Key idea: Once this next-generation telescope gets to work (2024), it could discover thousands of objects we never knew existed and completely alter everything we know about our Solar System.
Original author and publication date: Darren Orf – June 16, 2022
Futurizonte Editor’s Note: The outer Solar System is still as mysterious as the deepest part of the ocean on earth
From the article:
ASTRONOMERS KNOW VERY LITTLE about the far outer Solar System — beyond Neptune, Pluto, and the far-flung Kuiper belt. For the past seven years, some scientists have observed certain gravitational anomalies in this mysterious region and have theorized that there must be an undiscovered world, dubbed Planet Nine, lurking at the outer edges of our galactic backyard.
If true, this planet would be unlike any other in the Solar System. At 10 times the size of Earth, it’d take some 10,000 to 20,000 years to orbit the Sun. For comparison, it takes Neptune only 165 years to make the same trip.
But there’s an alternative explanation to these anomalies: some astronomers believe a whole belt of icy bodies, some potentially as large as Earth, could explain this.
Two years from now, the fate of Planet Nine, this new space belt, and other alternative explanations will be tested when the Vera C. Rubin Observatory opens for first light. Perched atop a mountain in central Chile, the observatory will begin its Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) in 2024. Once this next-generation telescope gets to work, it could discover thousands of objects we never knew existed and completely alter everything we know about our Solar System.
BELTING OUT A NEW POSSIBILITY — In 2016, Caltech astronomers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin hypothesized that some of the head-scratching phenomena occurring in the outer Solar System — especially the strange and extreme orbits of dwarf planets and other icy objects, all pointing toward the same section of space — could be explained by the existence of a ninth planet.
This hypothesized world would have to be about the size of Neptune, and its closest approach to the Sun, or perihelion, would be a staggering 300 AU (the distance between the Earth and the Sun is 1 AU), or about 27.9 billion miles. For comparison, Pluto’s perihelion is only 29.6 AU.
“If Planet Nine is real, it would be on such an odd orbit and so far out in the outer Solar System, that it would really challenge our ideas of planet formation and dynamics,” Ann-Marie Madigan, assistant professor of astrophysics at the University of Colorado, Boulder tells Inverse. “There’s nothing normal about this planet.”
