Yale’s Astronomers Use ‘Shifting And Stacking’ Method To Find A Path To Mysterious Planet Nine

Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com – As of October 2020, no observation of Planet Nine had been announced but Yale astronomers Malena Rice and Gregory Laughlin are now attempting a technique that may give possible results in a long-standing search for this mysterious celestial body.

The Planet Nine is a hypothesized ninth planet in our solar system, the astronomers’ present attempt may help to pinpoint the faintest orbital trails in an incredibly dark corner of space.

Artist’s impression of Planet Nine as an ice giant eclipsing the central Milky Way, with a star-like Sun in the distance. CC BY-SA 4.0

The Yale astronomers use the technique that scoops up scattered light from thousands of space telescope images and identifies orbital pathways for previously undetected objects.

“You really can’t see them without using this kind of method. If Planet Nine is out there, it’s going to be incredibly dim,” said Rice, lead author of a new study that has been accepted by The Planetary Science Journal.

The possibility of a ninth planet in Earth’s solar system, located beyond the orbit of Neptune, has gained momentum among astronomers in recent years as they’ve examined the curious orbits of a cluster of small, icy objects in the Kuiper Belt. Many astronomers believe the alignment of these objects—and their trajectories—point to the influence of an unseen object.

Although the vast majority of light observed from planets in the solar system is reflected light, the amount of reflected sunlight drops off dramatically for a planet as distant as Planet Nine, likely to be 12 to 23 times as distant from the sun as Pluto is.

If Planet Nine exists, it would be a so-called super-Earth. It would have five to 10 times the mass of Earth, be located hundreds of times farther from the sun than Earth is and 14 to 27 times as distant from the sun as Neptune is, said Laughlin, senior author of the new study and professor of astronomy in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

“This is a region of space that is almost entirely unexplored,” Laughlin said.

It was a year ago, Caltech’s Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin published two papers analyzing the evidence for Planet Nine’s existence.

The researchers presented the first evidence that there might be a giant planet tracing a bizarre, highly elongated orbit through the outer solar system.

In July this year, also scientists at Harvard University and the Black Hole Initiative (BHI) developed a new method to determine the true nature of the hypothesized Planet Nine, and at the same time, find black holes in the outer solar system. Their method is based on flares that result from the disruption of intercepted comets.

Now, the team Rice and Laughlin use a method called “shifting and stacking” that detects objects that are otherwise undetectable. They “shift” images from a space telescope—like moving a camera while snapping photos—along pre-defined sets of potential orbital paths. Then they “stack” hundreds of these images together in a way that combines their faint light. This method has been used in the past to discover new solar system moons.

This is the first time it has been used on a large scale to search a wide area of space. The images she and Laughlin used came from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, a space telescope normally used to search for planets outside our solar system.

The researchers tested their method by successfully searching for light signals of three known, trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). Next, they conducted a blind search of two sectors in the outer solar system that might reveal Planet Nine or any previously undetected Kuiper belt objects—and detected 17 potential objects.

“If even one of these candidate objects is real, it would help us to understand the dynamics of the outer solar system and the likely properties of Planet Nine,” said Rice.

“We should follow every clue to find out more information,” said Laughlin who added that the successful use of shifting and stacking on a limited scale will enable a wider-scale survey of the outer solar system, which is particularly compelling given the possibility of finding a new planet.

original story via Physorg

Written by Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com Staff