NASA's WISE Survey Finds Thousands of New Stars, But No 'Planet X'

There s still one thing bugging me here. and yes, I am still smarting after getting an estimate roughly half a light or more wrong. leave it to me. But the nagging feeling is; if there were something bigger out there, does that mean that they did not detect it? and yes, I know I am asking alot here. I am familiar with the notion of a larger mass having the same volume, but (since I only remotely understand the technology involved) does that not mean that there could be a somewhat (relatively speaking) larger mass that they did not detect? That s really what I want to know. I m not interested in the idea of a 'Nibiru' swooping into the inner orbits; but rather the interest that was generated by the idea that a large mass moving 'out there' ( outer Oort Cloud) coud have periodicaly disturbed cometary orbits. Of course , there is a whole new angle to this theory now. physicsworld.com...

reply to post by Nightspore


What WISE looks for is heat. It looks in the extreme infrared for faint heat signatures.

Gas giants and Brown Dwarfs do not emit visible light, but they do emit heat. Brown Dwarfs are more massive than Jupiter (at least 15 times more mass), but their size is actually not too much bigger (their diameter) than Jupiter.

If there were something bigger in size, it would have a lot more surface area to emit heat, which means it would have been easier to detect.

reply to post by eriktheawful


ah ok. that does answer my question. Thank-you! But, oddly enough, more news in this area. Certainly not confirmed, but find it coincidental how recent news in this area is all around this notion. www.astronomy.com... Now there is at least some suspicion around the idea of a very large planet, but not near as large as a brown dwarf or Jupiter. very interesting.