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Planet, 4 times the size of Earth, may be way, way beyond Pluto

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Oh man, the planet x conspiracy theory fans will have a field day with this.

It's interesting, but just one mans calculations. Will wait for peer review. Remember all the excitement over the faster than light story that later ended up falling flat?
 
It is about the size of Uranus.

5qLiM.gif
 

TheMan

Member
"Just beyond" Pluto is a bit of misnomer. This hypothetical planet would be 225 billion kilometers away. Pluto never gets further than 7.5 billion km from the sun.

christ that would expand the size of our solar system quite a bit.

hypothetical question for any physicists out there...what is the largest possible orbital radius that an earth-sized planet could have and still be able to orbit the sun?
 

TheMan

Member
Oh man, the planet x conspiracy theory fans will have a field day with this.

It's interesting, but just one mans calculations. Will wait for peer review. Remember all the excitement over the faster than light story that later ended up falling flat?

lol, so much excitement about possible time travel in that thread
 

kswiston

Member
Just how big is our solar system? =D

Huge. The hypothosized Oort cloud would be about 1 light year from the sun, which is ~10 trillion km. If you want to define the solar system as the area of space where the sun is the most dominant gravitational force, I think it would cover a radius of about 2 light years.
 
This. BAM, Solar system with 9 planets again, incl. "Pluto".



btw. wasn't the asteroid belt another planet? (or more if they collided)
That's not what Planet X refers to though, right?

The asteroid belt actually doesn't add up to anything large enough to be a planet - most likely "left over" material.
 

Jeff-DSA

Member
The sad reality of the asteroid belt is that if you were sitting on one of the asteroids, another one of them wouldn't be anywhere in your view. It's pretty sparse out there.
 

kswiston

Member
Well i was asking in terms of planets, but yes, i didn't think about comets.

A planet wouldn't be able to maintain an orbit like that. It would be shot into space, escaping the gravitational influence of the sun, before the first orbit was completed.

The actual Niburu conspiracy is ridiculous.
 

Grinchy

Banned
The sad reality of the asteroid belt is that if you were sitting on one of the asteroids, another one of them wouldn't be anywhere in your view. It's pretty sparse out there.

You obviously haven't watched science fiction movies. Spaceships have to maneuver through them all the time so they must be close together.
 

Black-Box

Member
wasn't there always a crazy rumor that there was a another planet in our solar system?

Planet X...wouldn't it be creepy if it was true
 

Hitokage

Setec Astronomer
Is this kind of orbit possible or does the Sun have to be the centre point?

http://i.imgur.com/fHfhu.png
Not only are orbits elliptical in nature to begin with, but even the "center point" for a more circular orbit is actually around the center of the two masses rather than one or the other (think of a board and fulcrum here). For each planet, this happens to still be within the Sun much of the time, but not its center, so the Sun wobbles.
 

endre

Member
Can anyone offer one good argument for the Pluto denomination outrage?

If Pluto would be classified as a planet again, why couldn't Ceres be classified as planet as well?
 

Atolm

Member
christ that would expand the size of our solar system quite a bit.

Nah, not really, if the solar system is the reach of the Sun's gravitational pull, then the solar system is one light year or even more. It's speculated that long-period comets come from a place called Oort cloud, which supposedly stores billions of comets and it's almost a light year away from us. Most short-period comets complete an orbit in years or a few centuries, those comets from the Oorb cloud can take millions of years easily:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_West
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C/1999_F1
 

Log4Girlz

Member
What I hate about the demotion of Pluto is that the definition of panet that we're going by cannot be applied to exo-planets. You cannot be sure if a planet in another system has cleared its orbit of a certain % of debris. I would prefer a clean, more precise definition that can be applied to any system.
 

Hitokage

Setec Astronomer
What I hate about the demotion of Pluto is that the definition of panet that we're going by cannot be applied to exo-planets. You cannot be sure if a planet in another system has cleared its orbit of a certain % of debris. I would prefer a clean, more precise definition that can be applied to any system.
Not the issue. What's important is that planets are the gravitational big boys of a system. For example, other stuff shares an orbit with Earth, but they move in a way subordinate to it. Naturally, when you have an uncontested leader in orbital space, it's going to be relatively tidy because most stuff would have accumulated into the planet or have been ejected from orbit. Ceres and Pluto are unable to bully their neighbors around so they're just dwarf planets.
 

kswiston

Member
What I hate about the demotion of Pluto is that the definition of panet that we're going by cannot be applied to exo-planets. You cannot be sure if a planet in another system has cleared its orbit of a certain % of debris. I would prefer a clean, more precise definition that can be applied to any system.

The definition can be applied to any system. Just because we can't (yet) confirm the status of exo-planets doesn't mean the definition is not universal.
 

Kinyou

Member
What I hate about the demotion of Pluto is that the definition of panet that we're going by cannot be applied to exo-planets. You cannot be sure if a planet in another system has cleared its orbit of a certain % of debris. I would prefer a clean, more precise definition that can be applied to any system.
You know, all I hear is just

"Bu- bu- but America wants to discover a planet too *sniff* A bloo bloo bloo"

just kidding
 
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