I love that this is still a topic-- along with 'is glass a fluid', this is one of the few questions I recall from childhood that turns out to still be relevant serious physics.
(Re 'is glass a fluid', my condensed matter professor said something like 'if it is, it flows too slowly to observe significant movement in the lifetime of the universe'.)
This article doesn't give either the for or the against, as we currently stand.
I'm not really sure how it's debatable, either their evidence was correct or not. Surely a respectable third person can look and tell us? The mathematics has been out for 6 weeks.
> “It is important to note that our work does not explicitly rule out Planet X/Planet 9"
I find this annoying. If it disproves their evidence, which I assume was the only known evidence for a 9th planet, then it does.
Add to this "Planet X" is tied to the original article, so if this kills all their evidence they also lose naming rights.
- With the current set of observations, the evidence for clustering is fairly strong, but well short of strong enough that it can't just be chance.
- The new survey was including one data point (which doesn't fit in the 'cluster') that Mike Brown doesn't think counts [1]. With the numbers involved, it seems to me that one additional data point is likely to be making a big difference.
[1] « there is one additional object that Napier et al. include that was never reported to the Minor Planet Center; we restrict our analysis to objects whose detection history we can track; that one unreported object is down in the lower left of the lefthand plot »
I think your counting's off: if you want to count dwarfs then Ceres would be "Planet 5", in which case "Planet 9" would be Neptune most of the time, since only a small part of Pluto's orbit crosses inside Neptune's.
Pluto's number would also depend on the current location of at least Quaoar, Haumea and Makemake, since I know their orbits cross inside Pluto's. Pluto may also swap numbers over time with others, like Sedna, Eris, Gonggong, Orcus, Salacia, Varda, Ixion, 2003 AZ84, 2002 MS4, 2002 AW197, etc. since they have quite low perihelia (30 to 40 AU) so may also cross inside Pluto's orbit.
Dwarf planets seem to be lucrative business for those who sell wall posters of the solar system. I would hate having to learn all of their relative locations and interactions in school!
Pluto got re-categorized as dwarf planet because there were now more like it. Therefore, if you still want to call it a planet, it definitely wouldn't be the 9th one.
[+] [-] tjpnz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atoav|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RupertEisenhart|5 years ago|reply
(Re 'is glass a fluid', my condensed matter professor said something like 'if it is, it flows too slowly to observe significant movement in the lifetime of the universe'.)
[+] [-] m463|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaron695|5 years ago|reply
I'm not really sure how it's debatable, either their evidence was correct or not. Surely a respectable third person can look and tell us? The mathematics has been out for 6 weeks.
> “It is important to note that our work does not explicitly rule out Planet X/Planet 9"
I find this annoying. If it disproves their evidence, which I assume was the only known evidence for a 9th planet, then it does.
Add to this "Planet X" is tied to the original article, so if this kills all their evidence they also lose naming rights.
[+] [-] mjw1007|5 years ago|reply
It looks like there are two things going on:
- With the current set of observations, the evidence for clustering is fairly strong, but well short of strong enough that it can't just be chance.
- The new survey was including one data point (which doesn't fit in the 'cluster') that Mike Brown doesn't think counts [1]. With the numbers involved, it seems to me that one additional data point is likely to be making a big difference.
[1] « there is one additional object that Napier et al. include that was never reported to the Minor Planet Center; we restrict our analysis to objects whose detection history we can track; that one unreported object is down in the lower left of the lefthand plot »
[+] [-] barkingcat|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DukeBaset|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chriswarbo|5 years ago|reply
Pluto's number would also depend on the current location of at least Quaoar, Haumea and Makemake, since I know their orbits cross inside Pluto's. Pluto may also swap numbers over time with others, like Sedna, Eris, Gonggong, Orcus, Salacia, Varda, Ixion, 2003 AZ84, 2002 MS4, 2002 AW197, etc. since they have quite low perihelia (30 to 40 AU) so may also cross inside Pluto's orbit.
Dwarf planets seem to be lucrative business for those who sell wall posters of the solar system. I would hate having to learn all of their relative locations and interactions in school!
[+] [-] input_sh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hackeraccount|5 years ago|reply