There May Be ‘Super Earths’ at the Edge of Our Solar System

Just saw this coming though on a few news feeds i keep running and thought it would be of interest to my fellow members.

This is being described as potentially the biggest discovery in the history of Astronomy

“We have unpublished calculations,” says lead author Carlos de la Fuente Marcos, of the Complutense University of Madrid, “that suggest that there could be two planets with between two and 15 times the mass of the Earth.”

As with last year’s discovery, the evidence for the two planets is indirect. “We would like to emphasize that we have not discovered any new objects,” de la Fuente Marcos says. What they’ve done instead is to look at the orbits of 13 small bodies, including 2012 VP113, that follow elongated orbits in the distant reaches of the solar system.

Time

a reply to: OtherSideOfTheCoin

But without the planet being near the sun how can the planet support life? If it's at the edge of the solar system wouldn't it be too cold?

a reply to: OtherSideOfTheCoin

Well ya, the aliens need a back up planet when we destroy ours.

I'm not believing it till it is written in the science books, you know, the ones they replace and destroy every few years in schools so that nobody can prove they were misled when they get older. It would be nice to get these books from over the years and have a lot of people go through them and check how much of what we were taught is not being taught anymore. When we tell our grandchildren something, they think we are forgetful because we do not remember stuff right. They don't understand that they will change things in their lifetimes and that their kids will be thinking they mistook what they were taught.

Destroy all evidence of societies mistakes so it looks like we are progressing and can keep making mistakes.

originally posted by: starwarsisreal
a reply to: OtherSideOfTheCoin

But without the planet being near the sun how can the planet support life? If it's at the edge of the solar system wouldn't it be too cold?

that's what we were taught to believe
it is not true
some places like Saturn and Uranus have hotspots even though they are farther away from Sun than we are

today'S science and education is out of date and being rewritten right now, results wont be seen or understood overnite

originally posted by: starwarsisreal
a reply to: OtherSideOfTheCoin

But without the planet being near the sun how can the planet support life? If it's at the edge of the solar system wouldn't it be too cold?

The term "Super Earth" does not mean a planet that is necessarily hospitable to life.

It simply means a planet with a mass larger than Earth but smaller than a gas giant (such as Jupiter or Saturn). The term only has to do with mass, not habitability.

So a dead, ice-cold, rocky planet with no atmosphere that is times as massive as the Earth would be classified as a super earth.

originally posted by: starwarsisreal
a reply to: OtherSideOfTheCoin

But without the planet being near the sun how can the planet support life? If it's at the edge of the solar system wouldn't it be too cold?

I was not really going with the idea that these "super earths" could be hosting life (not dismissing it either) but rather i was thinking this was cool because it does potentially mean a remapping of our solar system.

a reply to: OtherSideOfTheCoin

now theres a theory to ponder .. maybe "they" want to rearrange it first

a reply to: OtherSideOfTheCoin

I started a thread about this a couple days ago here that you might be interested in.

Id like proofs that "life" requires a sun.

a reply to: OtherSideOfTheCoin

Pretty darn cold super Earth's if they are out there beyond the orbit of Pluto. Adds some credence to the Nemesis theory and the Sumerian's notion of a 10th planet i suppose.

originally posted by: andy06shake
a reply to: OtherSideOfTheCoin

Pretty darn cold super Earth's if they are out there beyond the orbit of Pluto. Adds some credence to the Nemesis theory and the Sumerian's notion of a 10th planet i suppose.

If Pluto was the 9th planet, then we would already have a 10th planet also -- Eris.

It was the discovery of Eris (and the notion that many other Eris-like or Pluto-like objects potentially were out there in the kuiper belt) that directly prompted the International Astronomical Union to create the new classification of "dwarf planet". So Pluto has the discovery of Eris to thank for being demoted.

Eris is larger than Pluto, and has at least one Moon, so if Pluto was a planet, then so is Eris -- but then that opens up the potential for dozens (hundreds?) of similar objects that are believed to exist, but are yet undiscovered, to be called planets.

a reply to: blacktie

Very true. Apparently, I'm getting this from a co-worker who is a former science professor who lost his university job and now works in a secondary school (he says he was fired because his views on history and the world didn't mesh with the universities own) that you dont always need a sun to help build a habitable planet, he says that the gravity between two opposing and close by planets can course friction which keeps the core of a planet warm and alive which then gives the planet itself the early warmth and energy to make things livable.

I've never checked on that but remember one of the moons around one of the planets in our solar system is believed to have liquid water beneath its ice because of the same principle.

This is my proper reply -

I remember a good two decades ago back in my school days (realising its twenty years behind me, is very depressing) one of my teachers gave us an experiment to create our own solar system, we had to explain the orbits, the planets make up (simple like size, climate etc.) and design the life on each world. Back then I decided that there were fourteen planets in my system called 'The Morphing System' named after the old power ranger show (I was about 11) and when the teacher asked me to explain the concept of fourteen, I explained that apart from the fact that I liked the number and had fourteen members of my family living close by, I always said that I thought the universe that we know and see isn't real, that maybe we are just being shown a universe that we think exists and in fact the universe is really just very very small and we dont realise it yet.

Now being much older, I think that I was being a bit too well odd and over reaching, I didn't get a good grade for that work, in case you were wondering, but I still think that our system is bigger and fuller than we like to believe and are allowed to believe. I'm not a huge science nut but I think that we are going to slowly realise that our system is far stranger than we have ever thought.

I've just remembered the days when we were taught that there were nine planets in our solar system and now its eight with dwarf planet Pluto, something that I'm against, I actually own three t-shirts on the Pluto debate and they say -

1 - Pluto is a planet. If you dont like it, F OFF
2 - Pluto is a planet. If you dont believe me, ask Mickey
3 - (My favourite) If Pluto isn't a planet, then the sun is a giant yellow donut in space.

originally posted by: Danny85
a reply to: blacktie

Very true. Apparently, I'm getting this from a co-worker who is a former science professor who lost his university job and now works in a secondary school (he says he was fired because his views on history and the world didn't mesh with the universities own) that you dont always need a sun to help build a habitable planet, he says that the gravity between two opposing and close by planets can course friction which keeps the core of a planet warm and alive which then gives the planet itself the early warmth and energy to make things livable.

It's called tidal heating and it involves planets and moons not planets and planets.

I've never checked on that but remember one of the moons around one of the planets in our solar system is believed to have liquid water beneath its ice because of the same principle.

Many do. Most famously Europa a moon of Jupiter. Ganymede another moon of Jupiter is believed to have a liquid water ocean beneath its surface.

Further out, around Saturn, it's moon Enceladus is erupting liquid water geysers into space, the water freezes and falls as snow:



And Titan has a subsurface ocean.

Infact Europa has an ocean almost twice the volume of all the oceans of Earth combined. Titan has an ocean four times the volume of all the oceans of Earth combined.

Nice super earths in our solar system!

I think there is probably life on all the planets we just are ignorant of. . . .

Please continue in the recently posted existing thread on this topic.

LINK