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Starfleet Caught On Amateur Telescope



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-New York Times

June 19, 1982


A pair of American spacecraft may help scientists detect what could be a 10th planet or a giant object billions of miles away, the national Aeronautics and Space Administration said Thursday. Scientists at the space agency's Ames Research Center said the two spacecraft, Pioneer 10 and 11, which are already farther into space than any other man-made object, might add to knowledge of a mysterious object believed to be beyond the solar system's outermost known planets.

The space agency said that persistent irregularities in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune "suggest some kind of mystery object is really there" with its distance depending on what it is. If the mystery object is a new planet, it may lie five billion miles beyond the outer orbital ring of known planets, the space agency said. If it is a dark star type of objet, it may be 50 billion miles beyond the known planets; if it is a black hole, 100 billion miles. A black hole is a hypothetical body in space, believed to be a collapsed star so condensed that neither light nor matter can escape from its gravitational field.

-Newsweek Does the Sun Have a Dark Companion?

June 28 1982


When scientists noticed that Uranus wasn't following its predicted orbit for example, they didn't question their theories. Instead they blamed the anomalies on an as yet unseen planet and, sure enough, Neptune was discovered in 1846. Now astronomers are using the same strategy to explain quirks in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune.

According to John Anderson of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., this odd behavior suggests that the sun has an unseen companion, a dark star gravitationally bound to it but billions of miles away. ... Other scientists suggest that the most likely cause of the orbital snags is a tenth planet 4 to 7 billion miles beyond Neptune.

A companion star would tug the outer planets, not just Uranus and Neptune, says Thomas Van Flandern of the U.S Naval Observatory. And where he admits a tenth planet is possible, but argues that it would have to be so big - a least the size of Uranus - that it should have been discovered by now. To resolve the question, NASA is staying tuned to Pioneer 10 and 11, the planetary probes that are flying through the dim reaches of the solar system on opposite sides of the sun.

-New York Times

January 30, 1983


Something out there beyond the farthest reaches of the known solar system seems to be tugging at Uranus and Neptune. Some gravitational force keeps perturbing the two giant planets, causing irregularities in their orbits. The force suggests a presence far away and unseen, a large object that may be the long- sought Planet X. ... The last time a serious search of the skies was made it led to the discovery in 1930 of Pluto, the ninth planet.

But the story begins more than a century before that, after the discovery of Uranus in 1781 by the English astronomer and musician William Herschel. Until then, the planetary system seemed to end with Saturn.

As astronomers observed Uranus, noting irregularities in its orbital path, many speculated that they were witnessing the gravitational pull of an unknown planet. So began the first planetary search based on astronomers predictions, which ended in the 1840's with the discovery of Neptune almost simultaneously by English, French, and German astronomers.

But Neptune was not massive enough to account entirely for the orbital behavior of Uranus. Indeed, Neptune itself seemed to be affected by a still more remote planet. In the last 19th century, two American astronomers, Willian H. Pickering and Percival Lowell, predicted the size and approximate location of the trans-Neptunian body, which Lowell called Planet X. Years later, Pluto was detected by Clyde W. Tombaugh working at Lowell Observatory in Arizona. Several astronomers, however, suspected it might not be the Planet X of prediction.

Subsequent observation proved them right. Pluto was too small to change the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, the combined mass of Pluto and its recently discovered satellite, Charon, is only 1/5 that of Earth's moon.

Recent calculations by the United States Naval Observatory have confirmed the orbital perturbation exhibited by Uranus and Neptune, which Dr. Thomas C Van Flandern, an astronomer at the observatory, says could be explained by "a single undiscovered planet". He and a colleague, Dr. Richard Harrington, calculate that the 10th planet should be two to five times more massive than Earth and have a highly elliptical orbit that takes it some 5 billion miles beyond that of Pluto - hardly next-door but still within the gravitational influence of the Sun.


-US News World Report Planet X - Is It Really Out There?

