The Orbit of Planet Nine
findplanetnine.blogspot.com
findplanetnine.blogspot.com
"The existence of a giant planet beyond Neptune -- referred to as Planet Nine (P9) -- has been inferred from the clustering of longitude of perihelion and pole position of distant eccentric Kuiper belt objects (KBOs). After updating calculations of observational biases, we find that the clustering remains significant at the 99.6\% confidence level. We thus use these observations to determine orbital elements of P9. A suite of numerical simulations shows that the orbital distribution of the distant KBOs is strongly influenced by the mass and orbital elements of P9 and thus can be used to infer these parameters. Combining the biases with these numerical simulations, we calculate likelihood values for discrete set of P9 parameters, which we then use as input into a Gaussian Process emulator that allows a likelihood computation for arbitrary values of all parameters. We use this emulator in a Markov Chain Monte Carlo analysis to estimate parameters of P9. We find a P9 mass of 6.2 (+2.2, −1.3) Earth masses, semimajor axis of 380 (+140,−80) AU, inclination of 16±5∘ and perihelion of 300+85−60 AU. Using samples of the orbital elements and estimates of the radius and albedo of such a planet, we calculate the probability distribution function of the on-sky position of Planet Nine and of its brightness. For many reasonable assumptions, Planet Nine is closer and brighter than initially expected, though the probability distribution includes a long tail to larger distances, and uncertainties in the radius and albedo of Planet Nine could yield fainter objects."
Could it be a small black hole?
Or is it just a matter of us not spending the time/effort to find it. I know time on instruments like Hubble is very, very tight and scheduled out years in Advance. But they have been talking about Planet X since like the 80s at least, and probably earlier.
Even Pluto was detectable relatively early and it’s on a crazy orbital plane and elliptical orbit.
It could, the relevant part of the whole thing is the object's mass (and therefore its gravitational influence) and its orbit.
Lex Fridman did a podcast interview a few months ago with Konstantin Batygin [0] about the topic of Planet Nine and he poses this exact question of whether or not it could be a black hole [1].
More specifically, he asks if it could be a primordial black hole which would make it a double discovery since primordial black holes are still only theoretical.
Sure, ~300AU is a long way, but we have the technology, and it’s our closest black hole candidate by many orders of magnitude
I get that Pluto was demoted, but it's still a planet, if dwarfish, so it should still be Planet X (X as in ten, but X can also mean undetermined number, which is perfect).
Nemesis is a hypothetical star, not Planet 9/X, explaining different phenomena; it would be farther out.
But, yes, Planet 9 is more recent name for the same hypothetical object as Planet X:
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/hypothetical-planet-x/i...
Something very noble and approachable to it. Good job. Find that planet for us! We appreciate it.
There are so many other visually appealing options [0] that are attractive while still being perceptually uniform. There's even Google's Turbo [1] colourmap for those who refuse to give up rainbow-like colourmaps.
[0]: https://matplotlib.org/stable/tutorials/colors/colormaps.htm...
[1]: https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/08/turbo-improved-rainbow-col...
There is so many alternative that it is hard to know which replacement you should pick. If you pick the wrong one you are a moron, if you stick with the bad default it's way less noticeable, even if it is a strictly worse choice.
But your point "if you stick with the bad it's way less noticeable" is understandable.
There is no exclude for using Jet today and Journals should reject papers using bad colormaps
I guess women are better suited to science work after all. ;)
Since it's showing a probability density, wouldn't it make most sense to just use a grayscale in this case? As the probability density approaches zero the visual would disappear as well. This is more intuitive, as the probability is zero off the edge of the graph/page
I think you only need this color vomit if you have a change between two states, or you have multiple intermediary states and want some visual "clustering".
You can actually see the problem very clearly b/c it ends up having a weird dark-blue to white cut is some of the plots.
I still think it's a bit visually confusing when you're representing the existence or non-existence of something (the planet is in this region, and not anywhere else)
You could in theory do both.. rotate in hue and fade to white. If you did it right, when if you printed it out in B&W you'd get the grayscale equivalent :)
Maybe it'd look a bit silly
It's strange but the first linear color space (CET-L03 red-yellow-white) seems to go to a lightness of 100. On the far right it looks white as expected. However the other one (CET-L20) looks very nice, but it doesn't seem to reach 100. Even though in the plots and explanation it suggests it does. Strange..
I can see how it can be useful or even inescapable in some situations.. The most obvious being maps with different content that needs to be distinct and of course these bimodal "divergent color maps". But maps are already half-art :) and bimodal data you're effectively vaguely "pre-binned" the data into two equal halves. There are also situations where the color is adding an extra dimension (like these "cyclic colour maps"). The result with the fingerprint is honestly hard to visually interpret, but I don't see any clear alternative (other than a grid of arrows I guess)
But reading all this stuff leaves me with the impression that colors are dangerous. They really should be last resort. In simple/common situation like the probability densities of the mystery planet - grayscale looks like it's the only really honest option. Side by side with the grayscale, the linear colors don't seem to be adding all that much and are creating artificial "islands" (not to mention the colors are a real blast to the eyeballs)
This wouldn't even be half the mass of the smallest gaseous planet, but would be much larger than the largest terrestrial planet. Which do astronomers think it would be?
If it's not Hydrogen, it's rocks.
And 6 times mass of earth. Where Uranus and Neptune are x15 of earth.
Inclination 6 degrees are comparable with other planets.
Makes you wonder if maybe the interstellar space is just filled with tons of these little rocky planets.
Then pump the known history of the solar system in and find out with what it fills the gap.
Probably not due to nine being such a outlier, would have to arrange the model to not filter out rare events.
If you got really lucky, there could be public data from telescopes that had already recorded whatever regions of space were of interest, and evidence of planet nine might have been disregarded as noise.
(No, not the original Bode's Law, which was just a first approximation! Mathematician Mary Blagg did the real work in the early 20th century, but was mostly unacknowledged until nearly 70 years later.)
It works, not just for the solar system, but also for the satellite systems of Jupiter and Saturn; but no one knows precisely why...
An easy approximation:
Relative to the Earth, P9 and background stars don't move much at all relative to one another.
How far out can a planet be if it has a roughly circular orbit? At some point outwards neighboring heavy things will make it unstable.
Judging by our own solar system it’s likely that the distance at which circular orbits are stable is a question of relative mass, and time.
Yes. All human definitions are imperfect.
The distances between the planets fit nicely on a log scale.
For the Sun it's a bit more than 1 light year, but in practice almost all orbits will be quite a bit under this: less than 0.8 ly.
...so I would imagine that anything even 1ly out would be unstable, over several hundred million years. Solar systems may even exchange very outer outer "planets".
For all we know it formed billions of years ago in another system, and then was ejected from its home system from some near miss with its sister gas giant.
What is this telling me?
Essentially it's a common physical scientist way of expressing a point estimate with a confidence interval. (In the life and social sciences they tend to just provide the point estimate and confidence interval explicitly.)
That's not even three-sigma. I'm not sure if this is real evidence of a planet nine. Just a chance alignment of orbits seem like the most plausible explanation.