Planet Nine: Is It the Deadly Nibiru?
In early January, the news that an immense ninth planet likely exists beyond Pluto set the scientific community ablaze. We still have a lot to learn about this potential new solar sibling, but we do know that it’s huge—at least 10 times as massive as the Earth. The astronomers who discovered it even nicknamed it “Fatty.” And the fact that such a huge body has gone undetected just goes to show how little we truly know about our own solar system and how much science has left to teach us.
10 It Was Discovered By The Guy Who Killed Pluto
models of how gas giants form. As a result, ice giants remain the subject of hot debate in the scientific community, so a confirmed ninth plant could provide a wealth of new information on these planetary oddballs.
8 It‘s An Unbelievably Long Way Away
Even in astronomical terms, Planet Nine is staggeringly far away—its average distance from the Sun is 56 billion miles, over 20 times the distance from the Sun to Neptune, the most distant of the current planets. To put it another way, NASA’s New Horizons probe, which recently reached Pluto after a journey of nine years, would have taken at least 54 years to reach Planet Nine. And that’s a best-case scenario, calculated for Nine’s closest approach to the Sun. Reaching Nine during the most distant phase of its orbit could take up to 350 years. Of course, those are both hypothetical scenarios, since New Horizons can’t carry enough fuel to reach Nine anyway.
This incredible distance could help explain why nobody has noticed Planet Nine until now. Based on their calculations, Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin think that their hypothetical planet would actually be visible through most backyard telescopes—but only when its orbit brings it relatively close to Earth. Since nobody has noticed Planet Nine in their backyard yet, we can presume that it’s currently at a more distant point in its orbit, although Brown and Batygin still think it should be possible to detect with extremely powerful observatory telescopes.
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