Physicists think they finally know what Planet Nine is: an exoplanet stolen from another star

Everything about Planet Nine is weird. There’s the fact that something 10 times more massive than Earth and four times its size might have been lurking on the outer edges of our Solar System this whole time, and we’ve only just noticed it.

And what about its super-elongated orbit, which appears to take an incredible 10,000 to 20,000 years to complete? But forget all that, we don’t even really know if it even exists yet!

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If a planet nine didn’t exist what else could explain the alignment of KBO ?

Cymek said:

If a planet nine didn’t exist what else could explain the alignment of KBO ?

Set move by the Greenbay Packers?

Cymek said:

If a planet nine didn’t exist what else could explain the alignment of KBO ?

That’s an easy one to answer: the answer is TIME.

Objects in any solar system, including dust and gas, start out with random orbits. The inner parts are more dense so start interacting. As they interact they lose kinetic energy to heat through viscosity (gas-gas interaction), through drag (gas-dust interaction) and through inelastic collision (dust-dust interaction). But they don’t lose angular momentum as they lose energy. So they slowly settle into a state with fixed angular momentum and minimum kinetic energy, which is a disk in which every object has a circular orbit.

So the inner part of the solar system (the 8 inner planets) have lost all the energy that they can and are all on circular orbits in plane. Outside that, the Kuyper Belt, is still in the process of losing energy so has a general alignment with the inner disk, but because orbits are slower and particle and densities are less has not had time to lose all its kinetic energy and settle down into a plane with circular orbits.

Outside in the Oort Cloud, speeds and densities are less and interactions are so few that there has been virtually no loss of kinetic energy from the initial state of random inclinations and eccentricities.

There’s nothing new about what I’ve said, this was already known at least 100 years ago, and possibly as far back as the time of Kepler 400 years ago.

As for “planet nine”, it can’t possibly exist because there hasn’t been enough time since the origin of the solar system for it to form.

mollwollfumble said:

There’s nothing new about what I’ve said, this was already known at least 100 years ago, and possibly as far back as the time of Kepler 400 years ago.

As for “planet nine”, it can’t possibly exist because there hasn’t been enough time since the origin of the solar system for it to form.

Which is the reason they are postulating our solar system captured a planet from another system.

Postpocelipse said:

mollwollfumble said:

There’s nothing new about what I’ve said, this was already known at least 100 years ago, and possibly as far back as the time of Kepler 400 years ago.

As for “planet nine”, it can’t possibly exist because there hasn’t been enough time since the origin of the solar system for it to form.

Which is the reason they are postulating our solar system captured a planet from another system.

I find it hard to understand how a planet ten times the mass of the Earth would not have been reflecting enough light for us to pick it up no matter what orbit it had with our sun.

Postpocelipse said:

mollwollfumble said:

There’s nothing new about what I’ve said, this was already known at least 100 years ago, and possibly as far back as the time of Kepler 400 years ago.

As for “planet nine”, it can’t possibly exist because there hasn’t been enough time since the origin of the solar system for it to form.

Which is the reason they are postulating our solar system captured a planet from another system.

Isn’t it just trying to explain the alignment of KBO with a more complex and exciting means rather than the mundane explanation of time. I imagine if you did discover a ninth planet you’d win a Nobel prize so every now and then someone tries to postulate the existence of one with scant? indirect evidence,

Cymek said:

Postpocelipse said:

mollwollfumble said:

There’s nothing new about what I’ve said, this was already known at least 100 years ago, and possibly as far back as the time of Kepler 400 years ago.

As for “planet nine”, it can’t possibly exist because there hasn’t been enough time since the origin of the solar system for it to form.

Which is the reason they are postulating our solar system captured a planet from another system.

Isn’t it just trying to explain the alignment of KBO with a more complex and exciting means rather than the mundane explanation of time. I imagine if you did discover a ninth planet you’d win a Nobel prize so every now and then someone tries to postulate the existence of one with scant? indirect evidence,

Have to go with that if they don’t pick something significant up quickly don’t you?

mollwollfumble said:

Cymek said:

If a planet nine didn’t exist what else could explain the alignment of KBO ?

That’s an easy one to answer: the answer is TIME.

Objects in any solar system, including dust and gas, start out with random orbits. The inner parts are more dense so start interacting. As they interact they lose kinetic energy to heat through viscosity (gas-gas interaction), through drag (gas-dust interaction) and through inelastic collision (dust-dust interaction). But they don’t lose angular momentum as they lose energy. So they slowly settle into a state with fixed angular momentum and minimum kinetic energy, which is a disk in which every object has a circular orbit.

So the inner part of the solar system (the 8 inner planets) have lost all the energy that they can and are all on circular orbits in plane. Outside that, the Kuyper Belt, is still in the process of losing energy so has a general alignment with the inner disk, but because orbits are slower and particle and densities are less has not had time to lose all its kinetic energy and settle down into a plane with circular orbits.

Outside in the Oort Cloud, speeds and densities are less and interactions are so few that there has been virtually no loss of kinetic energy from the initial state of random inclinations and eccentricities.

There’s nothing new about what I’ve said, this was already known at least 100 years ago, and possibly as far back as the time of Kepler 400 years ago.

As for “planet nine”, it can’t possibly exist because there hasn’t been enough time since the origin of the solar system for it to form.

> As for “planet nine”, it can’t possibly exist because there hasn’t been enough time since the origin of the solar system for it to form.

OK. I need to qualify that. According to the standard model of planet and planetesimal formation (i.e. cold accretion) it can’t exist because there hasn’t been enough time for it to form. But my opinion is that cold accretion is not the whole story, everyone agrees that binary stars don’t form by cold accretion, and I claim that hot Jupiters don’t form by cold accretion. “Planet nine” could form in the same way that Proxima Centauri formed, by the collapse of an independent cloud of gas. Instead, “planet nine” needs to be rejected for the same reason that “hyper-intelligent rocks on Earth” are rejected – Occam’s Razor.

I think it would shock everyone if one of the telescopes up there suddenly zoomed in on a big fat planet we’d missed for millennia.

It’s all damn neo-Velikovsky again.

mollwollfumble said:

It’s all damn neo-Velikovsky again.

It will become a steampunk myth-world of fantastic immortals.

Postpocelipse said:

mollwollfumble said:

It’s all damn neo-Velikovsky again.

Velikovsky is a good ref for a bit of sideways opinion to look up. Cheers.

Postpocelipse said:

Postpocelipse said:

mollwollfumble said:

It’s all damn neo-Velikovsky again.

Velikovsky is a good ref for a bit of sideways opinion to look up. Cheers.

maybe not so much……