Have We Got Another Planet or Two in Our Solar System?
By James Donahue
September 2017
Astronomers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin of California Institute of Technology say they have discovered strong evidence of “something big” in the outer regions of our solar system. It may be at least one additional planet if not two of them.
They haven’t confirmed their findings yet, but they say the strange behavior of six Kuiper Belt objects suggest that their orbits are being influenced by the magnetic pull of something very large in their neighborhood. They calculate that this body is about 10 times more massive than Earth and orbiting about 20 times farther from the Sun than Neptune.
Since Pluto lost its status as a real planet in 2006, this yet undiscovered body is being dubbed the “Ninth Planet.”
Brown and Batygin dismissed the thought that other smaller particles of the Kuiper Belt may be affecting the orbit. To get the calculations they coming up with they say there has to be an extreme amount of mass within that part of the belt. A better possibility is that a large and undiscovered planet is circling the sun in the far outer reaches.
They are not alone in this theory. There has been a major hunt for “Planet X” perhaps ever since Nancy Lieder went public with her claim that she was contacted by Zetas, a name for the gray extraterrestrial beings, who warned her that a massive planet called Nibiru was on a near collision course with Earth and would fly by so close in 2003 that the effect would destroy all civilization.
At about this same time author Zacharia Sitchin published is controversial book The Twelfth Planet, in which he wrote of a large planet called Marduk which passed through the Solar System every 3,600 years and allowed its sentient beings, the Annunaki of Sumerian myth, to interact with humans.
Scientists scoffed at both Lieder and Sitchin’s stories although the idea of a twelfth planet has been considered by astronomers for several years. They have looked at discrepancies in the orbits of both Uranus and Neptune which suggest they are being “tugged” by the gravity of another unknown body. Astronomer Percival Lowell was among the first to be convinced of the existence of a Planet X. Yet neither Lowell nor other astronomers of that day were able to find the mysterious missing planet.
Lieder also drew on work by V. M. Rabolu, Hercolubus or Red Planet, in which he told of a mythical planet called Hercolubus that passed through our solar system, came dangerously close to Earth and destroyed Atlantis. Rabolu warned that the planet was on a course to sweep near our system again at around the year 11,700.
Then there was the hypothetical star Nemesis proposed by Richard A. Muller in 1984, who claimed proof in the fossil record that mass extinctions that happened every 26 to 34 million years were caused by a dim red dwarf that passed through the Oort cloud every 26 million years. Miller gave it the name Nemesis for obvious reasons. He theorized that Nemesis was the source of long-period comets that orbit our system and in the periods when the star was close, bombarded Earth with burning comets. Miller’s theory has never been proven.
Yet a new paper appearing in the Astronomical Journal, suggests a second possible planet in those outer limits, that may exist far beyond Pluto but closer to the sun than Brown and Batygin’s Planet Nine. Lead author Kat Volk, postdoctoral fellow at Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona, says he is calculating “something as massive as Mars would be needed to cause the warp that we measured” among the tumbling particles flying around in the Kuiper Belt.
Volk and his fellow astronomers present what they believe is compelling evidence of this second body “with a mass somewhere between that of Mars and Earth.” They say this object would be different from – but much closer than – the so-called Planet Nine, which also is yet to be confirmed.
So if two more large planets exist in our solar system, and astronomers have produced data proving they may exist, why haven’t they been found? They explain that the planets may be hiding not only among the vast amount of debris within the Kuiper Belt, but also in a galactic plane that is so densely packed with stars, that astronomers tend to avoid it.
Volk explained: “The chance that we have not found such an object of the right brightness and distance simply because of the limitations of the surveys is estimated to be to about 30 percent.”
There is help on the way, however. A new Large Synoptic Survey Telescope is under construction on Mt. El Penon, Chile. When it goes on line in about 2020, astronomers believe this instrument will be doing nightly real-time surveys of the sky that may find those planets and prove once-and-for-all their existence.
