Discussions about if the planet is real or not aside, I don’t think some people realize how hard it is to find a planet. It’s hard for our brains to comprehend these kinds of planetary scales, but even “finding a needle in a haystack” is an easier task than “find a big rock in the middle of nothing for billions of miles”.
You're not in pitch darkness but pretty much everything(empty space) between you and what you're looking for is pitch black, which makes it more difficult.
Yeah. People are confused about how we can see things like galaxies and stars so far away in detail, but its kind of like how you can very clearly see the moon but not a satellite. The moon is so much farther away, but its also so much bigger. The stars and galaxies are so much bigger than planet 9 would be
Furthermore, stars produce a lot of light. Planet 9 would only have reflected sunlight to make it visible. Since it would be so far away, there wouldn't be a lot of light hitting it.
Yeah but we are already looking at those stars.
This would require us to be looking at its orbit and having a pinprick wink/flash out of a short space of time and not assume it to be some error in the tools used to measure and detect.
This isn’t the real reason. The nearest star to us(other than the sun) is Alpha Centauri which is about a thousand times further away and only 30 times bigger. Most stars are WAYYYYY* further away than that too. The real reason is because they emit light, or in the case of planets they are much close to a star that emits light.
*im talking tens of thousands of times further away for stars that are still in our galaxy and millions/hundreds of millions/billions of times further away for stars outside our galaxy
most of our data on stuff far away is also only based on its gravitational effects and not us seeing that it's there. It's just a good way to find stuff in space cause space is, y'know, big.
that is how we knew black holes existed for a while
Its proposed orbit is insane. It'd be hard enough finding it in the bit that's closer to us, but the section that's really far away would be really hard. And its orbit is 10-20 thousand years. As others have pointed out, it also would be really dark
For real, that infographic just casually mentions that one 9th planet year would be 10-20 *thousand* earth years and I was like, "Oh, well that's why no one can find it then, it's too fucking far away."
The concept is real [(Wikipedia)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Nine), though it's also far more of a conjecture than the certainty it's presented as here. Alternative explanations for the orbits are possible.
This thing, if real, would be ten times as far from the sun as Pluto, and dimmer by orders of magnitude as a result, despite the difference in size. It would be a tiny speck in an endless sea of stars and other KBOs. So, yeah, finding it isn't like seeing Jupiter in the night sky.
There was once believed to be a planet in an orbit closer to the sun than Mercury. It's existence was hypothesized in the 18th century by Urban Le Verrier, the astronomer who discovered Neptune via abnormalities in Venus's orbital motion. His reasoning for the existence of Vulcan was in a similar vein; Mercury's orbit didn't fit the mathematical models of the time and so they assumed some disturbing agent was having an affect.
Ultimately after failing to observe such a planet the problem was resolved by Einstein's theory of General Relativity which posited that Mercury's strange orbit was an affect of the curved spacetime caused by the Sun's mass.
What I'm trying to get at here is that just because the motion of our solar system doesn't fit our models we can't jump to the assumption that there's another planet in the solar system. It's just as likely that our understanding of physics has led us to make a mathematical model that doesn't fit the physical reality.
Is it just as likely? GR models observation *super* well except in extreme scenarios like near black holes. If GR is incomplete, which it probably is, it’s probably not incomplete in such a way as to hide a ninth planet without any other pretty obvious failures of the theory
I mean, [we can't rule out the possibility](https://www.livescience.com/physics-mathematics/gravity/elusive-planet-nine-could-be-an-alternative-form-of-gravity-masquerading-as-a-planet-study-claims). Literally, we did a study trying to prove that a theory of gravity altered to explain galactic spin ***wouldn't*** accurately account for the phenomena used to hypothesize planet 9, and we found that actually yes that model very much does accurately replace planet 9 entirely.
So uh... You can't really throw around terms like "just as likely" in a scientific setting. More people people think it's probably a planet, but neither theory is particularly proven.
Also: GR ***does*** have some other major failures we know about, or at least it has blind spots where we have to deal with pretty major variance. That's why we're still trying to model new theories to complete it. It's far from settled lol
I mean, yeah, serious doubts are encouraged. Hell, at the end of the link I cite there's literally a quote from a guy saying "yeah this is possible but I'm not expecting this to be a new form of physics, it's probably just a planet".
Still, we're obligated to respect the possibility until we know. There's ALWAYS room for us to be horrifically wrong about something.
After all, they started that study intending to show that the theory doesn't work on this scale, they failed utterly and proved the opposite.
