• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Mystery object in weird orbit beyond Neptune cannot be explained

Status
Not open for further replies.
The Elite

The Elite

BOSS
Gattsu25 said:
Reminder, this is how our solar system moves:

zAxQBEl.jpg
Click to expand...

You don't really think about it but seeing it visualized it just seems crazy that we're a passenger on that right now.
 
K

KarmaCow

Member
Polishin8r said:
Wow this is nuts, but yeah makes sense how we are moving out of the big bang up to this point.... how fast is our solar system moving ?
Click to expand...

While the motion in that gif is highly exaggerated, it doesn't have to do with the expansion of the universe. It comes from the sun orbiting the galactic core like every other star in the Milky way.
 
D

driggonny

Banned
So... if I understand correctly... all of the planets in our solar system that we know of seem to emanate from the Sun and orbit on a roughly disk-like plane, and we've now found multiple space objects with a different orbit that suggests another rough plane of orbit? So if we've found a couple objects already orbiting on this plane, there are probably more?

I'm not sure if I actually understood that correctly or if I just made all that up :p
 
M

MrChocolate

Member
KarmaCow said:
While the motion in that gif is highly exaggerated, it doesn't have to do with the expansion of the universe. It comes from the sun orbiting the galactic core like every other star in the Milky way.
Click to expand...

Question, does the Milky Way also rotates in a certain way? Because it would be really cool that our whole universe (from atomic estructures, to planets orbiting the sun, and the stars orbiting (?) the galactic core) works under similar principles.
 
K

Kthulhu

Member
Full source from my last post.

The Sun is moving towards Lambda Herculis at 20 kilometers per second or 12 miles per second. Or in units "per hour": 72,000 kilometers per hour or 45,000 miles per hour. This speed is in a frame of rest if the other stars were all standing still.

The three-dimensional picture of the Sun's movement through the Galaxy is a little more complicated.

The Sun is moving upwards, out of the plane of the Milky Way, at a speed of 7 kilometers per second. Currently the Sun lies 50 light-years above the mid-plane of the galaxy, and its motion is steadily carrying it further away.

But the gravitational pull of the stars in the Galactic (Milky Way) plane is slowing down the Sun's escape. The astronomer Frank Bash estimates that in 14 million years the sun will reach its maximum height above the Galactic disk. From that 250 light-year position, it will be pulled back towards the plane of the Galaxy. Passing through, it will travel to a point 250 light-years below the disk, then oscillate upwards again to reach its present position 66 million years from now. We crossed the plane 2 million years ago. We are currently in the thick of the galactic disk and our view of distant regions is largely blocked by dust but 10-20 million years from now, our motion will allow a full view of our starry galaxy.

The Sun-Galactic center distance is 25,000 light-years -- plus or minus 2,000 light-years. The galaxy is thought to be 100,000 light-years in diameter and we are thought to be about halfway out from the center (used to be thought that we were two-thirds out).

If you have a good idea of the Sun's distance from the Galactic center, then the solar system's speed can be approximated. Using speed measurements of the gas at different distances from the Galactic center, the Sun appears to be cruising along at 200 kilometers per second and it takes 240 million years to complete the grand circuit around the Galaxy. This speed is an absolute speed.


Note:

1 light-year = 9.46*10^{15} meters
1 parsec = 3.08*10^{16} meters
Click to expand...

Source: http://solar-center.stanford.edu/FAQ/Qsolsysspeed.html
 
S

Staccat0

Fail out bailed
Newlove said:
I keep seeing people say a full disclosure is not far off. You really think a government will just come out and announce alien life? If real, these things have been kept ridiculously under tight wraps for years. They wouldn't just be like 'eh what the hell, lets tell all'. It will never happen, unless its from NASA finding some tiny organisms on Mars.
Click to expand...
I don't really believe we have been visited by aliens in recent time, but I did get excited when Hillary talked about how she was gonna try to release some info on Area 51 haha.

Meanwhile, if anyone would spill the beans on Martians and shit it'll be Trump for sure.
 
K

KarmaCow

Member
MrChocolate said:
Question, does the Milky Way also rotates in a certain way? Because it would be really cool that our whole universe (from atomic estructures, to planets orbiting the sun, and the stars orbiting (?) the galactic core) works under similar principles.
Click to expand...

Do you mean relative to other galaxies or purely the motion of the galaxy itself? I could be wrong but there is no greater movement other than the generally uniform expansion of space itself. I mean that movement still needs to be relative to something. Take the motion of the solar system. This entire topic is about an object that orbits in a highly eccentric and inclined plane relative to most objects in the solar system, which itself is very out of wack with the motion of the sun around the galaxy.

That said, yes everything does follow the same principles, that's almost the foundation of science. You wont be able to see planets orbiting a star mimicking an electron around its atom because those are very different processes but for the most part gravity still defines motion of larger objects relative to one another. The motion of the Moon around the Earth, the Earth around the Sun, the Sun around the galactic core comes from that even though the orbits themselves are not the same. It's how Newton derived his theory of gravity to explain the motion of the Moon almost 300 years ago.

That's not to say that everything is figured out obviously. For example, the concept of dark matter came out of people trying to figure out why the rotation of galaxies didn't match up with the amount matter seen in those galaxies. There just wasn't enough to be accounted for through what could be seen and so the thought was there was a form of very diffuse matter that surrounds the galaxies but doesn't interact with "normal" matter electromagnetically . AFAIK, that's the accepted theory and not that gravity itself radically changes at massive scales.
 
