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Originally posted by NyxOne
And, no, brown dwarfs give off little light, but they reflect it. An example of such in our solar system would be seen if it existed.
'Forensic evidence' of undiscovered planets
By Nic Fleming, Science Correspondent, in Boston
Published: 5:00PM GMT 18 Feb 2008
Astronomers believe there are large numbers of both rocky planets and gas giants in the Oort Cloud, a vast cloud of comets approximately five trillion miles away - some 50,000 times the distance from Earth to the Sun.
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Computer modelling and other astronomical clues suggest it may contain around 1,000 small planetary bodies, some of which may be the size of the Earth and Mars or larger.
Dr Alan Stern, a Nasa expert on the outer solar system described "forensic evidence" for the existence of large numbers of undiscovered planets in the Oort Cloud at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference in Boston.
Dr Stern said the angle of Uranuss rotation suggested it had been struck by an object three to five times the mass of Earth at some time in its history.
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Alan Boss, a planet-formation theorist at the Carnegie Institute in Washington, DC, agrees that a passing star or dense cloud of gas is the more likely cause for Sednas strange travels. Boss said it would be "hard to imagine" forming an Earth-sized object out where the interaction would have taken place.
Region to explore
But Brown said there is one unexplored region of space left, amounting to about 20 percent of the sky, that hasnt been searched for an Earth-sized object that would be orbiting at 70 AU and presumably in the main plane of the solar system. It is the region toward the bright galactic center, which is harder to search.
Browns team said they thought Sedna should be counted as the first known object of the otherwise theoretical Oort Cloud. The distant reservoir of small icy objects is thought to exist based on the orbits of some comets that zoom through the inner solar system now and then, and then disappear into deep space.
Nobody knows what's actually in the Oort Cloud, however.
"I would say that is likely" Stern said in regards to possible Earth-sized planets in the Oort Cloud. In the early years of the solar system, he explained, objects as massive as Earth are thought to have hit Uranus and Neptune. Computer simulations show most of the hypothetical Earth-mass objects "would be ejected from the outer planets region, not accumulated in Uranus and Neptune, so we could someday find these frozen relics in the Oort Cloud."
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All they know is that something is causing a pull on all of the planets, but as of today, they still have not found it.
See now you are calling it Planet X, Stitchen called it the 10th Planet. So even you call it by many names. Planet X is a very new name. Now on your image you we see that Planet X is about "8 Billion Miles" away.
Originally posted by stereologist
Some nitwits claim that there is a planet with this outlandish orbit. Such an orbit is unstable and the orbit would quickly degrade into a more circular orbit after a few revolutions of the sun.
Orbits such as this are drawn by people that do not understand physics and think that planets are on invisible threads and not subject tot he gravitational interactions of the system.
Large 'Planet X' May Lurk Beyond Pluto
By Ker Than,LiveScience
Posted: 2008-06-19 17:56:30
Filed Under: Science News
(June 19) - An icy, unknown world might lurk in the distant reaches of our solar system beyond the orbit of Pluto, according to a new computer model.
The hidden world -- thought to be much bigger than Pluto based on the model -- could explain unusual features of the Kuiper Belt, a region of space beyond Neptune littered with icy and rocky bodies. Its existence would satisfy the long-held hopes and hypotheses for a "Planet X" envisioned by scientists and sci-fi buffs alike.
"Although the search for a distant planet in the solar system is old, it is far from over," said study team member Patryk Lykawka of Kobe University in Japan.
The model, created by Lykawka and Kobe University colleague Tadashi Mukai, is detailed in a recent issue of Astrophysical Journal.
If the new world is confirmed, it would not be technically a planet. Under a controversial new definition adopted by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) last week, it would instead be the largest known "plutoid."
The Kuiper Belt contains many peculiar features that cant be explained by standard solar system models. One is the highly irregular orbits of some of the belts members.
The most famous is Sedna, a rocky object located three times farther from the sun than Pluto. Sedna takes 12,000 years to travel once around the Sun, and its orbit ranges from 80 to 100 astronomical units (AU). One AU is equal to the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
The stars, described as "ultracool subdwarfs" follow very unusual paths around our galaxy, the Milky Way.
They have low temperatures and are small enough to be close to planet-like objects.
Only a few dozen ultracool subdwarfs, which are up to 10,000 times fainter than the Sun, have been identified.
One of the oddest aspects of the stars is the rapid speed at which they travel. They have been clocked at more than a million miles per hour.
One of the oddest aspects of the stars is the rapid speed at which they travel. They have been clocked at more than a million miles per hour.
Projected orbits of ultracool subdwarfs. Credit: MIT
Originally posted by Illustronic
That's around our galaxy, not our solar system.
So I will provide a second line here I wasn't going to post...
Originally posted by Illustronic
Yes I do now that you mention it, anything you mention would have next to zero effect on us way out there. That's basically interstellar space. So what.
Secular increase of the astronomical unit and perihelion precessions as tests of the Dvali–Gabadadze–Porrati multi-dimensional braneworld scenario
Lorenzo Iorio JCAP09(2005)006 doi: 10.1088/1475-7516/2005/09/006
PDF (313 KB) | HTML | References | Articles citing this article
Lorenzo Iorio
Viale Unità di Italia 68, 70125, Bari, Italy
E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract. An unexpected secular increase of the astronomical unit, the length scale of the Solar System, has recently been reported by three different research groups (Krasinsky and Brumberg, Pitjeva, Standish). The latest JPL measurements amount to 7 ± 2 m cy−1. At present, there are no explanations able to accommodate such an observed phenomenon, either in the realm of classical physics or in the usual four-dimensional framework of the Einsteinian general relativity. The Dvali–Gabadadze–Porrati braneworld scenario, which is a multi-dimensional model of gravity aimed at providing an explanation of the observed cosmic acceleration without dark energy, predicts, among other things, a perihelion secular shift, due to Lue and Starkman, of 5 × 10−4 arcsec cy−1 for all the planets of the Solar System. It yields a variation of about 6 m cy−1 for the Earth–Sun distance which is compatible with the observed rate of change for the astronomical unit. The recently measured corrections to the secular motions of the perihelia of the inner planets of the Solar System are in agreement with the predicted value of the Lue–Starkman effect for Mercury, Mars and, at a slightly worse level, the Earth.