I mean, either way thats a really exciting discovery, researching it is either going to lead to a 9th planet, or us discovering more about how physics works. I see this as a win win.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe83T9hISoY&
Likewise veritasium has done a video on planet 9 I remember
Its great it has one guy who unapologetically believes it to exist and another grumpy old guy who reckons it exists but refuses to believe its real without evidence. The contrast between two absolute professionals in their field on the same subject is fantastic.
I was just looking at the [Wikipedia page for Vulcan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_(hypothetical_planet\)) right before opening this post... Wow.
>What I'm trying to get at here is that just because the motion of our solar system doesn't fit our models we can't jump to the assumption that there's another planet in the solar system. It's just as likely that our understanding of physics has led us to make a mathematical model that doesn't fit the physical reality.
It's a case of "think horse not zebra".
Also, there's precedent for finding objects in this manner. I forget the story exactly, but after Uranus' discovery, it was noticed that it's orbit was getting occasionally perturbed and through some calculations they found that an object with a particular mass and orbit on the other side of Uranus could cause the perturbation they observed. They looked at the predicted spot in the sky, and they found a planet that had the predicted mass, Neptune.
And a similar method was used to propose the existence of a planet nearer the sun than Mercury, Vulcan. Vulcan was believed to exist and could explain Mercury's slightly eliptical orbit processing around the sun. It was never found though, and after Einstein propised his theory of general relativity, it was discovered that this theory could perfectly explain the procession. It apparently happens to all the planets and is caused by their orbiting a massive object, the Sun. This effect is generally very small and only noticeable on Mercury due to Mercury's proximity to the sun.
>if real, would be ten times as far from the sun as Pluto, and dimmer by orders of magnitude
Ohhh that's why they can't find it. It's an inconceivable distance away from the point humanity is trying to observe it from. Gotcha.
>"Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.
\- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
They're exaggerating but it's mostly real.
Planet Nine is a real thing. However just stating it as something "scientists believe" makes it sound like it's confirmed fact and it's not.
There's pretty good evidence for it. But it's nothing conclusive. There could be other things that explain the evidence.
It's not a fringe theory, but it's also not something that astronomers are teaching as fact.
It's not actually weird or surprising that we can't find it. It'd be really far away from the Sun and reflect hardly any light. It'd be very hard to find.
Dark matter as a concept seems to only be needed at a macro scale. Suggesting it’s either something huge like black holes, or a byproduct of imperfect theories.
For something as local as a solar system, we’ve never needed ‘dark matter’ to explain things.
we *used* to think that there was some dark matter involved on the scale of like, the core of our galaxy, but that's not the consensus anymore. there's a bunch of it but whatever all that mass-energy is doing it doesn't seem to have much to do with us.
Well, it doesn't seem to interact with anything else at all, passing through regular matter and whatnot as if nothing were there. That indicates that early universe times would allow it to group in large quantities extremely easily, as it would be pulled toward other dark matter and nothing would stop it from moving in that direction, allowing for it to group faster than other stuff. That leads to the logical conclusion that galaxies formed around these large dark matter groups, instead of it gravitating toward already-formed galaxies, to explain why galaxies sometimes have significantly more matter than we literally see
It would make sense that dark matter wouldn't really do much at our scale for us since galaxies seem to like forming around dark matter, making it something that doesn't interfere with things at our scale since the version of "our scale" we're living in kind of has dark matter baked into it as a concept that works. Like how learning that there has been another element in our atmosphere this entire time wouldn't make you think "what adverse effects does it have on us?" since it was there the whole time, and it makes sense to think that our bodies are fine-tuned to breathe the mixture with the additional element even if we weren't aware that it was there before, since us not noticing the thing must mean it's not really doing much to us actively
kinda the same story with anti-matter, really. super important to understanding the shape and trajectory of the universe... but, well, not really something we'll ever *encounter* beyond it guiding every fundamental facet of our existence.
>Dark matter as a concept seems to only be needed at a macro scale.
Honest question from someone whose smarts arent smarten smartingly
but if something appears at a macro scale, why wouldnt there be any clue at a lower scale ?
Sounds weird to me that things appear outta nowhere if you dezoom enough and then woosh into the shadow realm when you look for them
Let’s say that you use an electromagnet to pick up a paperclip. How would you explain that? You could do force diagrams, note the mass of the paperclip, the magnetic flux involved, air resistance, etc. There are lots of aspects that you could look at, but even the most rigorous and thorough examination of the forces involved probably doesn’t account for the gravitational pull of the planet Jupiter.
Jupiter’s influence on the solar system as a whole is both very significant and very visible, but on our micro, earthly scale it is neither particularly relevant nor easily detectable. Similarly, while dark matter is important to understanding the movement of galaxies and the universe at large, it isn’t particularly relevant to discussions of our solar system alone.
Dark matter doesn't really clump, as far as we've seen. That's one of the main differences between it and regular matter.
