Planet 9

Planet Nine, that's a great name!

But we all know it should be named 'Rupert' - of course we'd need to re-instate Pluto to make Rupert the tenth....

Cheers

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Syd

On a sunny day (Thu, 21 Jan 2016 08:09:19 +0000) it happened Syd Rumpo wrote in :

-planet-49523

I had just been thinking about another planet orbiting the sun being the ca use of that 'Dyson Sphere' around KIC 8462852. Maybe something like a binar y planet or a bunch of moons and the occultations acting like a Foucault kn ife edge on the star. The planet's orbit around the sun would be really slo w holding it's position but the moons' orbits would cause all the weird dim ming periods. I wonder if the proposed orbit of this new planet and KIC 846

2852 intersect.

Still hoping it's a Dyson sphere or ring of some sort. Built by intelligent robots that evolved on a planet high in naturally occurring semiconductors, metallics, liquid hydrocarbons, and silane, where replicators made from naturally occuring PN junction devices slowly evolved...

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Planet Nine? Plan Nine? Maybe Ed Wood got it right.

Maybe it's a vortex in the Space/Time Continuum. Anybody have a TARDIS we can use? Where's the Doctor when you need him?

My money is on the Planet Zog.

Brian

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Brian Howie

The full paper is online and free if you are interested in the details (although it isn't an easy read)

Basically they looked at the orbital elements of a bunch of other objects out there and found a peculiar correlation which could hint at another object in a specific orbit. The hunt is on now to find it.

It wouldn't be slow enough to hold position for very long and perhaps paradoxically if it was an occultation by the disk of a planet or moon you would see a blip at mid occultation when diffraction effects are taken into consideration. It was the remarkably bright diffraction blip of an occultation of Saturns moon Titan that alerted people to the possibility of a substantial atmosphere on it back in the 1970's.

The expected diffraction blip was there but way brighter than it should have been because Titan's atmosphere was focusing the light at us.

Looking for possible microlensing events (ie small compact foreground objects) against the distant stars is a growth industry now that deep automated sky surveys have become routine.

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Regards, 
Martin Brown

inth-planet-49523

e cause of that 'Dyson Sphere'

Interesting, but I wonder how far out and for how small an object does this apply. Would a ping pong ball with an orbit twice that of Pluto's occult a star? A star is so far away it is just a pin point of light. Does the diam eter of the telescope come into play at some point? I know from doing the F oucault test that at the focus of a spherical mirror the knife edge makes t he image go uniformly more and more grey. It doesn't just turn on and off. I figure that has to do with the finite size of my pupil. What if there was a Saturn like planet half a light year away and we were watching a star pa ss through the rings?

The largest stars are about 0.01" arc across most stars we can see are local to our galaxy and as such subtend angles in the range down to

0.000001" or thereabouts. So taking Pluto as about 40AU at 80AU it would take an object about 360 miles across to occult a nearby large giant star and correspondingly less to occult a distant small star. (assuming my back of the envelope calculation is about right)

Studies like these tend to be done with interferometers rather than single telescopes. Michelson (of Michelson-Morely) and Pease managed to determine stellar sizes with a deticated rig on the Mount Wilson 100" in the 1920's. A trick not repeated until Hanbury-Brown & Twiss perfected the intensity interferometer at Jodrell Bank in the 1950's. I have a feeling his (out of print) book about it is online somewhere.

These days there are folk applying radio astronomy techniques to optical imaging in the near infrared to visible waveband.

CHARA and COAST are competing to bag the brighter large stars.

Too small, but a proto-planetary disk around a star in formation would show up if another star passed behind it. Curiously the odd wandering planet has been observed well away from any star. Ejected from its original system during the violent early stages of star formation.

We live in a golden age of observational astronomy where almost every waveband has been imaged in high resolution from radio up to X-rays.

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Regards, 
Martin Brown

Here's another interesting space object discovery.

"NASA discovers new planet covered with marijuana"

NASA has announced this morning that they have discovered a planet completely covered with marijuana, a discovery that has completely taken scientists by surprise. Planet X637Z-43, discovered using NASA's Kepler satellite, would also allegedly be one of the very few planets potentially habitable according to NASA experts, who have detected sufficient levels of oxygen and nitrogen to support human life. The presence of marijuana on other planets could strongly encourage future generations to take interest in space exploration, some experts believe.

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If there can be a large planet way out there, then I think it likely that there are a dozen more, and maybe a hundred more farther out.

Rogue planets have been observed?????

It couldn't be a planet orbiting our sun because the earth's orbit would cause it to pass out of the line of sight, but a planet orbiting that other star with a very long orbital period could do it.

Amazingly yes - first one about three years ago at about 100ly distant. Showing up in the deep IR survey with the VLT. Reported at the time:

Full article at

They may be more common than we thought...

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Regards, 
Martin Brown

Ovenden's conjecture (still not proved or even close to being proved) suggeste that although you can have an infinite series that they have to be spaced in a very particular way to prevent themselves from being ejected off towards to infinity in very finite time (ie becoming a rogue planet). Slightly more in this thread from a while back

Anyone who has played with RK simulations of planetary or larger systems will know how common it is for stars to be violently ejected allowing the remaining ones to settle down into a nice cosy pseudo equilibrium. It isn't all due to defects in the numerical methods.

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Regards, 
Martin Brown

Michael Ovenden was a great guy. He was my celestial mechanics / galactic dynamics prof at UBC, (mumble) years ago. I learned a lot from him, mostly about numerical methods, asymptotics, and orbital calculations. Hohmann transfers, eccentric anomaly, Lindblad resonances, density waves, all that fun classical mechanics stuff.

(He was also a big New Age religion enthusiast, but so was I at the time, so I don't hold that against him. Of course, I was 20 and he wasn't.) ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
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hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
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