In our solar system there is a mysteriously dark, distant and icy kingdom, far beyond the giant striped icy planet Neptune – the great planet most distant from our Sun. Astronomers are just beginning to explore this strange kingdom, where a dancing mass of icy and icy objects – some large, some small – surround our star in the mysterious darkness of interplanetary space, where our sun shines with only one light fire. and seems just an unusually large star floating in the eternal twilight of the cold sky. Called the Kuiper Belt, the area is the icy homeland of the dwarf planet Pluto and its moons, as well as many other comet-like objects. In January 2016, astronomers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, announced their historic discovery of new evidence pointing to the existence of a giant planet that orbits a very elongated orbit within the outer limits of our system. This supposed ninth major planet, which scientists have called Planet Nine, has an amazing mass about ten times the mass of Earth, and on average it orbits about 20 times farther from our star than Neptune, which orbits our Sun. 2.8 billion miles on average! In fact, astronomers have calculated that this potential new planet will take 10,000 to 20,000 years to make one full rotation around our Sun.
The astronomers who made this discovery, Dr. Konstantin Batygin and Dr. Michael Brown, have discovered the planet’s supposed existence using mathematical models and supercomputer simulations, but they have yet to directly observe this new possible addition to our Sun’s family.
“It will be a real ninth planet. Since ancient times, only two real planets have been discovered, and this will be the third. It’s a pretty big part of our solar system that can still be found, which is quite interesting,” Dr. Brown said in a Press Release, January 20, 2016. Brown is Professor of Planetary Astronomy Richard and Barbara Rosenberg in Caltech.
The founder of the Lowell Observatory, the American astronomer Percival Lowell, a century ago put forward the hypothesis that the mysterious and distant planet X secretly hiding in the eerie icy darkness on the outer borders of our solar system. best worthy of such an elusive world. The ninth planet orbiting our Sun will never come about 200 times the distance of the Earth-Sun, or 200 astronomical units .e., This will place the planet far beyond Pluto, in the strange kingdom of the Kuiper Belt, where icy bodies float in the freezer far from our star. One AU is equivalent to the distance between the Earth and the Sun, which is approximately 9.3 million miles.
Dr. Batygin and Dr. Brown concluded that this remote world exists from the movements of several other Kuiper Belt (KBO) objects. Unfortunately, the history of similar and previous scientific assumptions about the existence of distant worlds, such as the Ninth Planet, suggests that this may end in another false positive. Indeed, astronomers have spent years pondering the existence of other large planets inhabiting our outer solar system, in addition to the four already known: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. However, there is no confirmation yet.
“Although we were initially rather skeptical about the existence of this planet, as we continued to explore its orbit and its significance for the outer part of the solar system, we are increasingly convinced of its existence. For the first time in 150 years, there is strong evidence that the planetary account of the solar system is incomplete,” Dr. Batygin said in a press release from Caltech dated January 20, 2016.
Historic hunt for Planet X
The giant greenish-blue ice planet Uranus – the seventh largest planet from our Sun – was discovered by British astronomer William Herschel on March 13, 1781. Herschel explored stars of all sizes. 8 or brighter when he noticed an object moving across the starry sky over time.
German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle discovered Neptune in 1846, guided by predictions derived from observed perturbations in the orbit of Uranus. In 1906, Perseval Lowell began a hunt for the mysterious and hypothetical Planet X, which he said would surround our star beyond Neptune, just as Neptune is beyond Uranus. Lowell’s calculations led astronomers from the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, to the discovery of Pluto, but this charming little distant world was not big enough to be Planet X.
The trajectories of each of the eight known large planets in our Sun family are slightly disturbed by the gravitational pull of the other seven planets. Conflicts between what was observed and what astronomers had expected at the turn of the 20th century, including more distant planets, Uranus and Neptune, have raised widespread suspicion that more planets live on the outer borders of our system. Neptune. However, this chase did not lead to the discovery of tiny Pluto by the American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh until 1930.
The Kuiper Belt took its name from the Dutch-American astronomer Gerard Kuiper, although its true role in the assumption of its existence is sometimes disputed. Since the first Kuiper Belt (KBO) object was discovered in 1992, the number of known KBO has grown to thousands – and it is believed that more than 100,000 KBOs with a diameter of more than 100 kilometers revolve around our Sun in this isolated and frozen region . .
In 1999, observed disturbances in the orbits of comets led some astronomers to suggest that the shooting star – the so-called brown dwarf – was haunted by the outer boundaries of our solar system. A brown dwarf is the rest of the star nest, it’s smaller than a real star, but bigger than a planet. These objects, which actually have a very beautiful pink-purple color called “purple,” probably form the same as real stars, due to the gravitational collapse of a relatively small drop in a huge cloud – a dark molecule consisting of gas and dust. However, brown dwarfs are too small for nuclear fusion to ignite.