I WENT AND LOOKED INTO THIS AND DEADASS PLANET NINE HAS BEEN PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE SINCE 2016 AND WE HAVE ESTIMATES ABOUT WHERE IT IS BUT WE HAVE NO. CLUE.
IT’S 10 TIMES LARGER THAN EARTH.
WE THINK WE FOUND ONE OF PLANET NINE’S MOONS.
WE HAVE NO IDEA WHERE IT IS.
WHAT THE FUCK
*jaws theme*
Bitcg it’s real
Space is big guys. Like really really mindbogglingly big, even if we’re only talking about the space in our solar system.
That tiny green circle labeled “orbit of Neptune”? That circle has a radius of four and a half billion kilometers (2.3 billion miles). It’s 30 times as far away from the sun as the Earth is; light takes 8 minutes to get to Earth, yes? It takes 4 hours for light to get to Neptune. It is ridiculously far away, going by the standards we’re used to on Earth.
And look at how small is it compared to the predicted orbit of Planet Nine. The estimates for the semi-major axis range from 400 to 1000 times as far from the Sun as Earth is.
Notice that the orbit is an ellipse? Statistically, it’s likely that this planet is currently closer to the far end of the ellipse (the aphelion, or to be generic, apoapsis), because orbiting objects move slower at the aphelion so they spend more time there. Pluto orbits the Sun once every 247 years – anything further out is going to take longer still, so we can’t wait around for it to get closer and expect to see anything anytime soon.
There’s also viewing difficulties. The wikipedia article says that if it’s relatively close, it might show up on pictures from stellar databases, but if it’s further away (more likely) it’ll be too faint and require a stronger telescope. Also, in the part of the expected orbit that goes in front of the galactic plane, it would look like any back ground star and be harder to pick out.
That is how you lose a planet. More specifically, that’s how you have trouble finding a planet that you don’t know for sure exists yet, that might be invisible to all but the biggest telescopes, and that’s exact position isn’t exactly known.
