Solar system. What a new planet in the solar system looks like and when will it be discovered Recent discoveries in the solar system

In 2006, Pluto was stripped of the status of the ninth planet in the solar system thanks to the efforts of one astronomer - Michael Brown. Together with his colleagues, he discovered, and then other dwarf planets far beyond the orbit of Neptune. Thus, he proved that Pluto is not remarkable and large enough to be called a full-fledged planet. However, now Brown and our compatriot Konstantin Batygin argue that the new Planet 9 is almost open ... and that all that remains is to see it.

Yes, yes, no one has ever seen the "almost open" ninth planet of the solar system! In fact, its discovery is the fruit of long observations of the orbits of other planets. According to Kepler and Newton, the place of each planet in the solar system is determined by its characteristics, mainly mass. And if the orbit does not correspond to the parameters of the planet or is generally anomalous, it means that it is affected by some other, no less massive object. He became the first planet discovered by mathematical equations, and not by living observations - in 1846 he was found at the place calculated by the French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier.

Moreover, the planets can influence each other very actively - in the past of the solar system, they traveled hundreds of millions of kilometers, approaching and moving away from the Sun. The gas giants especially distinguished themselves here. In young planetary systems, they devour all the embryos of the planets and hover close to the star - as close as Mercury. Because of this, they become very hot and unstable. Scientists call these planets "hot Jupiters" or "hot Neptune" - depending on their mass and size.

The troubled history of the solar system

In the solar system, however, Jupiter, the largest and most influential planet, changed everything. Initially appearing at a distance of 5 to 10 from the Sun, it provoked active collisions of scattered material in the protoplanetary disk around the star. This gave impetus to the creation of other gas giants, such as Saturn or Neptune, at distances equally close to the Sun.

However, the newly formed planets behaved "ungratefully", following the gravitational laws - they pushed their "parent" closer to the Sun, into the modern orbit of Mars. Thus, Jupiter invaded the inner solar system. In other planetary systems, this part is the most saturated with matter and space objects. But the heavy tread of the mass of Jupiter scattered the embryos of planets and asteroids there, throwing them into the nuclear furnace of the Sun or throwing them to the outskirts of the system in the zone of modern and.

If not for Saturn, who bound Jupiter with an orbital resonance and brought it into its present orbit, the gas giant could have completely ruined the solar system, throwing 99% of the planetary matter out of it. However, his travels did not remain without a trace - so Neptune and Uranus changed their orbits, forming most of the long-period comets.

Ultimately, an unusual equilibrium reigned in the solar planetary system - gas giants that form close to the star found themselves on the outskirts, and "solid planets" like the Earth moved closer to the Sun. However, some astronomers believed that to achieve such a balance, another planet was needed - and massive enough to influence the large Neptune and Uranus. Many astronomers have been looking for it, Planet X, for a century and a half - and it seems that Brown and Batygin finally got close to it.

The history of the quest for planet X

After Le Verrier calculated Neptune from the disturbances in the orbit of Uranus, astronomers found that even its presence did not explain the peculiarities of the orbit of the ice giant. For some time they tried to find another planet that could influence the last large objects of the solar system - however, they managed to find only Pluto, which with the mass and direction of its orbit could not disturb larger bodies in any way. The issue of Uranus-Neptune anomalies was finally resolved by "", who measured the mass of Neptune in 1989 and thereby discovered that there were no contradictions in the orbits.

By that time, the power of telescopes had grown significantly, which allowed astronomers to look into the depths of the solar system. Many trans-Neptunian objects have been discovered - dwarf planets and large asteroids, whose closest orbital point is farther from the Sun than Neptune. So, in 2005, the already mentioned Eris was discovered, the second largest dwarf planet after Pluto. And back in 2003, they found an object with diameters of over 2 thousand kilometers, which is moving away from the Sun at a distance of 1.4 × 10 11 km - farther than any large trans-Neptunian object! Soon it was overgrown with a whole family of "sednoids", isolated trans-Neptunian objects with similar characteristics.

The ninth planet - where and why?

Observing the newly discovered planetoids, astronomers C. Trujillo and S. Sheppard, colleagues, discovered an interesting pattern. Most of them have elongated, comet-like orbits that briefly come "close" to the Sun, at a distance of 40 to 70 astronomical units, and then go away for hundreds or even thousands of years. And the larger the object, the stronger its removal. In addition, the sednoids deviated from the Sun in the same direction.

