Is the Solar System increase? Planet y, a world of the size of the earth, arouses the curiosity of astrophysicians
A team of astronomers claims that he has found indications about the existence of the 9th planet of the solar system, which they called “Planet Y”, to differentiate from the other candidate planet, planet X, according to a study published on August 25 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Live Science wrote on Tuesday.
This hypothetical planet Y would be close to the Earth and could exist independently of the planet X, the number of planets in the solar system, thus reaching 10, if the existence of both planets will be confirmed.
Researchers claim that planet Y could be discovered in the next three years, but for now there is no direct evidence of its existence, notes Agerpres.
The search for the ninth planet in the Solar System began after the discovery of Neptun in 1846 and was temporarily completed in the 1930s with Pluto's discovery, which was later relegated to the dwarf planet status in 2006. But the search resumed in 2016, when astronomers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin, from Caltech, proposed to the planet, that the unusual orbits presented by approximately a dozen large transnectunic objects would be explained by the gravitational attraction of a hidden mass.
This hypothetical world, also known as planet X, is probably somewhere in the Kuiper Belt – a gigantic disc as an asteroids, comets and dwarf planets (including Pluto) that orbits the Sun beyond the eight known planets – but so far has avoided detection.
The planet y, a telluric world
In the study published at the end of August by Monthly Not to the Royal Astronomical Society, another group of researchers claims that he has discovered evidence of a new candidate planet, which they called Planet Y. This hypothetical world, which would also be in the Kuiper belt, could be about twice as close to the earth than the planet X-could be much closer than our planet. Its potential existence does not invalidate the theory of planet X, the researchers said.
The team came to this conclusion after analyzing the trajectories of 50 objects in the Kuiper Belt (KBO) and found that they were inclined by about 15 degrees compared to the rest of the solar system planets. The only thing that could explain this inclination is a hidden planet, they supported.
“We started to try to find other explanations about this inclination, but what we discovered is that, in fact, a planet is needed,” said the main author of the study, Amir Siraj recently at Princeton University.
“This work is not the discovery of a planet,” he added. “But it is certainly the discovery of a puzzle for which a planet is a probable solution,” said Siraj.
Based on their calculations, the study team believes that the planet Y is probably a telluric world with a table somewhere between that of Mercury and the Earth. This is significantly smaller than the hypothetical mass of the planet X, which is proposed as a giant gas up to 10 times more massive than the Earth.
Researchers also propose that planet Y is located at a distance of 100 to 200 times farther from the Sun than the Earth, but not far from Neptune's orbit, and that it would be closer to the Sun than the planet X, which is probably at least 400 times beyond the sun. At these distances, both planets would reflect very little light back to the ground, which makes them difficult to observe directly.
If there, the planet Y would also be inclined up to 10 degrees compared to the orbital plane common to the eight known planets – another factor that would make it more difficult to detect it, the researchers wrote.
Critics say that the discoveries “are not definitive”
However, not everyone agrees with the new proposal. Samantha Lawler, an astronomer at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan and one of the critics of the planet's hypothesis, told CNN that the discoveries “are not definitive”, largely due to the small sample of transneptunic objects included in the study.
Patryk Sofia Lykawka, an astronomer at Kindai University in Japan, specialized in objects of the Kuiper belt has added that the existence of the planet Y is “plausible”, but requires more observations to be considered a probability.
In order to fully prove the existence of the planet Y or the planet X, the researchers will either have to be lucky and directly observe the weak light reflected by these two distant bodies, or find many more transneptunic objects that match the patterns they discovered.
This may not take long due to the Vera C. Rubin Observer in Chile, who has recently become operational, who began scanning the night sky with the largest digital room in the world.
Many experts believe that this observer will discover thousands of other objects in the Kuiper belt in the coming years, which could provide the data needed to confirm or deny these theories.
