Astrologists have found a nine planet candidate – but he is in the wrong place

A team of astronomers says that it has identified a single infrared organism that is slowly motivated by all the correct boxes because it is the ninth ninth planet that exceeds Neptune.

The search for the ninth planet – the ghostly gravitational dwarf of the solar system – has long been dependent, and is based on the strange assembly of rock objects in the Keper belt behind the orbit of Neptune. This group indicates that there are some weak and weak things. But the team behind the new study took a new approach to research: investigating infrared data that collects dust for several decades.

Search, to publish This month to the Preprint Arxiv server and is scheduled to be published in the facts of the Astronomical Society in Australia, comes from a group of scientists in Taiwan, Japan and Australia. The group that brought up the archive data from infrared space telescopes, IRAS mission in NASA From 1983 and Japan Akari satellite From 2006 to 2007 their goal: finding anything cold, faded, slow enough to be the ninth planet.

The research depends on a theory that topped the headlines in 2016, when astronomers at Caltech Mike Brown and Konstantin Batigin make A huge hidden planet suggested Depending on the patterns of assembling the Cuper belt objects. In the update 2021, the duo RefinementEstimating the ninth planet to be more than six times the Earth’s mass, with 7400 years Vera Robin Observatory.

Enter infrared search search. Astronomer Terry Long Van of Tsing Hua National University in Taiwan and his fellows of the 23 -year -old IRAS and Akari were used to search for very distant things that moved a little between the shots. After applying stars, galaxies and other noise, left with one filter. It does not match any known object and it seems that it has moved enough to be reasonably missing.

“The paper is a good analysis, but it is missing one thing that I was hoping to see: a discussion about the possibility of discoveries simply a noise or passing astronomical physics that spoke over a period of 23 years,” Brown told Gizmodo in an email.

The signing of the low organism and a very slow movement indicates that a planet goes beyond the orbit that Beni and Patin, as well as the estimates of the planet, are nine other. It is a new progress on the Phantom object, although it leads in a completely different direction.

“The other interesting point is that the orbit of this object is not consistent with our predictions for the ninth planet,” Braun added. “This does not mean that it is not real, only if it is real, it is not the expected ninth planet, it is an unexpected thing.”

He said: “My doubts are that it is simply a noise, but it will be interesting to know that.”

So astronomers remain cautious. Two points of data are not enough for the orbit hole, and the source can be a non -relevant background or an artifact of the data. However, the authors suggest that the object is bright enough to re -discover it using ground telescopes, such as the Dark Power Camera (DECAM) in Chile.

New research also reduces some of the most marginalized theories of the ninth planet – such as the idea that it is a primitive black hole – because the apparent organism is light from infrared. If follow-up notes confirmed a planet, this will be a great victory for the team’s approach-and to check the big long idea of ​​a hidden planet in our system, albeit different from the already assumed.

Currently, the ninth planet is still theoretically. But this could be the first real glimpse of something TRUE There – a low point of light is drifting through darkness, waiting for our technology and creativity to arrest her in the act of existence.