There’s no need to panic, but a heads up
-- there might be a big bully on the loose,
and it’s tormenting our entire solar system.
Hi there!
Ian here for DNews and I’m here to talk
about a solar mystery that astronomers have
failed to explain… until NOW.
For a long time astronomers have known that
our sun is tilted.
It’s not by much, but the tilt is there
-- its spin axis appears to be over 6 degrees
off-vertical.
So what the heck could have caused THAT?
Well, nobody really knows for sure, hence
the “mystery.”
But there’s some evidence that it has nothing
to do with the sun at all.
Instead there might be an object out there
roughly ten times the mass of Earth bullying
our entire solar system.
Back in January, renowned dwarf planet hunters
from Caltech caused a huge stir when they
announced that they had discovered a group
of small objects in the outer solar system
acting rather strange.
They all seemed to be traveling in the same
direction.
It’s extremely unlikely they are doing this
by chance.
Instead, it must be a massive planet located
20 times farther away from the sun than Neptune,
gravitationally tugging at them.
Of course.
Astronomers call this massive mystery world
Planet 9.
And in new research accepted for publication
in the Astrophysical Journal, they’ve made
a link between the our apparently tilted Sun
and the mystery of Planet 9.
To understand what’s going on, we have to
go back in time to when the solar system was
just being formed.
There was an infant Sun, and it was surrounded
by a disk of gas and dust called a protoplanetary
disk.
It was like a vinyl record, pretty much flat,
and inside of it our solar system’s planets
formed.
They ended up in fairly flat racetrack-like
orbits.
But if one of those planets underwent some
kind of disturbance, like a collision with
another planet, that planet’s orbit could
have been dramatically tilted away from the
orbital plane that the other planets occupy.
Then, over the course of the evolution of
our solar system, this massive world would
have added a wobble over billions of years
to the entire system, causing all of the other
planets’ orbits to tilt as they compensated
for this imbalance.
As Planet 9 is thought to be a pretty big
object, and we already think it can influence
the orbits of smaller objects in the outer
solar system, this unaccounted-for mystery
world COULD be causing the wonkiness of the
entire solar system!
It just so happens that Planet 9’s predicted
orbit is thought to be tilted a whopping 30
degrees away from the orbital plane which,
according to computer simulations, would exactly
account for the observed tilt in the rest
of the solar system.
So guess what?
It’s not that our Sun is tilted, it’s
actually Earth and all the rest of the planets
that are tilted, making the Sun LOOK like
it’s wonky from our perspective.
So now we have all this indirect evidence
of Planet 9.
Isn’t it about time we zoom in on it and
take a picture already?
Sadly, according to the researchers, the search
area is so big and Planet 9 is so far away,
it’s going to take at least 3 years to get
a direct observation of this strange new world.
Want to know more about space exploration?
Our new VR channel, Seeker VR, has a video
about that.
Join Jason Silva as he discusses why humanity
needs to explore space to push our species
forward.
Just use the YouTube app or your VR device,
put on your headphones and get ready to stargaze!
Want to know more about Planet 9?
Well guess what, Trace and Amy covered that
right here.
Do you think Planet 9 is the last big planet
in the solar system to be discovered or do
you think there’s more out there?
Let us know in the comments below and be sure
to like this video and subscribe for more
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