When I was little (allow me the nostalgic license) I had a mnemonic rule to remember the order of the planets. It was a phrase in which each word began with the same letter as the planet: My old uncle Martin plays only using cards borrowed. And so he had, in order of proximity to the sun to Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. But In 2006 I was taken away from this rule and now I am “lame by memory” And I can’t repeat that appointment without naming it.
But that they have fired Pluto, as it does not mean that our solar system only has eight planets. The search for planet nine has been a constant over almost two decades. Now, An international team of scientists has identified a promising candidate for planet nine (which obviously has no name) comparing infrared studies of the sky carried out with a 23 -year -old interval. The object seems to have changed position over time, just what is expected of a distant planet that slowly orbits around the sun.
This is probably the most convincing evidence of the existence of planet nine to date. It is believed that this planet is five to ten times larger than the earth and has an orbit very different from that of known planets. In 2021, British astronomer Michael Rowan-Robinson He reviewed Nasa’s ancient astronomical satellite data (Iras), which scanned the sky in 1983. He detected a possible candidate for planet nine with an estimated mass of three to five times that of the Earth, about 225 UA del Sol (1 UA is the land-sol distance).
However, that object had not been observed in any other data set and is still unconfirmed. Or continued … Recently, a team led by Patrick Phan adopted a new approach: they compared Iras data with images of the Japanese Akari satellite, taken in 2006.
And in an image of anger, they detected an object. It was not in the same place when Akari later observed it, but it did detect an object just 47.4 minutes of arc (just under one degree), which coincides with the distance that Planet nine could have moved in its orbit for 23 years. This type of movement is crucial, since, if something moves so slowly, it is probably very far and possibly orbiting the sun. What makes this finding more blunt than the previous ones is that it appears in two different infrared studies of the sky (Iras and Akari), made with decades of difference.
Based on the brightness of the object in both data sets, Phan’s team estimates that it could be even more massive than Neptune. This is surprising, since Originally they were looking. However, it conforms to the expectations on the dough and the estimated distance of the planet nine better than any other finding so far.
In addition, its alleged orbit is very different from that of known planets. While Neptune orbit the sun at 30 UA (about 45 billion kilometers), planet nine could range between 280 (distance closer to the sun) and 1120 UA (farther distance), a distance of 100,000 million kilometers from the sun.
That is more than 700 times further than the distance between the sun and the earth. Such a strange orbit poses many questions: was this planet formed together with the rest of the solar system? Or was he captured from another star?
The possibility of finding a new planet in our own solar system is exciting. To be confirmed, The planet nine would be the first planet discovered in the modern era that was not found by accident or through the study of nearby orbits.
It would be revealed by indirect evidence, almost how to detect a ghost because of the way it moves. However, the study published in Arxiv, only suggests a possible candidate, and more evidence is needed to confirm its existence. “The verification of the existence of the planet nine through future observational studies will contribute to our understanding of the evolution and structural dynamics of the solar system,” concludes the study.