Perhaps the ideas of earthlings about the solar system are far from reality. Scientists at the University of California Michael Brown And Konstantin Batygin published a paper proving that .

As stated in the work, new planet, which does not yet have its own name, is found by mathematical analysis perturbations experienced by the bodies of the so-called "Kuiper belt" - space on the outskirts solar system.

According to the calculations of Brown and Batygin, the orbit of the ninth planet is located at a distance of 20 orbits from Neptune. This object makes a revolution around the Sun in 10 - 20 thousand years. The planet, according to the findings of the researchers, exceeds the Earth in mass by 10 times.

Do you see the planet? And she is there!

According to astronomers, the planet has not yet been discovered due to its great distance from the Sun, but there is hope that the latest astronomical instruments will make it possible to fix it in the next 5-10 years.

The idea of ​​the existence of the ninth planet of the solar system appeared after studying the movement of several previously discovered objects in the Kuiper belt. Michael Brown, who was skeptical of such a hypothesis, together with Konstantin Batygin began a more thorough analysis of the behavior of objects in the Kuiper belt.

The result of these studies was the conclusion that the stable existence of these objects in their current orbits within the framework of the laws of celestial mechanics is possible only if there is another planet that affects them. Moreover, this heavy planet makes possible the existence of smaller objects, the plane of rotation of which is perpendicular to the plane of the solar system.

According to Brown and Batygin, last years at least four celestial bodies have been found in the Kuiper belt that fit perfectly into their calculations.

NGC 2207 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Canis Major. Discovered by John Herschel in 1835 along with the neighboring galaxy IC 2163. The pair of galaxies are actively interacting, being at the beginning of the merging process. The galaxy is located at a distance of about 36 Mpc from the Earth. The merger with a neighboring galaxy is in its initial phase, the spiral structure of both galaxies is still preserved, however, as a result of this process, after about a billion years, an elliptical or lenticular galaxy is formed.

A pioneer born in the USSR

According to American astronomers, the ninth planet could be pushed into a distant orbit, too close to the main gas giants of the solar system - Jupiter and Saturn. This happened during the formation of the solar system.

It should be noted that today the work of Brown and Batygin is only a hypothesis, which has both supporters and opponents. In the coming years, the version of the existence of the ninth planet of the solar system should either receive weighty arguments in its favor, or be convincingly refuted.

One of the co-authors of the work, astronomer Konstantin Batygin, was born in the Soviet Union and lived in Russia until 1994, having finished the first grade of school. Then, together with his parents, he left for Japan, and in 1999 the family moved to the United States. Here Batygin completed his secondary education, and then entered the California University of Technology. After completing the course of study, and then graduate school, the young astronomer took up scientific research.

Two planets in 250 years

In 1781 the British William Herschel discovered the seventh planet from the Sun, named Uranus. In 1846 the French Urbain Le Verrier discovered Neptune.

The peculiarity of Neptune lies in the fact that its existence was first calculated mathematically, and only then proved with the help of regular observations. The discovery of unforeseen changes in the orbit of Uranus gave rise to the hypothesis of an unknown planet, the gravitational perturbing influence of which they are due to. Neptune was found within the predicted position.

The history of the discovery of Neptune proves that the current assumptions of Brown and Batygin may have very serious grounds.

"Degraded" Pluto

The ninth planet already existed in the solar system between 1930 and 2006. In 1930 an American Clyde Tombaugh discovered a planet beyond the orbit of Neptune, which was named Pluto. It was originally thought to be the so-called "Planet X" that astronomers have been looking for since late XIX century. But further studies have shown that neither in size nor in mass does Pluto fit into theoretical constructions scientists who believed that there must be another gas giant on the periphery of the solar system, and not a planet smaller than the Earth.

Research in the second half of the 20th century led to the discovery of the "Kuiper belt" - a zone of a large number of relatively small celestial bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune, among which Pluto was one of the largest.