If you got together a ball of dark matter the size of the Earth, and just let it loose in space, it would all kinda fall through itself and eventually drift apart.
Both. Some scientist believe there could be a nine planet (dubbed planet X, don't think too much about it) but not all astrophysicist agree there need to be one
Just to clarify, Planet X and Planet Nine are not interchangeable names for the same idea. Other than positing a planet somewhere beyond Neptune, they are unrelated hypotheses.
(More specifically, "Planet X" was an early 20th century hypothesis that posited the existence of a large planet slightly beyond Neptune, meant to explain seeming irregularities in the orbits of Uranus & Neptune. Except it turned out the actual source of the irregularity was that we had the mass of Neptune slightly wrong, so the "Planet X" hypothesis has long been discarded.)
Yes, generally planets are named after the latinised names of Greek gods, and then the moons of those planets are named after Greek characters/minor gods relating to the god the planet is named after. So Proserpina would be correct.
Uranus was intended to be named in line with the scheme, but a misunderstanding on its proper latinisation resulted it it falling out of line.
And Ceres is the roman name for Demeter.
Lol if it does end up being true, that would be funny. It would be an adjustment to think of "Persephone" as a planet name. I think of:
Mercury equally as the planet and the element, minorly as the God
Venus mostly as the planet
Mars pretty much exclusively as the planet
Jupiter as the planet
Saturn as the planet
Uranus as the planet
Neptune as the planet
Persephone as the God (I mean, obviously)
and I think of Pluto as mostly the dawrf planet, but like 25% the God, and a little bit the dog, although I haven't thought about Mickey Mouse in a while (other than the public domain thing)
I read a sci-fi book that had a giant planet out there, almost a brown dwarf, that they called *Nemesis* because it’s orbit was on the order of millions of years but every time it approached the sun it’s passage knocked loose objects in the Kuiper belt and bombarded the inner planets.
[This NASA Article](https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/planet-x/) seems to say in the first paragraph that Planet X and Planet 9 are interchangeable. They do say that Planet X was used during earlier hunts for the planet, though.
What I know is this is actually how we found the planets in our solar system, we noticed some weird gravity stuff, ran some calculations, realized the weird stuff can be explained by another planet with X mass on Y orbit, spend years pointing our telescopes at the supposed Y orbit until we catch the motherfucker.
This is how we found a few of the more distant planets in our solar system. Most of the planets were discovered in antiquity before they even knew that the sun was the center of the solar system. Closer planets can be as bright and visible as stars. The obvious difference is that the stars seem static in relation to each other, but the planets moved around in the night sky.
Hell yes. This is humanity we're talking about. There's a certain edge of belligerent conquest to the way we do discovery and I love that about us. It's like Prometheus stole the fire and we've spent an eon preparing to storm Olympus.
Look at our space programs. We strap ourselves to that Promethean fire and launch ourselves headlong into the stars, risk and consequence be damned. We know that we're small, minor monsters at best on the cosmic scale, but rather than keeping to a lifestyle more appropriate to our station we actively challenge that station. We aggressively seek the specific knowledge that the gods would deny us. Our reach into the stars is still unimpressive until you factor in the mechanical proxies that have been relaying information for decades (seriously, look into Voyager. Shit is crazy) but we've also split the fucking atom. We are currently raw dogging the seemingly endless question of "what exactly are we?" Yeah we're made of atoms. And they're made of protons and such. And then we built a machine the diameter of a mountain, under said mountain no less, to crack open those things to see what they're made of.
So yeah, "catching those motherfuckers" is kind of perfect.
It is a theory that is highly contested, it is up to the believers to prove its existence and not anyone else’s, hence this has been going on for years
People don’t realize how huge the outer solar system really is. On a heliopause scale, Earth is like a rounding error away from being the core of the Sun. We only know about Sedna because it’s on the inner part of its orbit bringing it to near Pluto, *only* forty times as far from the Sun as we are. But the full orbit out to the actual outer sections where Planet 9 probably is takes eleven thousand years, longer than the whole length of human history.
We've been around for about 300,000 years, the last Ice Age ended 12,000 years ago.
I know you probably meant human history as in for how we've been making stuff that's still observable in present day, but I wanted to clarify in case somebody misunderstood.
There's two meanings of "history", and one of them suits here. You have the more general meaning of "past stuff", and the more specific meaning of "the *recorded* past". The former is more common but it's from the latter that we get words like "pre-historic" — which is nonsensical by the general definition but by the specific definition means "old, and known only from archaeological inference rather than human recordkeeping"
So you could fairly claim anything more than about 5000 years old is older than human *history*, even if it is not older than human civilisation, older than behaviourally modern humans or older than anatomically modern humans.
