Light has to go from the sun to this far out body, then back.
Not a lot of light, hitting a far away object that has to come back and hit our telescopes.
That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. The solar system is 9 billion KMs across. Light travels over a billion KMs per hour. If we were on Pluto, and this planet was on the other side of the solar system, it would take less than a day for light from the Sun to reach it and bounce back to Pluto. Please correct me if I'm wrong on this, physics/math was not my strong suit.
Is it simply that it's orbit would take hundreds of years and we just haven't been looking that way for very long? I understand that space is impossibly huge, but we can see galaxies and the beginnings of the universe, but not this planet revolving around our own Sun?
That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. The solar system is 9 billion KMs across. Light travels over a billion KMs per hour. If we were on Pluto, and this planet was on the other side of the solar system, it would take less than a day for light from the Sun to reach it and bounce back to Pluto. Please correct me if I'm wrong on this, physics/math was not my strong suit.
Is it simply that it's orbit would take hundreds of years and we just haven't been looking that way for very long? I understand that space is impossibly huge, but we can see galaxies and the beginnings of the universe, but not this planet revolving around our own Sun?
No physics expert either so I might be wrong, but I'm not talking about the speed of the light. Light dispurses as it travels away from the source. Only a small fraction of the light from the sun hits this planet (which is further than pluto, at least in the time we've been looking with telescopes) and then even less of that light hits earth on it's way back.
Galaxies and stars emit way more light than this relatively microscopic (compared to stars and galaxies) planet reflects.
No physics expert either so I might be wrong, but I'm not talking about the speed of the light. Light dispurses as it travels away from the source. Only a small fraction of the light from the sun hits this planet (which is further than pluto, at least in the time we've been looking with telescopes) and then even less of that light hits earth on it's way back.
Galaxies and stars emit way more light than this relatively microscopic (compared to stars and galaxies) planet reflects.
You're right on the point that a planet is much dimmer than a galaxy You also have to consider the planet's albedo (reflectivity of sunlight).
Also remember that you have to know where to look to observe objects. Distant planets like Neptune (and formally Pluto) are two far away to observe on one's own. They were both discovered in the same manner as this possible planet - by observe the motions of objects near them and inferring that a planet was affecting them.
Once you run the calculations you can then aim a telescope to that area of the sky.
Light dispurses as it travels away from the source. Only a small fraction of the light from the sun hits this planet (which is further than pluto, at least in the time we've been looking with telescopes) and then even less of that light hits earth on it's way back.
Yeah, the way it makes the most sense to me is to think of a planet's orbit as a sphere that sunlight is spread over. No matter how far out you go, the amount of sunlight is the same, but the size of the sphere increases tremendously:
On earth, the sunlight we get is spread over a sphere of .28 billion km2.
On Neptune, the same amount of sunlight is spread over 254 billion km2.
At the sort of distance this planet is, you're talking about this same amount of light spread over 11159 billion km2. Or, if my math is right, light there is 39855 times dimmer than on earth.
Ninth planet may have been discovered, researchers say.
Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have found evidence in the outer solar system of an object that could be a real ninth planet.
Nicknamed Planet Nine, it has a mass that of 10x of Earth and orbits about 20 times farther from the sun" than Neptune. That means "it would take this new planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make just one full orbit around the sun," according to Caltech.
Researchers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown haven't actually seen the planet, but other research helped lead them to conclude that there is one. Basically, they found that certain objects in the Kuiper Belt -- the field of icy objects and debris beyond Neptune -- had orbits that peculiarly pointed in the same direction.
Over time, mathematical modeling and computer simulation led them to the conclusion that a planet was exerting the gravity necessary to shape these orbits.
Batygin and Brown inferred its presence from the peculiar clustering of six previously known objects that orbit beyond Neptune. They say there’s only a 0.007% chance, or about one in 15,000, that the clustering could be a coincidence. Instead, they say, a planet with the mass of 10 Earths has shepherded the six objects into their strange elliptical orbits, tilted out of the plane of the solar system.
Caltech is pretty confident Planet Nine is large enough to rule out any debate about whether it's a true planet -- unlike Pluto, which got the boot in 2006.
Brown, who played a role in Pluto's demotion to a dwarf planet, says "all those people who are mad that Pluto is no longer a planet can be thrilled to know that there is a real planet out there still to be found. Now we can go and find this planet and make the solar system have nine planets once again."
A planet thought to have been free floating in space is actually in a colossal orbit around a star 1 trillion kilometers away.
That's according to a team of astronomers in the UK, U.S. and Australia, who revealed this week that snappily-named planet 2MASS J2126 is in an orbit around its star 7,000-times the size of Earth's orbit around the sun.
Quote:
Previously it had been thought that 2MASS J2126 was a free-floating or "rogue" planet, adrift in the depths of space untethered to any star.
However, observations of the star and planet revealed that the two were moving through space together and appeared to be associated.
"How such a wide planetary system forms and survives remains an open question," Simon Murphy of Australian National University said in a statement.
At 1 trillion kilometers from its parent star, 2MASS J2126 has the widest orbit of any planet found, one that takes nearly 900,000 years to complete.
