Did a 9th planet ‘escape’ billions of years ago?
While much of the effort involved in tracking down the rumored ‘Planet Nine’ has focused on exploring the outer reaches of our solar system, some researchers believe that there may in fact have once been a sizable planet much closer to home, somewhere between the orbits of Uranus and Saturn.
This ancient, icy world was likely ejected from the solar system billions of years ago. To determine this, scientists created thousands of simulations to rewind the clock and recreate the orbits of the planets – and in particular the gas giants – to examine how they evolved over time.
“We now know that there are thousands of planetary systems in our Milky Way galaxy alone,” said study lead author Matt Clement from the Carnegie Institution for Science.
“But it turns out that the arrangement of planets in our own solar system is highly unusual, so we are using models to reverse engineer and replicate its formative processes.”
“This is a bit like trying to figure out what happened in a car crash after the fact – how fast were the cars going, in what directions, and so on.”
The researchers also found that the positions of Uranus and Neptune were altered by the Kuiper Belt.
“This indicates that while our solar system is a bit of an oddball, it wasn’t always the case,” said Clement.
Read more at www.unexplained-mysteries.com
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Tom O
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Simulations based on simulations based on simulations. Way to go science!
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Finn McCool
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There’s something like 100 billion stars in the Milky way. Only a few thousands of planetary systems have been ‘discovered’. Is it a bit presumptuous to say that ours is an oddball?
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Tom O
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Have you considered exactly what can be seen in any sort of “picture” in space? Do you think that something that resolves to the size of a “pixel” in a frame that might be 5000 x 4000 pixels as a telescope looks at a point in space that at arm’s length, isn’t more than about a micrometer in size? Have you considered what the apparent diameter of a “sun sized star” would be if it was 100 light years away? What they are looking at is smaller than the point of a common pin, and they are going to “resolve” the planets, things that aren’t any real different in size relationship than ours are to our Sun, their approximate orbits, and even their atmospheric makeup, all through computer algorithms because there is no possible visible data, even with Hubble. It is what science has become – computer simulations and deducing information from those simulations that have little basis in actual reality. A belief that everything can be defined by a mathematical statement and thus can be simulated with computer software. In reality, it is closer to mysticism than science.
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Beatty Bob
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I wonder what the note
Trackback from your site.
means?
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Tom O
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I clicked on “trackback” to see what happens. It comes back to this article, so I would guess that if you had a web page and you wrote a brief article referring to this one on PSI, you could just copy the “trackback” and drop it on your web page as a link back to this article.
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Peter C
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I was hoping that the “missing planet” would correspond with an anomaly in the Titius Bode Rule.
Unfortunately it does not.
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Burns Matkin
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I for one never want to see a “computer model” again ever even if the dimensions end up 36x24x36.
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