S

-Stranger-

Junior Member
I had a dream the other night.
I was in my front yard with my wife.
We looked up and saw a strange craft, it looked like a flying saucer with blinking lights.
Then we looked to the east and noticed there was 3 more flying in a triangle formation.
Then in a panic we jumped in the car and drove and we noticed they were fucking everywhere in the sky over the city.

It dawned on me ''they are here''

Creepy dream
 
The Elite

The Elite

BOSS
sandkiller said:
As far as i know this is complete BS and has already been debunked.
Click to expand...

That the solar system is traveling at 20 kilometers a second?

It doesn't look like that gif but the solar system is in motion. That's obviously sped up. There is about 5-10 years in that gif.
 
C

CosmicQueso

Member
Although the majority of Centaurs are thought to have originated in the scattered disk, with the high-inclination members coming from the Oort cloud, the origin of the high inclination component of trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) remains uncertain. We report the discovery of a retrograde TNO, which we nickname "Niku", detected by the Pan-STARRS 1 Outer Solar System Survey. Our numerical integrations show that the orbital dynamics of Niku are very similar to that of 2008 KV42 (Drac), with a half-life of &#8764;500 Myr. Comparing similar high inclination TNOs and Centaurs (q>10 AU, a<100 AU and i>60&#8728;), we find that these objects exhibit a surprising clustering of ascending node, and occupy a common orbital plane. This orbital configuration has high statistical significance: 3.8-&#963;. An unknown mechanism is required to explain the observed clustering. This discovery may provide a pathway to investigate a possible reservoir of high-inclination objects.
Click to expand...

Well hey, at least we now know what Jeff Rigby does for a living.
 
S

Socreges

Banned
Kud Dukan said:
I seem to remember that getting a lot of criticism. Here's a link discussing that animation.

Explanation of why this is wrong.
Click to expand...

sandkiller said:
As far as i know this is complete BS and has already been debunked.
Click to expand...
Well, hang on. The main reason why it's resonating with people here is that it shows the Sun moving around an orbit as the planets also orbit. That much is true. So it's not "complete" BS. The idea that the Sun is pulling the planets with it, though, as if they're trailing behind....wrong.
 
C

curls

Wake up Sheeple, your boring insistence that Obama is not a lizardman from Atlantis is wearing on my patience 💤
sandkiller said:
As far as i know this is complete BS and has already been debunked.
Click to expand...

Complete BS? Even Plait avoids stating that.

Tho that slate article muddies the waters rather than clarifying. A moving image is worth a thousand words! Thats why it went viral in the first place.
 
S

SkyOdin

Member
This is really a very simple discovery, but it is still pretty interesting.

Here is the background:

According to current models of how the Solar System formed, it started as a cloud of gas that was gathered together by the gravity of the sun. That cloud of gas and dust then flattened out into a rotating accretion disc. Basically, anything that wasn't part of that rotating disc of matter was either dragged into the sun or kicked out of the solar system entirely. That disk of gas probably looked a lot like the rings of Saturn at one point, but the gas and dust that composed the disk eventually clumped together to form the planets and asteroids in the Solar System. As a result, everything in the Solar System lies in the same flat plane of rotation, and most objects still rotate around the Sun in the same direction and spin in the same direction. All of the motion of the planets comes from the rotation of the original accretion disc. Any deviation from that motion is due to some sort of event that happened after the formation of the planets: larger planets affecting the motions of smaller ones, large-scale impacts disrupting orbits or spin, etc.

However, this object doesn't move through the normal plane of rotation in our Solar System. It follows an orbit that takes it above and below the plane. Now, one object alone following this sort of path is not a big deal. That could be explained by any number of different phenomena. However, apparently scientists have identified multiple objects that have a similarly angled orbit that heavily deviates from the main orbital plane. This raises all sorts of interesting questions. It could be the result of some special event that happened in the history of the formation of the solar system, such as an exo-planet passing through the Solar System perpendicular to the plane of motion. There is almost certainly nothing special about these asteroids in of themselves, but their movements might shed light on the history of our Solar System.

As another piece of clarification, the term "Centaurs" as it is used in the article is referring to a group of asteroids. Astronomers like to name celestial objects along themes. For example, the asteroids that are trapped in the L4 and L5 Lagrange points of Jupiter are called the Trojans. All of those asteroids are named after characters who were part of the Trojan War from Greek mythology (one cluster is named after those from the Greek camp, while the other cluster is named after those from the Trojan side of the war). The Centaurs are a group of asteroids that are found between Jupiter and Neptune, with orbits that cross the orbits of at least one of the major planets. All of these asteroids are named after centaurs from Greek mythology.
 
T

theepicoftyler

Member
I wish scientists would be more careful with their word choices, "we don't currently understand" inspires much less magical thinking than "we cannot explain". The later implies that they've exhausted all their resources and are at a dead end, when in reality they just haven't collected enough data to make any more substantive statements.
 
P

Pancake Mix

Copied someone else's pancake recipe
And is it just this one object that seems to have an impossible orbit?

Very curious, I hope scientists solve the mystery.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Similar threads

Have Aliens Found Us? A Harvard Astronomer on the Mysterious Interstellar Object 'Oumuamua
28
2K
5secondrulesucks replied
  • Locked
New evidence suggests a ninth planet lurking at the edge of the solar system
2 3 4 5 6
286
34K
Marky Mark replied
  • Locked
Astronomers say there are two unknown planets in our solar system
2 3
105
13K
Javaman replied
  • Locked
New moon discovered around Neptune in old Hubble images
10
2K
Himynameischris replied
  • Locked
Planet, 4 times the size of Earth, may be way, way beyond Pluto
2 3
135
14K
gosox333 replied
Top Bottom