By James Donahue
September 2017
Astronomers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin of California Institute of Technology say they have discovered strong evidence of “something big” in the outer regions of our solar system. It may be at least one additional planet if not two of them.
They haven’t confirmed their findings yet, but they say the strange behavior of six Kuiper Belt objects suggest that their orbits are being influenced by the magnetic pull of something very large in their neighborhood. They calculate that this body is about 10 times more massive than Earth and orbiting about 20 times farther from the Sun than Neptune.
Since Pluto lost its status as a real planet in 2006, this yet undiscovered body is being dubbed the “Ninth Planet.”
Brown and Batygin dismissed the thought that other smaller particles of the Kuiper Belt may be affecting the orbit. To get the calculations they coming up with they say there has to be an extreme amount of mass within that part of the belt. A better possibility is that a large and undiscovered planet is circling the sun in the far outer reaches.
They are not alone in this theory. There has been a major hunt for “Planet X” perhaps ever since Nancy Lieder went public with her claim that she was contacted by Zetas, a name for the gray extraterrestrial beings, who warned her that a massive planet called Nibiru was on a near collision course with Earth and would fly by so close in 2003 that the effect would destroy all civilization.
At about this same time author Zacharia Sitchin published is controversial book The Twelfth Planet, in which he wrote of a large planet called Marduk which passed through the Solar System every 3,600 years and allowed its sentient beings, the Annunaki of Sumerian myth, to interact with humans.
Scientists scoffed at both Lieder and Sitchin’s stories although the idea of a twelfth planet has been considered by astronomers for several years. They have looked at discrepancies in the orbits of both Uranus and Neptune which suggest they are being “tugged” by the gravity of another unknown body. Astronomer Percival Lowell was among the first to be convinced of the existence of a Planet X. Yet neither Lowell nor other astronomers of that day were able to find the mysterious missing planet.
Lieder also drew on work by V. M. Rabolu, Hercolubus or Red Planet, in which he told of a mythical planet called Hercolubus that passed through our solar system, came dangerously close to Earth and destroyed Atlantis. Rabolu warned that the planet was on a course to sweep near our system again at around the year 11,700.
Then there was the hypothetical star Nemesis proposed by Richard A. Muller in 1984, who claimed proof in the fossil record that mass extinctions that happened every 26 to 34 million years were caused by a dim red dwarf that passed through the Oort cloud every 26 million years. Miller gave it the name Nemesis for obvious reasons. He theorized that Nemesis was the source of long-period comets that orbit our system and in the periods when the star was close, bombarded Earth with burning comets. Miller’s theory has never been proven.
Yet a new paper appearing in the Astronomical Journal, suggests a second possible planet in those outer limits, that may exist far beyond Pluto but closer to the sun than Brown and Batygin’s Planet Nine. Lead author Kat Volk, postdoctoral fellow at Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona, says he is calculating “something as massive as Mars would be needed to cause the warp that we measured” among the tumbling particles flying around in the Kuiper Belt.
Volk and his fellow astronomers present what they believe is compelling evidence of this second body “with a mass somewhere between that of Mars and Earth.” They say this object would be different from – but much closer than – the so-called Planet Nine, which also is yet to be confirmed.
So if two more large planets exist in our solar system, and astronomers have produced data proving they may exist, why haven’t they been found? They explain that the planets may be hiding not only among the vast amount of debris within the Kuiper Belt, but also in a galactic plane that is so densely packed with stars, that astronomers tend to avoid it.
Volk explained: “The chance that we have not found such an object of the right brightness and distance simply because of the limitations of the surveys is estimated to be to about 30 percent.”
There is help on the way, however. A new Large Synoptic Survey Telescope is under construction on Mt. El Penon, Chile. When it goes on line in about 2020, astronomers believe this instrument will be doing nightly real-time surveys of the sky that may find those planets and prove once-and-for-all their existence.