Astronomers Found a Planet Nine Candidate—But It’s in the Wrong Place

The astronomer team said he found a single, slow-moving infrared facility, which inspects all right boxes, because of all the right boxes with a long Ninth planet outside the Neptune.

Hunting for the planet, the disappointment of the nine solar system is based on the unique majority of rocky bodies in the cuiper belt in the slightest troll-long and Neptune orbit. This majority offers some weak, mass object. However, the team behind the new work has made a new approach to the search: decades explore the infrared information that collects dust.

Research, stationed This month, first of all, a group of Archiv and Australia’s astronomical society, a group of Taiwan, Japan and Australia come from a group of scientists. The group was interested in archival information from two infrared space telescopes, NASA’s mission of IRAs Since 1983 and from Japan Akari satellite In 2006-2007. Their goal: find any object that is cold, weak and slow enough for the planet.

Search, Caltech Astronomers are based on a theory that prepares headlines in 2016 when Mike Brown and Constantine Batygin Offered a mass, a secret planet Based on many patterns of Kuiper belt objects. In 2021 an update, duo gently made the theoryThe fact that nine of the planet is more than only six times, with 7,400 years of orbit, perhaps is enough to detect with the upcoming Vera Rubin Observatory.

Enter the infrared search. Astronomer Terry Long Phans and colleagues from the University of Taiwan use the 23-year spacecraft between the 23-year-old colleagues, and colleagues, 23 years used to look for extremely distant objects. After applying filters for stars, galaxies and other noise, they remained with a candidate. It does not match any known object and seems to move enough to be a missing planet.

“The paper is a stylish analysis, but it’s a thing that I hope for: said that the statements are a noise approaching each other in a 23-year period,” he said.

The weak signature of the facility and extremely slow moves, Brown and Batygin, as well as another planet offers a planet outside of a drowning orbit with nine evaluations. It is a new lead in a person’s phantom object that leads to a completely different direction.

“Another interesting point is that the orbit of this facility is not in line with our forecasts for the planets,” he said brown. “It doesn’t mean it is not real, it’s not just the forecasted planet, not the nine of the planet.”

“My doubts are just noise, but to find it will be fun.”

Thus, the astronomers remain careful. The two data points are not enough to close a orbit and the source can still be a background object or data artefact. Again, the authors suggest that in Chile is bright enough to use surface telescopes such as a dark energy chamber (Decam).

New research, if the more fringe is overlooked, if the tracking observations are a great victory for the team’s approach, confirm and confirm the concept of a long-term planet in our system.

So far, the planet remains nine theoretically. But it may be the first realistic seem of this thing real There – a weak point of light sliding from the darkness is waiting to catch our technology and our ingenuity.