Wait, now there's a 9th planet?

This is fascinating. We missed it, because it was away from its desk for a bit. It’s now back and returning calls, catching up on email, etc.

I dub it Planet Jake. Or Beelzebub. Or Joe. Or just Planet Nine.

I think I went to a bar called Planet Nine once in Chicago.

You could call it “Plan(et) 9 from Outer Space”.

Just goes to show how far we still have to go. Thank you for the share, that was interesting. Something I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on now.

Fascinating.

Moving there.

Ooh! How exciting!

I vote we name it Orcus, which is basically Pluto when he’s really pissed off.

@syz “How could we have missed it all this time (erratic orbit or not)?”

Because it’s really, really far out there. For comparison Neptune is (roughly) 30 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun. An AU is roughly equivalent to the distance from the Sun to the Earth (93,000,000 miles). So Neptune is 30x farther from the Sun than the Earth is and this new hypothesized planet (if, indeed, it does exist) is out 20x farther than Neptune.

At that point there’s not a lot of light hitting it and reflecting back, thus the odds of directly spotting it would be terribly slim (you wouldn’t see it at all from the surface of the Earth, not even with large, stationary telescopes). This might be a poor metaphor, but sighting that thing would be a bit like spotting a needle in an extremely large and spread out haystack (with a lot of debris between you and the stack) from a few blocks away, while relying on the light from a flashlight a little bit behind you to reflect off it some time.

Never mind, Orcus is taken by a Kuiper belt object

Bellona is available – she’s a major war goddess.

What Dr. Brown and a fellow Caltech professor, Konstantin Batygin, have not done is actually find that planet, so it would be premature to start revising mnemonics of the planets.

Call it Kardashianarse because it’s big, round & way out there.

I’m already so attached to Bellona!! I really hope they find her…

From article: ”‘When the simulation aligned the distant Kuiper Belt objects and created objects like Sedna, we thought this is kind of awesome—you kill two birds with one stone,’ says Batygin. ‘But with the existence of the planet also explaining these perpendicular orbits, not only do you kill two birds, you also take down a bird that you didn’t realize was sitting in a nearby tree.’”

Also from article: “In terms of understanding more about the solar system’s context in the rest of the universe, Batygin says that in a couple of ways, this ninth planet that seems like such an oddball to us would actually make our solar system more similar to the other planetary systems that astronomers are finding around other stars.”

It is the tenth planet. Pluto still counts. Boom.

@msh – then it’s the 14th, because so do Ceres, Eris, Make make, and Haumea.

Yep, but Pluto’s the cutest.

Ceres, Eris, Makemake, Haumea and potentially hundreds (maybe even thousands) of other similar objects in our solar system.

I too count it as 10th. Since when do scientists just get to bully pluto and say “Hey guess what, we need that plaque that says planet back”.

Meanies.

It is cool though.

Honestly, do we really care about the feelings of a lifeless rock?

I think everyone still pissed off about “lonely old Pluto” should consider the fact that Pluto has Charon. Charon is a high contender for dwarf-planet status herself, and the two of them are locked in an orbital dance so delicately balanced that they don’t even cause tidal pull on each other.

Pluto is just fine.

I know my grandson was pissed off about Pluto when it happened, and he was only 5 at the time.

I was, too, until I learned why they changed the status. It makes sense – Pluto hasn’t cleared his own orbital path. It’s a meaningful designation. I think people are insulted at the term “dwarf” being added and assume the change was based on size alone.

^^^^ Must have been a guy thing.

Also, the outrage about Pluto was purely a colonial thing. Might be because the connection to the cartoon dog, or because at that point, Pluto was the only planet discovered by a colonial.

I think it is simple underdog pity. Nobody wants to think of this lonely little planet being demoted. Pluto has been a sort of boundary reference for the average person. It is our something furthest out there. For most it marks the end of our solar system. To demote Pluto makes things less tangible for non-astronomers.

PLUTO is still on the planetary mobile.
Therefore, it IS Planet # 9
The removal is piffle.
Jeeze-o-flip!
Try and kill other people’s planets.
Call the guard!
Off with their imagination-less heads!!!
Do y’all kick puppies and step on kitten’s heads
when feeling moderately hateful?
Piffle to you too!
Jeesh!

I just read that article on TIME. For me, this is a little bit demotivating. It seems that we can’t be certain about anything.

Certainty is overrated. Plenty of people are absolutely certain that they have been abducted by aliens and sexually molested by them. That’s not exactly a good thing.

@Seek
Hey, they consented. They just forgot about that part.

I like to think of it as we can’t be certain we know everything—which seems exciting to me, the opportunity of discovery, wild facts that spin us around until we can regain a sense of our inner ear… and when we look around with that new sense of the world, everything seems beautifully strange.

We do know things. We know earth exists. And Mars. Venus. Saturn. Etc.—we just assumed that since we couldn’t initially see anything else, we must be seeing everything.

I love the universe’s ability to remind us how we never see everything, how we can always look out into the stars and find something we didn’t even know we could know.

But then, I’m hopelessly romantic when it comes to science.

I’m in the “don’t give a shit” camp.

@DancingMind , I’m with you.
@ucme , try Activia.
@CynthiaFulcanelli , don’t lose heart. There will always be change, which is not always a bad thing. There are also things we can still depend on though too. By the way, if the new planet, and changing opinions of Pluto’s status have you cringing, dare I mention that sometimes Earth has more than one moon? There are asteroids which occasionally track close enough to Earth to be pulled into orbit for a while. Sometimes it lasts a few months, sometimes several years, but always they are seduced away by the Sun’s gravity, and resume orbiting it. There is also one which comes by routinely for a visit, but we can’t call it a moon, because it never actually develops an orbit around us.

Activia…a moon of uranus.

[Mod says] Moved to Social with OP’s permission.

@Here2_4
Thank you! You just made my day :D