This
artistic rendering provided by California Institute of Technology shows
the distant view from Planet Nine back towards the sun. Picture:
Infrared Processing and Analysis Center
US
ASTRONOMERS announced last month they may have found a ninth planet
beyond Neptune, but conceded they had no idea where on an estimated
10,000-20,000-year orbit it might be.
But this week a French science quartet said they have narrowed the search area.
By
studying data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn, the
seventh planet from the Sun, they could exclude two zones, the team
wrote in the journal
Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Their work
confirmed that a ninth planet might exist in the far reaches of our
Solar System, co-author Jacques Laskar of the Paris Observatory said,
“but not just anywhere”.
Based on mathematical modelling, the
French scientists calculated what influence a ninth planet — travelling
along the orbit speculated by the American scientists — would have on
the movement of other planets as it passed nearby.
They then looked at how the known planets actually behaved.
The planet is thought to circle the Sun in a lopsided, highly elongated, oval loop.
At
its most distant from the Sun, the planet would be too far too away for
any effect on other planets to ever be detectable, thus limiting
astronomers to a searchable zone representing only about half of the
total orbit.
Now Mr Laskar and his team have reduced the search
area by 50 per cent by eliminating two zones in which they say the
modelling does not match reality.
“We have cut the work in half,” he told the AFP news agency.
California
Institute of Technology astronomer Michael Brown points to a yellow dot
simulating Planet 9 on a computer video simulation last month. Picture:
Damian DovarganesSource:AP
Last
month, astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown predicted the
existence of what they dubbed Planet Nine, about 10 times bigger than
Earth.
Its existence was predicted with mathematical modelling and
computer simulations, and was said to exactly explain the strange
clumping behaviour of a group of dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt, a
field of icy objects and debris beyond Neptune.
Mr Laskar and his
team said the search field could be further narrowed if Cassini, due to
finish its mission next year, was extended to 2020.
Astronomers
expect it would take years to find Planet Nine, if it exists at all. It
would take a very large telescope to spot the planet at that distance,
and with no clear idea of where on its very large orbit it is.
Many other planets have been predicted through modelling over the years, mostly wrongly.
In one famous case the science was right — the discovery of Neptune, first predicted from its gravitational pull on Uranus.
news.com.au 25 Feb 2016
Isn't Planet Nine/Nibiru/X supposed to be a 'conspiracy theory'?