Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, have been analyzing telemetry from the Cassini spacecraft for clues to the current position of the putative planet within its enormous orbit. Simulations running on supercomputers and in the cloud are modeling billions of years of celestial mechanics to pin down Planet Nine’s likeliest path. ![]() But the smart money is on software, either to deliver the quarry or reveal it to be an illusion. Fallon/The Washington Post/Getty ImagesĪny of them could get lucky. Brown (left) and Konstantin Batygin of the California Institute of Technology are using the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii to search for a ninth planet. Meanwhile other astronomers, both professional and amateur, are digging through archives of images in hopes of finding this needle in a hayfield.Īspect_ratio Celestial Scouts: Michael E. Brown and Batygin have been observing on Japan’s Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea-as have veteran minor-planet hunters Chad Trujillo of Northern Arizona University and Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science-to exploit that observatory’s giant mirror (8.2 meters across) and its 3-metric-ton, 870-megapixel camera. Huge telescopes on Earth have been scanning the skies for months now. ![]() And because the planet is so far from Earth, near the far end of a highly elliptical path that takes at least 15,000 years to complete, astronomers have to wait a day or more between successive photographs of the right patch of sky to see the planet shift its apparent position relative to the much more distant stars. Searchers could easily miss it among random speckles of sensor noise and the twinkling of distant and variable stars. Greg Laughlin, an astronomer at Yale University, says, “Our best estimate for its current position and brightness put it about 950 times farther than Earth from the sun.” As faint as the tiniest moons of Pluto, Planet Nine would be barely two pixels wide on the Hubble Space Telescope’s camera. Persuaded-or at least intrigued-by several converging lines of evidence, teams of astronomers around the world are now trying to answer the obvious next question: Where is Planet Nine? Although it is thought to be 8 to 10 times as massive as Earth and 2 to 4 times as wide, it seems to be maddeningly hard to spot. Somewhere out there, they are convinced, drifts a frozen world so distant from the sun-perhaps 5.5 light-days, or roughly 150 billion kilometers-that high noon on its surface is no brighter than a moonlit night on Earth. Calculations that Brown published last year with Konstantin Batygin, a former student of Brown’s who now occupies the faculty office next to his, suggest that Planet Nine is real. The 52-year-old, sporting a week-old beard and Converse sneakers, is shifting his sleep schedule to spend the coming nights remotely babysitting a giant telescope as it scans the heavens from the snowy summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii. I meet Brown in the late afternoon, shortly after his breakfast. The year before, Brown had discovered Eris, a frosty dwarf in the outer solar system more massive than Pluto and named, fittingly, for the Greek goddess of strife.īrown now has good reason to hope that history will remember him not for the Eris-instigated demotion of Pluto but as codiscoverer of an as yet unseen, true ninth planet-a Neptune-size world so massive that it may have tipped the entire solar system a few degrees sideways. Sitting in his sunny Pasadena office at the California Institute of Technology, Brown jokes that Pluto, which was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006, had it coming. Brown is often called “the guy who killed Pluto.” But he takes the moniker in stride. The team identified a distant object labeled 2015 TG387, nicknamed “The Goblin,” with an elongated orbit that is consistent with Planet Nine’s expected size and trajectory, first proposed by Caltech’s Konstantin Batygin and Michael Brown in 2016. ![]() Update on 3 October 2018: The International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center announced an observation by Scott Sheppard, Chad Trujillo, and the University of Hawaii’s David Tholen that adds new supporting evidence for the existence of Planet Nine.
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