Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Planet Nine" in English language version.
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It's like seeing a disturbance on the surface of water but not knowing what caused it. Perhaps it was a jumping fish, a whale or a seal. Even though you didn't actually see it, you could make an informed guess about the size of the object and its location by the nature of the ripples in the water.
'It was that search for more objects like Sedna ... led to the realization ... that they're all being pulled off in one direction by something. And that's what finally led us down the hole that there must be a big planet out there.' —Mike Brown
More work is needed to determine whether Sedna and the other scattered disc objects were sent on their circuitous trips round the Sun by a star that passed by long ago, or by an unseen planet that exists in the solar system right now. Finding and observing the orbits of other distant objects similar to Sedna will add more data points to astronomers' computer models.
'Right now, any good scientist is going to be skeptical, because it's a pretty big claim. And without the final evidence that it's real, there is always that chance that it's not. So, everybody should be skeptical. But I think it's time to mount this search. I mean, we like to think of it as, we have provided the treasure map of where this ninth planet is, and we have done the starting gun, and now it's a race to actually point your telescope at the right spot in the sky and make that discovery of planet nine.' —Mike Brown
'It's exciting and very compelling work,' says Meg Schwamb, a planetary scientist at Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan. But only six bodies lead the way to the putative planet. 'Whether that's enough is still a question.'
'We like to be consistent,' said Rosaly Lopes, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a member of the IAU's Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature. ... For a planet in our solar system, being consistent means sticking to the theme of giving them names from Greek and Roman mythology.
We need more mass in the outer solar system," she (Madigan) said. "So it can either come from having more minor planets, and their self-gravity will do this to themselves naturally, or it could be in the form of one single massive planet—a Planet Nine. So it's a really exciting time, and we're going to discover one or the other.
'We plotted the real data on top of the model' Batyagin recalls, and they fell 'exactly where they were supposed to be.' That was, he said, the epiphany. 'It was a dramatic moment. This thing I thought could disprove it turned out to be the strongest evidence for Planet Nine.'
The statistics do sound promising, at first. The researchers say there's a 1 in 15,000 chance that the movements of these objects are coincidental and don't indicate a planetary presence at all. ... 'When we usually consider something as clinched and air tight, it usually has odds with a much lower probability of failure than what they have,' says Sara Seager, a planetary scientist at MIT. For a study to be a slam dunk, the odds of failure are usually 1 in 1,744,278. ... But researchers often publish before they get the slam-dunk odds, in order to avoid getting scooped by a competing team, Seager says. Most outside experts agree that the researchers' models are strong. And Neptune was originally detected in a similar fashion—by researching observed anomalies in the movement of Uranus. Additionally, the idea of a large planet at such a distance from the Sun isn't actually that unlikely, according to Bruce Macintosh, a planetary scientist at Stanford University.
'It was that search for more objects like Sedna ... led to the realization ... that they're all being pulled off in one direction by something. And that's what finally led us down the hole that there must be a big planet out there.' —Mike Brown
More work is needed to determine whether Sedna and the other scattered disc objects were sent on their circuitous trips round the Sun by a star that passed by long ago, or by an unseen planet that exists in the solar system right now. Finding and observing the orbits of other distant objects similar to Sedna will add more data points to astronomers' computer models.
It's like seeing a disturbance on the surface of water but not knowing what caused it. Perhaps it was a jumping fish, a whale or a seal. Even though you didn't actually see it, you could make an informed guess about the size of the object and its location by the nature of the ripples in the water.
'We plotted the real data on top of the model' Batyagin recalls, and they fell 'exactly where they were supposed to be.' That was, he said, the epiphany. 'It was a dramatic moment. This thing I thought could disprove it turned out to be the strongest evidence for Planet Nine.'
The statistics do sound promising, at first. The researchers say there's a 1 in 15,000 chance that the movements of these objects are coincidental and don't indicate a planetary presence at all. ... 'When we usually consider something as clinched and air tight, it usually has odds with a much lower probability of failure than what they have,' says Sara Seager, a planetary scientist at MIT. For a study to be a slam dunk, the odds of failure are usually 1 in 1,744,278. ... But researchers often publish before they get the slam-dunk odds, in order to avoid getting scooped by a competing team, Seager says. Most outside experts agree that the researchers' models are strong. And Neptune was originally detected in a similar fashion—by researching observed anomalies in the movement of Uranus. Additionally, the idea of a large planet at such a distance from the Sun isn't actually that unlikely, according to Bruce Macintosh, a planetary scientist at Stanford University.
'It's exciting and very compelling work,' says Meg Schwamb, a planetary scientist at Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan. But only six bodies lead the way to the putative planet. 'Whether that's enough is still a question.'
'Right now, any good scientist is going to be skeptical, because it's a pretty big claim. And without the final evidence that it's real, there is always that chance that it's not. So, everybody should be skeptical. But I think it's time to mount this search. I mean, we like to think of it as, we have provided the treasure map of where this ninth planet is, and we have done the starting gun, and now it's a race to actually point your telescope at the right spot in the sky and make that discovery of planet nine.' —Mike Brown
We need more mass in the outer solar system," she (Madigan) said. "So it can either come from having more minor planets, and their self-gravity will do this to themselves naturally, or it could be in the form of one single massive planet—a Planet Nine. So it's a really exciting time, and we're going to discover one or the other.
'We like to be consistent,' said Rosaly Lopes, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a member of the IAU's Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature. ... For a planet in our solar system, being consistent means sticking to the theme of giving them names from Greek and Roman mythology.
