We May Be on the Brink of Finding the Real Planet Nine

scientificamerican.com

14 points·danboarder··7 comments

“ Evidence he and others have gathered over the past decade suggests something strange is happening in the outer solar system: distant subplanetary objects are being found on orbits that look sculpted, arranged by an unseen gravitational force.”

Does anyone know what they mean by “sculpted orbits”?

It seems to just be a poetic way of saying orbits that are affected by, or only possible because of, another object.

I think it means the orbits are distributed in a way that suggests they gravitationally altered, either missing in certain orbits, or more than expected in others.

The solar system is mostly a flat spinning disk with everything spinning roughly in the same direction, roughly in a plane.

When you find objects in orbits going the opposite direction or not orbiting in the plane or spinning in the wrong direction you want to look for some explanation of why.

The most thorough explanation of what is going on here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-J6gW_w_Hs

old, but the speaker is credited as an author of most recent papers on the subject

https://archive.ph/wpA9s

Paywalled.

Neil deGrasse Tyson claimed that several telescopes contributed to the dataset of orbits that lead to the conclusion of an 9th planet is impacting orbits.

He also claimed there was a misalignment of one of the telescopes and that if that data is removed there's no more mystery and everything works out.

Other theories claim that a passing star in "recent" times might have kicked things into unusual orbits and left, leading signs of it passing.

My favorite theory is a small black hole out there, in one of the papers it was in a diagram showing a 1:1 size of the event horizon.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com