Such a coincidence could be an accident, if we are talking about simple comets - over the billions of years of the history of the solar system, they were scattered by all the major planets, especially the already mentioned "travelers" Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune. However, such a coincidence in the deviations of large objects requires a very large planet, whose orbit would reach the Oort cloud.

Here Brown and Batygin distinguished themselves - by comparing the orbital characteristics of the sednoids, they found mathematically that the probability of their coincidence is only 0.007%. Scientists went further and compiled a computer model aimed at finding the characteristics of a planet capable of changing the orbits of bodies located beyond Neptune. The data they received in January 2016 became the basis for the announcement of the pre-discovery of a new planet in the solar system.

Characteristics of Planet X

In his interviews, Brown claims that the probability of finding a new planet is 90%. However, until it is actually discovered using a telescope, it is too early to talk about a final discovery. Nevertheless, the calculated characteristics of Planet 9 have been published - they will be used in the forthcoming search.

• The orbital parameters of Planet X will be mirrored to those of the sednoids - the planet's orbit will still be elongated and inclined relative to the plane of the main planets of the Solar System, but directed in the other direction. Accordingly, the planet's perihelion - the point of maximum approach to the Sun - will be 200 astronomical units at the closest point, and the aphelion - the maximum distance - will reach 1200 astronomical units. That's even more than Sedna's! A year on Planet 9 will last up to 20 thousand Earth years - that is how much it may take to complete the entire orbit.

A planet far from the Sun is difficult to detect - this requires telescopes that work in the infrared spectrum, or powerful optical devices that can record even the smallest sun glare on the surface. Work on infrared telescopes will move faster, but errors are possible - and on optical telescopes the result will be reliable, albeit at the cost of time. The WISE Infrared Orbiting Telescope, which conducted broadband surveys in 2009, has yet to spot Planet X, although it has provided fairly detailed images.

Therefore, Brown, Batygin and other astronomers plan to find it using the Subaru telescope in the Hawaiian Islands, which is considered one of the largest and highest quality in the world - the diameter of its main mirror exceeds 8 meters! In addition, it is capable of operating in both optical and infrared light ranges. But even with such a tool, scientists will need at least 5 years to put an end to the question of Planet X.

A new planet has been discovered in the solar system. This discovery was made by the astrophysicist of the Californian Technical University Konstantin Batygin. The author of the sensation admits that no one was looking specifically for the ninth planet. The discovery, which is destined to become the main one in astronomy for two and a half centuries, as often happens, was made by accident.

A strange anomaly that led scientists to the discovery of the ninth planet

Constantine was approached by his colleague, an astronomer from California, Michael Brown. He asked an astrophysicist to make calculations that would explain why some objects in the solar system behave in a strange way. It was about the Kuiper belt. This is the region farthest from the Sun. There is space debris left after: small asteroids, blocks of ice, stardust. It is from there that many comets come from that plow our system. Astronomers around the world have been watching the Kuiper Belt very closely for a long time, but only now an important discovery has been made.

If you study the Kuiper Belt, then this is a field of ice debris beyond the orbit of Neptune. Most of them walk in very eccentric and elongated orbits, conventionally randomly oriented in space. But if you concentrate on the most distant orbits, those that are farthest from the Sun in, you will notice that they are all oriented approximately in the same direction and lie approximately in the same plane. It was this orbital alignment that seemed anomalous to scientists.

It was this anomaly that Konstantin Batygin was asked to explain from a mathematical point of view. The astrophysicist put forward an assumption: objects in the Kuiper belt are oriented towards an unknown large space body. This gave astronomers the first clue in centuries. The atlas of the solar system familiar to everyone is unfinished. There must be another planet, and it is gigantic.

According to the new model, the ninth planet has a mass equal to ten, or twenty masses of the Earth, that is, it is, in principle, comparable to Uranus and Neptune. Knowing only the mass it is impossible to accurately judge its composition. However, you can compare it with other planets and assume that the ninth planet was formed from the same materials as other planets with a similar mass.

After analyzing the data on the mass and size of the ninth planet, Konstantin Batygin put forward the assumption that, most likely, this is a gas giant, exactly the same as Uranus and Neptune.