In 2006, the International Astronomical Union first gave an official definition of the term "planet", which included eight of the nine planets in the solar system - except for Pluto. After that, Pluto was transferred to the category of dwarf planets, with which he still does not agree. whole line astronomers.

Two American astronomers, one of whom is a native of Russia, stunned the scientific world on Tuesday after sensational news spread around the media: they discovered a ninth planet on the outskirts of the solar system! The first news about this was published by the California Institute of Technology, where both scientists work - and Mike, later - reputable scientific journals Science and Nature.

“She will be the real ninth planet. Since ancient times, only two real planets have been found, and this will be the third. It's a big part of our solar system that has gone undetected, and that's amazing," says Brown.

It is reported that the planet was found by mathematical analysis of the perturbations experienced by many icy bodies from the so-called Kuiper Belt - a huge region of space beyond the orbit of Pluto. Calculations showed that the planet revolves around the Sun at a distance of 20 orbits of Neptune, its mass is 10 times the mass of the Earth.

Due to such a distance from the Sun, the planet is not visible and makes a complete revolution around the Sun in 10-20 thousand years.

“Although we were initially skeptical that this planet could exist, as we continued to explore its orbit, we became more and more confident that it really is there,” Batygin said.

The calculated mass of the object leaves no doubt that it can be attributed to the planet with full confidence, because it is 5 thousand times heavier than Pluto! Unlike a huge number of small objects in the solar system, such as dwarf planets, the ninth planet gravitationally dominates the extended region of the Kuiper Belt, where it rotates. Moreover, this area is much larger and the spaces dominated by all the other known planets of the solar system.

This, in Brown's words, makes it "the most planetary of the planets in the solar system."

Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin

The work of scientists, which may become epoch-making, entitled "Evidence for a Distant Giant Planet in the Solar System" is published in the journal Astronomical Journal. In it, the authors find an explanation for many previously discovered features in the movement of icy bodies in the Kuiper Belt.

The search for the planet began in 2014, when a former student of Brown published a paper claiming that 13 of the most distant Kuiper Belt objects had similar oddities in their motion. Then a version of the existence of a number of not big planet. Brown then did not support this version, but continued the calculations. Together with Batygin, they began a year and a half project to study the orbits of these bodies.

Caltech/R.Hurt (IPAC)

Quite soon, Batygin and Brown realized that the orbits of six of these objects pass close to the same region of space, despite the fact that all orbits are different. “It's like looking at six clocks on six hands that are running at different speeds, and at that moment they show the same time. The probability of this is about 1/100,” explains Brown. In addition, it turned out that the orbits of all six bodies are inclined at an angle of 30 degrees to the plane of the ecliptic. “Actually, this could not be accidental. So we began to look for what formed these orbits, ”the astronomer explained.

Almost by accident, scientists noticed that if you put a heavy planet into the calculations,

whose perihelion is 180 degrees from the perihelion of these six bodies (that is, the Sun itself is between them), then its perturbations will explain the observed picture.

“It was a healthy reaction - such a geometry is impossible, orbits cannot be stable for a long time, because in the end this will lead to a collision of objects,” Batygin believes. However, the mechanism known in celestial mechanics as resonances of mean motions does not allow this to happen: objects, approaching each other, exchange energy and fly apart.

For every four revolutions of the ninth planet, there are nine revolutions of those same objects, and they never collide. As is often the case in astronomy, the hypothesis was confirmed when the assumption it predicted was confirmed. It turned out that the trans-Neptunian object Sedna, discovered in 2003 by Brown, Trujillo and Rabinowitz, and another similar object 2012 VP113 do deviate their orbits slightly where predicted. But the main assumption that came true is the existence, thanks to a heavy planet in the Kuiper Belt, of objects whose rotation plane is completely perpendicular to the plane of the solar system.

It turned out that over the past three years, astronomers have found at least four such objects whose orbits correspond to predictions.

Where did the planet hidden in the depths of the Kuiper Belt come from? Scientists believe that there were originally four cores in the solar system that formed Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. “However, there could have been five,” says Brown. This fifth protoplanet, coming too close to Jupiter or Saturn, could be thrown into a distant eccentric orbit.