6 The increase of the Astronomical Unit
6.1 The observation
From the analysis of radiometric measurements of distances between the Earth and the major planets including observations from Martian orbiters and landers from 1961 to 2003 a secular increase of the Astronomical Unit of approximately 10 m/cy has been reported (36) (see also the article (37) and the discussion therein).
6.2 Search for explanation
Time–dependent gravitational constant and velocity of light This increase cannot be explained by a time–dependent gravitational constant G because the ˙ G/G needed is larger than the restrictions obtained from LLR.
It has also been speculated that a time–dependent change in the velocity of light can be responsible for this effect. Indeed, if the speed of light becomes smaller, than ranging will simulate a drift of distances. However, a inspection of Kepler’s third law
T2 4π2
a3 = GM⊙
(17)
12
shows that, if one replaces the distance a by a ranging time a = ct, then effectively the quotient G/c3 appears. Only this combination of the gravitational constant and the speed of light governs the ratio between the orbit time, in our case the orbit time of the Earth. Consequently, a time–dependent speed of light is equivalent to a time–dependent gravitational constant. Since the latter has been ruled out to be possibly responsible for an increase of the Astronomical Unit, also a time–dependent speed of light has to be ruled out.
Cosmic expansion The influence of cosmic expansion by many orders of magnitude too small, see Sec.9.2. Neither the modification of the gravitational field of the Sun nor the drag of the planetary orbits due to the expansion is big enough to explain this drift.
Clock drift An increase of ranged distances might also be due to a drift of the time scale of the form t → t + αt2 for α > 0. This is of the same form as the time drift needed to account for the Pioneer anomaly. From Kepler’s third law one may ask which α is suitable in order to simulate the increase of the Astronomical Unit. One obtains α ≈ 3 · 10−20 s−1 what is astonishing close to the clock drift needed for a clock drift simulation of the pioneer anomaly, see Eq.(16) and below.
7 The quadrupole and octupule anomaly Recently an anomalous behavior of the low–l contributions to the cosmic microwave background has been reported. It has been shown that (i) there exists an alignment between the quadrupole and octupole with > 99.87% C.L. [38], and (ii) that the quadrupole and octupole are aligned to Solar system ecliptic to > 99% C.L. [39]. No correlation with the galactic plane has been found.
The reason for this is totally unclear. One may speculate that an unknown gravitational field within the Solar system slightly redirects the incoming cosmic microwave radiation (in the similar way as a motion with a certain velocity with respect to the rest frame of the cosmological background redirects the cosmic background radiation and leads to modifications of the dipole and quadrupole parts). Such a redirection should be more pronounced for low–l components of the radiation. It should be possible to calculate the gravitational field needed for such a redirection and then to compare that with the observational data of the Solar system and the other observed anomalies.
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8.2 Other anomalies?
There is one further observation which status is rather unclear bit which perhaps may fit into the other observations. This is the observation of the return time of comets: Comets usually come back a few days before they are expected when applying ordinary equations of motion. The delay usually is assigned to the outgassing of these objects. In fact, the delay is used for an estimate of the strength of this outgassing. On the other hand, it has been calculated in (44) that the assumption that starting with 20 AU there is an additional acceleration of the order of the Pioneer anomaly also leads to the effect that comets come back a few days earlier. It is not clear whether this is a serious indications but a further study of the trajectories of comets certainly is worthwhile.
Originally posted by heineken
NyxOne ... you have been posting on this thread for about 24 hrs!!!..amazing
i have been to work, gym and slept and you kept on popping up...
if you are one person alone i suggest you review how your spending your time
Originally posted by WilcoRain
I hope this is an appropriate thread to post this. I'm in the midwest US. Tonight, at about 17:30 CDT, the sun columns breaking through the clouds were extraordinary. They weren't just coming down; they were radiating out from all sides of the sphere, breaking through the clouds. It reminded me of an eye's iris. I was in my car pulling out of a parking lot, wishing I had my good camera, decided my cheap cell phone camera (Motorola W376g, 640x480, 96dpi, no specs on its camera in the manual), was better than nothing. I pulled over in the lot but didn't get out of the car. I snapped the first two holding the phone out the window, and the third through the tinted sunroof. The quality setting was "good", which is the minimum (I didn't even realize the phone's camera had a quality setting until I saw the manual tonight). I didn't use a filter or effects, and other than renaming the files, they have not been manipulated in any way.
I didn't notice the black dots while taking the pics, but I wasn't looking too closely at the 1x2" viewscreen I did see it when saving one of the files, but assumed it was something on the lens. I've 99.999% convinced myself this is some kind of burn overload on the cheap CCD, and was hoping someone would confirm as much, something along the lines of, "Yes, that is exactly what happens when you point a cheap digital camera directly at the sun. Dumbass."
[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/3eea8b67451a.jpg[/atsimg]
[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/e7b7519bc7b2.jpg[/atsimg]
[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/bfcabac533b6.jpg[/atsimg]
Surprisingly, it didn't do permanent damage to the CCD, as a couple of test shots taken since then don't have any black dots or other anomalies. I'll try taking some more sun shots tomorrow, because I'm curious.
Anyway, excited and grateful to be on ATS. For what it's worth, this is my first post of any substance. Thanks for looking.