Sumerian mention of the ninth planet

The mention that there is a planet in the solar system with an irregular orbit, different from all the others, is found among the ancient Sumerians. It was called Nibiru. The planet Nibiru, judging by the legends of the Sumerians, entered the solar system at a fairly high speed. It moved in an elongated epileptic orbit, moving away from the Sun at a considerable distance, then returning. The circulation period was 3600 years. This follows from the chronicle of the Sumerians.

Sumerian history is engraved on clay tablets that are almost 6,000 years old. It follows from them that once upon a time, on the territory of Mesopotamia, a highly developed civilization suddenly arose. The Sumerians had very detailed knowledge of space. They believed that Nibiru was not a lifeless planet. It was inhabited by creatures similar to people - the Anunnaki. They came to Earth to. According to one of the versions, the aliens needed the precious metal to save their planet, which was rapidly losing its atmosphere. Gold was crushed, practically turning into dust, and this allowed heat and light to linger on Nibiru, maintaining conditions for life.

For hundreds of thousands of years, the Anunnaki developed deposits on their own, but then, as the Sumerian chronicles tell, there was an uprising of workers. The work was too hard. I had to. But the humanoid apes that then lived on the planet were too primitive even for such work. According to myths, the Anunnaki went on. By mixing the DNA of earthlings and their own, they got a completely new look. They created more so that man could do more difficult work than a monkey.

On Sumerian clay tablets, this process is depicted in the form of two snakes intertwined. This symbol is very reminiscent, and perhaps this Sumerian myth explains to us one of the greatest historical mysteries. Why they still cannot find an intermediate link between the ape and modern man. If you believe the ancients, then it simply cannot exist. and the monkey are actually genetically distant from each other.

Indeed, even on our own planet, we find life in the most unexpected places and species. In the ocean, at a depth of thousands of meters, creatures live that can withstand colossal pressure. And recently, scientists from Princeton University discovered that underground, at a depth of almost three kilometers, life is teeming. There are bacteria that use uranium ore as a source. If we record such amazing phenomena on earth, then what can we say about distant space? On the ninth planet? There, for example, the atmosphere does not have to be, or it can be liquid, or so dense that the pressure there will exceed all conceivable limits.

When it comes to, first of all, we mean a reasonable life. Who said that all beings in the Universe, endowed with intelligence, must necessarily be like us?

Our science understands the word life only as a protein-nucleic acid form, the main "highlight" in which is a cell. If this cell is not there, then there is no life either. But it’s another matter if by life we \u200b\u200bmean something else. For example, Tsiolkovsky spoke about a radiant person. What it is? Reasonable, consisting of some kind of energy formations?

Perhaps someday we will be able to solve these amazing mysteries of the Universe, or perhaps we will never be allowed to do this ...

Just remember all sorts of conspiracy theories about, but it turns out that another planet still exists. Well, at least with a probability of 99.993.

And this is how it happened.

Astronomers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena have reported the discovery of a Neptune-sized object outside Pluto's orbit, which is 10 times heavier than Earth. The authors published the results of the search for Planet X in The Astronomical Journal, and Science News briefly tells about them.

The planet revolves around the Sun in an elongated orbit (and in a plane inclined relative to the Earth's orbit) with a period of 15 thousand years. Its chemical composition is similar to that of the gas giants Uranus and Neptune. As Brown and Batygin believe, the object 4.5 billion years ago was knocked out of the protoplanetary disk near the Sun.

The closest distance between the Sun and the detected object is 200 astronomical units (this is seven times the distance between Neptune and the star). The maximum distance of Planet X is estimated at 600-1200 astronomical units, which puts its orbit outside the Kuiper belt, in which Pluto is located.

The referent of the scientists' work in The Astronomical Journal was the planetary scientist Michael Brown, who, together with his colleagues, in 2003 discovered the dwarf planet Sedna, which orbits the Sun for 11.4 thousand years. The specialist was optimistic about the chances of the discovery of Planet X by Brown and Batygin.

Scientists discovered the new planet by analyzing the data on the gravitational perturbation it exerts on other celestial bodies. As noted by Brown and Batygin, astronomers will believe in their discovery when they can observe the planet through a telescope. To do this, they reserved time at the Japanese Subaru Observatory in Hawaii.

Confirmation of the existence of a celestial body will take five years. If discovered, the object could become the ninth planet in the solar system. Brown and Batygin estimate the probability of error at 0.007 percent. Earlier searches for Planet X in the solar system led scientists to discover Neptune (in 1864) and Pluto (in 1930).

Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin, Photo by Popular Science

But back in 2012, according to the calculations of an astronomer from Brazil, there is a fairly large space object beyond the orbit of Neptune, which can be recognized as the ninth planet.

With this assumption, an astronomer from the Brazilian National Observatory, Rodney da Silva Gomes, made. He drew attention to the deviation from the data of calculations of the orbits of six objects in the Kuiper belt, among which a contender for the title of a dwarf planet - Sedna.

According to him, there are several explanations for the unusual behavior of some objects in the belt. The simplest is the existence of a large body, a planet that changes their orbits with its gravity.

"All of the most distant objects are moving in the same direction along an inexplicable trajectory, and we realized that the only explanation for this is the existence of a large distant planet that holds them together as they revolve around the sun," said Brown.

Planet X

The idea of \u200b\u200bthe existence of the so-called Planet X, located on the periphery of the solar system, has been discussed in scientific circles for over 100 years. They remember and forget about her.

The current assumption is of particular interest due to the lead author of the study.

Brown specializes in finding distant objects, and it was thanks to his discovery of the dwarf planet Eris in the Kuiper Belt in 2005 that Pluto lost planetary status a year later.

Then it was assumed that Eris is slightly larger than Pluto, but now it became clear that she is slightly smaller than him.

Researchers studying distant objects in the solar system have for some time been speculating that a planet the size of Mars or Earth could exist due to the size and shape of the planets in the Kuiper Belt. But until you can see the planet through a telescope, the idea of \u200b\u200bits existence will be perceived with skepticism.

The study by Michael Brown and Konstantin Batygin was published in the Astronomical Journal.

MOSCOW, January 21 - RIA Novosti... Konstantin Batygin, who discovered the ninth planet at the "tip of the pen", located 274 times farther from the Sun than the Earth, believes that it is the last real planet in the solar system, the press service of the California Institute of Technology.

Last night, Russian astronomer Konstantin Batygin and his American colleague Michael Brown announced that they had succeeded in calculating the position of the mysterious "planet X" - the ninth, or tenth, if you count Pluto - the planet of the solar system, located 41 billion kilometers from the Sun and weighing 10 times larger than Earth.

“Although initially we were rather skeptical, when we found hints of another planet in the Kuiper belt, we continued to study its supposed orbit. Over time, we became more confident that it did exist. we have real evidence that we have completely completed the "census" of the planets of the solar system, "said Batygin, quoted by the press service of the magazine.

This discovery, according to Batygin and Brown, was largely due to the discovery of two other ultra-distant "inhabitants" of the solar system - the dwarf planets 2012 VP113 and V774104, comparable in size to Pluto and about 12-15 billion kilometers from the Sun.

Both of these planets were discovered by Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii (USA), a student of Brown, who, after their discovery, shared with his teacher and Batygin his observations indicating the oddities in the Biden movement, as they called 2012 VP113 , and a number of other Kuiper objects.

Analysis of the orbits of these objects showed that they are all affected by some large celestial body, forcing the orbits of these small dwarf planets and asteroids to stretch in a certain direction, the same for at least six objects from the list presented by Trujillo. In addition, the orbits of these objects were inclined to the ecliptic plane at the same angle - about 30%.

Such a "coincidence", as the scientists explain, is similar to if the hands of a clock, moving at different speeds, pointed to the same minute at any moment when you look at them. The probability of such an outcome of events is 0.007%, which suggests that the orbits of the "inhabitants" of the Kuiper belt were not elongated by chance - they were "conducted" by a large planet located far beyond Pluto's orbit.

The calculations carried out by Batygin show that this is definitely a "real" planet - its mass is 5 thousand times greater than that of Pluto, and this most likely means that it is a gas giant like Neptune. A year on it lasts about 15 thousand years.

It rotates in an unusual orbit - its perihelion, the point of closest approach to the Sun, is located on the "side" of the solar system where the aphelion - the point of maximum distance - is located for all other planets.

Such an orbit paradoxically stabilizes the Kuiper belt, preventing its objects from colliding with each other. So far, astronomers have not been able to see this planet due to its remoteness from the Sun, however, Batygin and Brown believe that it will be possible to do this in the next 5 years, when its orbit is calculated more accurately.