According to scientists, if the planet is now close to its perihelion, you can look for it in past surveys of the sky. If she managed to leave, telescopes like 10-meter instruments at the Keck Observatory can catch her,

after all, the planet never approaches the Sun at a distance closer than 200 orbits of the Earth.

Among scientists there is no consensus about the discovery. , a body dynamics specialist from Nice, is sure that this planet exists. But not everyone thinks so. “I have seen many, many statements like this in my career. And they all turned out to be wrong, ”says Hal Levison, a planetary scientist at the Institute in Boulder (Colorado).

Until 2009, Pluto was considered the ninth planet of the solar system, discovered in 1930 also thanks to the analysis of the disturbances it created. Pluto has been demoted to a dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union. Recently, some astronomers have created a movement to return it to planetary status following the discoveries made by the New Horizons probe.
One of the first interviews Konstantin Batygin gave to the correspondent of Gazeta.Ru.

- Konstantin, the search for bodies in the Kuiper Belt is not a very popular topic among astronomers, how many people are doing this?
“There are a little over a hundred people in the world, I think. It turned out that the most distant objects in the solar system, in physical space, look in the same direction. And the only theoretically correct model that we could construct is one where their orbits are held by the gravity of one planet.

- What are the prospects for finding a planet with telescopes?
“I think it can be done in the next two to five years. This requires knowledge of the orbit and sufficient observational time on telescopes. Knowing the orbit is what we've been doing in this article. To find it, you need to know where to look. At the moment, we know only the closest part of it.

— I know that you were born in Moscow. How did you end up in the USA?
- We lived in Russia until 1994, in Moscow I finished the 1st grade. We moved to Japan, lived there for six years, where I studied from grades 3 to 6, and skipped the second grade because I was too tall. Then he studied at the Russian school at the embassy in Tokyo. Moved to California in 1999 where I graduated high school, university and graduate school at Caltech.

- Good luck, we hope that your discovery will be confirmed, and we will see your last name in textbooks!
- Thank you.

A few years ago, a huge number of posts about the mythical planet Nibiru appeared on the network. Thanks to the Sumerian epic, we learned that a certain planet rotates in the solar system, which has a very elongated and large orbit. Once every 10-15 thousand years, this planet invades near-Earth space and causes a global catastrophe on our planet. For various peoples of the world, this catastrophe is reflected in mythology, in particular, by the Great Flood. Indeed, many data from archaeologists, hydrologists, geologists and other scientists show that something happened about 12-13 thousand years ago that killed most of the flora and fauna of the Earth.

Official science and the governments of the world in every possible way denied information about Nibiru, while continuing to build super fortified bunkers all over the earth. There is a lot of information on the net about the bunker under Mount Yamantau, about the bunker under the Denver airport, etc. So what are the governments of the whole world afraid of?

And here is the sensation. Officially, with great fanfare, scientists admitted that a ninth planet could exist in the solar system. Moreover, they recognized that the planet is huge, larger than the Earth and the period of its rotation around the Sun can vary from 10 to 20 thousand years. Thus, information about Nibiru takes on a completely different meaning. What is this? An attempt to warn mankind?

At the very beginning of this year, Caltech scientists Michael Brown and Konstantin Batygin presented compelling evidence that there is another planet in the solar system. It is much further away than the rest and has not yet been seen through a telescope, but indirect evidence definitely indicates its presence. In this article, we will talk about 9 facts that are already known about this new planet.

A new planet was discovered by a man who "killed" Pluto.

One of the discoverers of the new ninth planet - Michael Brown, is known as "the man who killed Pluto." It was on his initiative that Pluto was deprived of the official status of the planet. And in 2010, Brown even wrote a book, How I Killed Pluto and Why It Was Inevitable. Many in scientific world they even joked that the discovery of a new planet by Brown was an attempt to rehabilitate Pluto for the “murder”, because the decision to deprive him of the status of a planet was extremely negatively perceived by society.

