Planet 9(X) Mystery: “An Alien Planet Stolen from Its Star By Our Sun” (A ‘Galaxy’ Insight)
- Planet 9 Mystery –“An Alien Planet Stolen from Its Star By Our Sun” (A ‘Galaxy’ Insight)
by http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/
“This is the only exoplanet that we, realistically, would be able to reach using a space probe,” says Alexander Mustill, astronomer at Lund University. “It is almost ironic that while astronomers often find exoplanets hundreds of light years away in other solar systems, there’s probably one hiding in our own backyard.”
–
Through a computer-simulated study, astronomers at Lund University in Sweden show that it is highly likely that the so-called Planet 9 (also known as Planet X) is an exoplanet. This would make it the first exoplanet to be discovered inside our own solar system. The theory is that our sun, in its youth some 4.5 billion years ago, stole Planet 9 from its original star.
–
An extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, is by definition a planet located outside our solar system. Now it appears that this definition is no longer viable. According to astronomers in Lund, there is a lot to indicate that Planet 9 was captured by the young sun and has been a part of our solar system completely undetected ever since.
–
Stars are born in clusters and often pass by one another. It is during these encounters that a star can “steal” one or more planets in orbit around another star. This is probably what happened when our own sun captured Planet 9.
–
In a computer-simulated model, Alexander together with astronomers in Lund and Bordeaux has shown that Planet 9 was probably captured by the sun when coming in close contact while orbiting another star.
–
“Planet 9 may very well have been ‘shoved’ by other planets, and when it ended up in an orbit that was too wide around its own star, our sun may have taken the opportunity to steal and capture Planet 9 from its original star. When the sun later departed from the stellar cluster in which it was born, Planet 9 was stuck in an orbit around the sun,” says Alexander Mustill.
–
“There is still no image of Planet 9, not even a point of light. We don’t know if it is made up of rock, ice, or gas. All we know is that its mass is probably around ten times the mass of earth.”
–
This past January, 2016, Caltech researchers found evidence of a giant planet tracing a bizarre, highly elongated orbit in the outer solar system. The object, which the researchers have nicknamed Planet Nine, has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbits about 20 times farther from the sun on average than does Neptune (which orbits the sun at an average distance of 2.8 billion miles). In fact, it would take this new planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make just one full orbit around the sun.
–
read more.
end