If Planet Nine exists, why has no one seen it?
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(Image credit: ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser)
An artist’s depiction of Planet Nine (Credit: ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser)
By Zaria Gorvett
17th February 2021
Strange things are happening at the outer edges of our solar system. An object up to ten times the mass of Earth is pulling others towards it. Is it a planet, or something else?
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Percival Lowell was a man of many errors.

The 19th-Century travel writer and businessman – fabulously wealthy, perennially moustachioed, and often found in crisp three-piece suits – had read a book on Mars, and on this basis, decided to become an astronomer. Over the coming decades, he made a number of wild claims.

First up, he was convinced of the existence of Martians, and thought he had found them (he hadn’t). Others had documented strange lines traversing the planet, and Lowell suggested that these were canals, built as the last attempt of a dying civilisation to tap water from the polar ice caps. He used his fortune to build an entire observatory, just to get a better look. It turned out they were an optical illusion, created by the mountains and craters on Mars when viewed through low quality telescopes.

Lowell also believed that the planet Venus had spokes – seen in his notes as spidery lines emanating from its centre (it doesn’t). Though his assistants tried to find them, it seemed that only he could see this unexpected detail. It’s now assumed that they were shadows cast from the irises in his own eyes, as he looked through his telescope.

But most of all, Lowell was determined to find the ninth planet in our solar system – a hypothetical “planet X”, which at the time was thought to be responsible for the rogue orbits of the furthest-known planets from the Sun, the cool-blue ice giants Uranus and Neptune. Though he never set eyes on this phantom behemoth, the quest consumed the last decade of his life – and after several nervous breakdowns, he died at the age of 61.

Little did he know, the search would still be going – with a few tweaks – in 2021.

Read More:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210216-the-massive-planet-scientists-cant-find?ocid=fbfut

It was quite clear from the outset that Brown’s Planet 9 could’t exist.

For two reasons.

One is that things move so slowly out there that there was not enough time for anything much larger than Pluto to coalesce before the Sun’s solar wind and radiation dispersed the Solar System’s hydrogen. It was the drag of this hydrogen that caused the coalescence because there was no other mechanism for the energy loss required to reduce relative speeds to slow enough for gravity to play a role in coalescence. This was already known 50 or so years ago.

The other is that even before Brown made his proposal, the whole Kuyper belt had already been ruled out by preexisting historical telescope images.

mollwollfumble said:

It was quite clear from the outset that Brown’s Planet 9 could’t exist.

For two reasons.

One is that things move so slowly out there that there was not enough time for anything much larger than Pluto to coalesce before the Sun’s solar wind and radiation dispersed the Solar System’s hydrogen. It was the drag of this hydrogen that caused the coalescence because there was no other mechanism for the energy loss required to reduce relative speeds to slow enough for gravity to play a role in coalescence. This was already known 50 or so years ago.

The other is that even before Brown made his proposal, the whole Kuyper belt had already been ruled out by preexisting historical telescope images.

Yes. Brown is the new Lowell. Lowell discovered Pluto before going mad. Brown discovered Eris before going mad. Perhaps there’s something about the painfully long lonely work of scouring through millions of blank images looking for anything out of the ordinary that drives a man mad.