Unlike Pluto and Eridu, which Brown also discovered, the new planet is supposedly a gas-ice giant and looks something like Neptune. Scientists believe that the new planet has a diameter of 2-4 times the Earth's and a mass of about 10 Earth's, which puts it in this indicator between the terrestrial planets and giant planets.

She is very far away.

Neptune is the planet farthest from the Sun, located at a distance of 4.5 billion km from it. And the new ninth planet is 20 times further away. That's a lot, even by astronomical standards. For comparison: not so long ago, the NASA New Horizons probe flew to Pluto, this journey took him 9 years. It would have taken him 54 years to fly to the new ninth planet. And this is only in the best scenario, when the planet would be as close as possible to the Sun. It would take New Horizons about 350 years to reach the farthest point of its orbit.

It is the largest and longest orbit around the Sun.

Due to the fact that the new ninth planet is very far from the Sun, around which it revolves, its period of revolution is extremely long. Only according to the most modest calculations of scientists, a complete revolution around the star takes this planet from 10 to 20 thousand years. Just think about this number. Even if the lowest limit of 10,000 years is accurate, the last time this planet was in the same place as it is now, when mammoths still walked the earth, and the number of people worldwide did not exceed 5 million. The entire history of mankind, from the earliest development of agriculture to the invention of spaceships, would fit in just one year on this planet.

The new planet may be the "fifth giant".

Back in 2011, scientists based on the structure of the Kuiper belt began to suggest that in our solar system, most likely there was a fifth giant planet. Such assumptions were made in an attempt to understand exactly how a complex of large icy asteroids in the Kuiper belt formed, which stick together and move in a strictly constant orbit. After checking with the help of computer simulations about 100 possible scenarios for the development of events, scientists came to the conclusion that at the dawn of the origin of the solar system, it most likely had a fifth giant planet.
According to scientists, it was like this: about 4 billion years ago, a giant planet, by the force of its gravitational field, “pushed” Neptune out of its then occupied orbit next to Jupiter and Saturn. Neptune is in the back of the solar system beyond Uranus. During this “flight”, Neptune took with him pieces of the primary matter of the solar system, which were then thrown out of its current orbit by its gravitational forces and formed the core of the current Kuiper belt. The whole question was, what kind of planet was it? Uranus, Jupiter and Saturn were not suitable for this role. Now, with the advent of the new ninth planet, something began to clear up. Scientists suggest that having done her "dirty deed", she apparently flew into deep space, thrown out of the solar system by the forces of gravitational interaction with other planets.

The new planet could help with interstellar travel.

The problem with space is that it's very, very big. Therefore, one of the biggest problems in interstellar travel is that we simply don't have enough fuel to keep the ship's engines running for many years. In the case of probes and reconnaissance interplanetary ships, scientists have long and quite successfully used such a trick as a "gravity maneuver", which allows to disperse the ship due to the force of gravity of a large planet. For the Voyager and New Horizons probes, this planet was Jupiter. Well, if (when) we want to explore interstellar space, then the new ninth planet can become such a planet for us. Problems can arise only if its density is less than the density of Neptune, then the increase in speed from such a maneuver around it will be extremely small. In any case, we will only be able to find out about this when we study the new planet more carefully.

Conspiracy theories call it the "planet of death".

It's time to get used to the fact that every time after the discovery of new objects in our solar system, various adherents of conspiracy theories begin to call these objects the harbingers of the imminent apocalypse. Usually this role is assigned to comets and asteroids. But these guys also could not pass by the discovery of a new ninth planet. Almost immediately after the announcement of scientists, various Internet prophets proclaimed that the new planet is the same planet "Nibiru". It is assumed that "Nibiru" is a mythical planet that the secret government knows about, but carefully hides this fact from people, because one day "Nibiru" will pass very close to the Earth, which will provoke destructive earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, which in the end lead to the apocalypse.

And it really can turn out to be the "planet of death."