Sept 10, 1984

 

Shrouded from the sun's light, mysteriously tugging at the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, is an unseen force that astronomers suspect may be Planet X - a 10th resident of the Earth's celestial neighborhood. Last year, the infrared astronomical satellite (IRAS), circling in a polar orbit 560 miles from the Earth, detected heat from an object about 50 billion miles away that is now the subject of intense speculation.

"All I can say is that we don't know what it is yet," says Gerry Neugesbeuer, director of the Palomar Observatory for the California Institute of Technology. Scientists are hopeful that the one-way journeys of the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes may help to locate the nameless body.

 

 

-Giant Stealth Planet May Explain Rain of Comets from Solar System's Edge

 

 

Our sun may have a companion that disturbs comets from the edge of the solar system — a giant planet with up to four times the mass of Jupiter, researchers suggest.

A NASA space telescope launched last year may soon detect such a stealth

 

companion to our sun, if it actually exists, in the distant icy realm of the comet-birthing Oort cloud, which surrounds our solar system with billions of icy objects.

The potential jumbo Jupiter would likely be a world so frigid it is difficult to spot, researchers said. It could be found up to 30,000 astronomical units from the sun. One AU is the distance between the Earth and the sun, about 93 million miles (150 million km).

Most systems with stars like our sun — so-called class G stars — possess companions. Only one-third are single-star systems like our solar system.

Not a nemesis

Scientists have already proposed that a

 

hidden star, which they call "Nemesis," might lurk a light-year or so away from our sun. They suggest that during its orbit, this red dwarf or brown dwarf star would regularly enter the Oort cloud, jostling the orbits of many comets there and causing some to fall toward Earth. That would provide an explanation for what seems to be a cycle of mass extinctions here.

Still, other astronomers recently found that if Nemesis did exist, its orbit

 

could not be nearly as stable as claimed.

Now researchers point to evidence that our sun might have a different sort of companion.

To avoid confusion with the Nemesis model, astrophysicists John Matese and Daniel Whitmire at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette dub their conjectured object "Tyche" — the good sister of the goddess Nemesis in Greek mythology, and a name proposed by scientists working on NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope.

It is the WISE observatory that, using its all-seeing infrared eye, stands the best chance of having spotted Tyche, if this companion to the sun exists at all, the researchers said.

Matese and Whitmire detailed their research Nov. 17 online edition of the journal Icarus.

Comet-flinging sun companion

The researchers noted that most comets that fly into the inner solar system seem to come from the outer region of the Oort cloud. Their calculations suggest the gravitational influence of a planet one to four times the mass of Jupiter in this area might be responsible.

Two centuries of observations have indicated an anomaly that suggests the existence of Tyche, Matese said. "The probability that it could be caused by a statistical fluke has remained very small," he added.

The pull of Tyche might also explain why the

 

dwarf planet Sedna

has such an unusually elongated orbit, the researchers added.

If Tyche existed, it would probably be very cold, roughly minus 100 degrees F (-73 degrees C), they said, which could explain why it has escaped detection for so long — its coldness means that it would not radiate any heat scientists could easily spot, and its distance from any star means it would not reflect much light.

"Most planetary scientists would not be surprised if the largest undiscovered companion was Neptune-sized or smaller, but a Jupiter-mass object would be a surprise," Matese told SPACE.com. "If the conjecture is indeed true, the important implications would relate to how it got there — touching on the early solar environment — and how it might have affected the subsequent distributions of comets and, to a lesser extent, the known planets."

Is Tyche really out there?

The fact of Tyche's existence is questionable, since the pattern seen in the outer Oort cloud is not seen in the inner Oort.

"Conventional wisdom says that the patterns should tend to correlate, and they don't," Matese said.

If the WISE team was lucky, it caught evidence for the Tyche solar companion twice before the

 

space observatory's original mission ended in October. That could be enough to corroborate the object's existence within a few months as researchers analyze WISE's data.

But if WISE detected signs of Tyche only once (or not at all), researchers would have to wait years for other telescopes to confirm or deny the potential solar companion's existence, Matese said.

 


01 December 2010

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