If you type in “Planet X” in your favorite search engine, you’re likely to find all kinds of stuff from mass destruction of our current existence, to ancient alien astronauts … and a whole host of others.
This article is NOT about any of that. This article is about the growing evidence that a 10th planet may actually be out there, just waiting for us to find it. (Oh and yes, I’m one of those that still think Pluto is a planet!)
Robert Matthews in Science Mag wrote a superb article about it all the way back in Dec 1991. In that article he state several arguments …
“ … the gravitational pull of the planet, dubbed Planet X, has left its signature in quirks in the orbits of Neptune and Uranus. But judging by the presentations at an international conference on Planet X … held by the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), anyone searching for Planet X may be on a wild goose chase.”
“… but the evidence is sufficiently strong – and the potential gain sufficiently great – for me [Robert Harrington of the U.S. Naval Observatory (USNO) in Washington] to go on looking for it.”
“ …What spurs Harrington and his colleagues is evidence that something is missing from the current dynamical models of the solar system. Even the best of these models, incorporating decades of observations, can’t predict to positions of the outer planets more than 10 years into the future. For Pluto, the discrepancies are embarrassingly large.”
But the argument goes on …
“… the finding that random errors can account for the apparent orbital anomalies of Uranus and Neptune means that the signature of a Plante X would be lost in the noise unless it were much more massive than Harrington predicts …”
More recently, in a Mar 2016 Nature Magazine article by Alexandra Witze, the hunt for exoplanets has taken a front seat, and surprisingly enough we seem to know more about extremely distant ones than something large enough in our own solar system to be called a new planet.
But the arguments against are still out there, and they will be for quite some time. That is, all the way up to the point the new planet is found … be that the (new) 9th, 10th … or just Planet X.
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