, ~10, ~10 and ~10 Jupiter-masses, respectively)
Click to expand...

Well that 's cool...it REALLY is, but having a possibly "foreign" mult-Jovian-mass planet would add such an exotic flair to to this good ol' Sol system....aside from life on Earth that is...
 
arg-fallbackName="Gnug215"/>
BrainBlow said:
I hate this case. Why?
Planet X/Niburu.
The conspiracy theorists go crazy over this.
Click to expand...

Yeah, it seems they already have.

I wonder what the Oort-cloud-denying creationists have to say about this, though.
Well, in a fitting fit of convenient rationalism, they'll probably point to the fact that it's sensationalist media hype, and it needs proper scientific confirmation.

*groan*
 
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