No, of course, next to the Earth, this new ninth planet is unlikely to ever pass, this is absolutely fantastic. However, there are, albeit not great, but still real chances that she may indirectly be guilty of the apocalypse. The fact is that the enormous force of attraction of this planet for a gravitational maneuver can be used not only by probes and spaceships. The same thing can happen with an asteroid. Using its gravity, the new ninth planet can literally “launch” a huge rock at us, from which we cannot dodge. Of course, the probability that this will happen in such a huge space is negligible, but still it is.

It may not exist at all.

And this is perhaps the most important thing to know about the new ninth planet. So far no one has seen this planet. Astronomers only assume the presence of this planet, based on the statistical anomalies of the orbits of minor planets that have developed over billions of years. That is, according to the behavior of neighboring objects, which are affected by some gravitational force, scientists suggest that this force may come from a large planet. Only visual detection can confirm its existence. However, given the fact that the planet moves very slowly and is far from Earth, this makes it very difficult to find. Brown and Batygin have already booked time on Japan's Subaru telescope at an observatory in Hawaii. According to Brown, a survey of more than

If at first these were still timid assumptions, albeit based on calculations, now everything is already very serious.

The ninth planet (Planet Nine), according to the latest statement by NASA scientists, actually exists and astronomers are determined to find it in the near future. New evidence obtained by NASA scientists indicates that our solar system would be very different if the "invisible" ninth planet did not actually exist.

Where is this ninth planet of the solar system?

The hypothetical ninth planet, according to preliminary calculations, is approximately 10 times more massive than the Earth. It is located in the darkness of outer space almost on the outer edge of the solar system, 20 times farther from the Sun than Neptune. In recent years, astronomers have discovered many anomalous features in our system that can only be explained by the presence of the ninth planet, and the only thing left to do is to find a point in space where the ninth planet is located at a given time.

"We now have five independent 'lines' of evidence pointing to the existence of a ninth planet, obtained through astronomical observations," says Konstantin Batygin, a planetary scientist and astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. planet, then we will get many more new problems than the solutions obtained. We will have to come up with as many as five new independent theories, which should be consistent with each other in one way or another. "

Using a computer model of the solar system with the ninth planet present in it, Batygin's group demonstrated that a sufficiently large number of objects should be present in the system, the plane of the orbit of which is inclined at a certain angle to the plane of the solar system. And now astronomers already know about the existence of five such objects. In addition to this evidence, scientists have shown that the presence of the ninth planet caused the plane of rotation of all the planets of the system to tilt to the equatorial plane of the Sun, the difference between which is six degrees.

Another manifestation of the influence of the ninth planet, scientists believe that all Kuiper belt objects rotate in the opposite direction from everything else in the solar system. "No other model can explain the strangeness of the trajectories of these objects," says Batygin.

In their further studies, scientists plan to use the Subaru Telescope, located at the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii. With his help, they hope to find the ninth planet in the near future and find out where it really came from.

But back in 2012, according to the calculations of an astronomer from Brazil, beyond the orbit of Neptune there is a rather large space object, which can be recognized as the ninth planet.

With such an assumption, an astronomer from the National Observatory of Brazil Rodney da Silva Gomes made. He drew attention to the deviation from the given calculations of the orbits of six Kuiper belt objects, among which the contender for the title of a dwarf planet is Sedna.

According to him, there are several explanations for the unusual behavior of some objects in the belt. The simplest is the existence of a large body, a planet, which changes their orbits with its gravity.

In 2015, astronomers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena reported the discovery of an object the size of Neptune, 10 times the mass of Earth, outside the orbit of Pluto. The authors published the results of the search for Planet X in The Astronomical Journal, and Science News briefly talks about them.

The planet revolves around the Sun in an elongated orbit (and in a plane inclined relative to the Earth's orbit) with a period of 15 thousand years. Its chemical composition is similar to those of the gas giants Uranus and Neptune. According to Brown and Batygin, the object was knocked out of the protoplanetary disk near the Sun 4.5 billion years ago.

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