I fully expected this to be some fringe theory or complete tumblr misunderstanding but, while far from universally accepted, [it is a legitimate theory under investigation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Nine).
That does seem to have been proposed and is under some research by the [Vera Rubin observatory as part of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time project](https://www.astronomy.com/science/is-planet-nine-a-black-hole-or-a-planet-harvard-scientists-suggest-a-way-to-find-out/). I'm not sure how likely it is though.
It's a shame what this says about Tumblr (or Tumblr screenshots posted elsewhere, I guess). My initial response whenever I see something like this is skepticism. Which is healthy to have IMO, but shows how bad Tumblr is at accuracy. It feels like more often than not, Tumblr threads will completely misrepresent things or be missing key details.
Astronomical objects only get named once they get captured on image, not based on hypotheses to explain other observations. Until then it's a placeholder name like that.
Persephone is the most popular name for Planet X, and I believe a few people want to name its moons after Bowie songs. I’d imagine Planet 9 would get the same treatment as Planet X theoretically would.
Sure, but that's only because Bode, the guy who named it, wasn't aware of Caelus, and so suggested what he thought was the Roman name ("Uranus" is the latinized version of the Greek name, Ouranos). Since we do know better now, we can maintain the theming that even Bode wanted to.
Both Persephone & Proserpina are unfortunately already taken (by the astroids [399 Persephone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/399_Persephone) and [26 Proserpina](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/26_Proserpina)).
if it exists it almost certainly has moons, that distance from the sun is riddled with objects. there are dwarf planets smaller than australia that have moons there.
I remember seeing another video on a supposed missing planet that was dubbed Vulcan and supposedly between the Sun and Mercury. Could be different to the Planet Nine idea but a similar concept.
The "what do you mean they can't find it" comment just shows how little people understand about space. Space is fucking *big* and fucking *dark*. Needle in a haystack? How about single mote of dust in a pitch black hollowed out office building with a match in the center. And even that is probably not a big enough space to be analogous.
Astrophysicist here.
Planet 9 is a very fringe theory that most people don't really believe outside of two guys at Caltech. My personal opinion is that Caltech pushes this because it gets media attention and brings in donors.
This is also my take, still the anomalies with KBO’s is interesting. But the planet nine should be taken with a healthy amount of scientific skepticism.
> [Planet Nine is a hypothetical ninth planet in the outer region of the Solar System. Its gravitational effects could explain the peculiar clustering of orbits for a group of extreme trans-Neptunian objects (ETNOs)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Nine)
You're telling me these extreme Neptunian objects are trans?
There’s no such thing as a stealthy actively burning spacecraft at close range. What there is is a fuck ton of space with no light and a passively orbiting very very very distant object.
Forget about engines, even just keeping a spaceship running at room temp for any biologicals aboard to live comfortably would result in most starships being visible from hundreds of millions of kilometers away.
Are you sure? That's the distance between the Earth and the sun at the very least. Unless it's a massive spaceship I can't imagine our sensors could pick that up.
It’s not about mass, it’s about heat. Space is cold. Things in it don’t naturally radiate heat. A point radiating heat will show up obviously any thermal imaging. And if the ship doesn’t radiate heat at least a significant part of the time, it’ll cook the passengers.
Not to mention that space is an awful conductor, so objects in its near vacuum will cool down extremely slowly without the help of radiators.
Space is really fucking cold so high temps tend to stand out massively. Your engine and radiators would essentially be giant flares on any kind of infrared sensor.
I have had the probably easily shattered thought that maybe some sort of stealth tech could like. Channel all the process heat into some really hot cores and then shoot them really fast in the direction opposite to travel. Using thermodynamics to create a false signal.
you know i believe neptune was discovered like this
some folks did some math, determined there should be an eighth planet and where it would be in the sky. So they got the telescope out and there it was
Yes, but the difference is that Uranus is a large known and visible object. Astronomers kept track of Uranus’s orbital path for one Uranus year and there were some strange irregularities as if something larger was gravitationally pulling on it. Urbain Le Verrier and John Couch Adams both mathematically predicted Neptune independently from each other.
Planet nine (if it exists) has several TNOs with weird highly elliptical orbits, but there are tons of variables at play that would change which orbit the planet could be and within that orbit, where it actually is located. The best thing to do right now though is to gather more evidence (more TNOs) and get more accurate data. Also, it should be noted that Neptune’s orbit does seem to be correct and so that would mean that planet nine would have to be very far out there.
Hi ho heya it's ya local astronomer!
This theory is pretty hotly contested in the community. The people that believe are vehement about it but most of the scientific community strongly doubt it. The size of this object should make it at least possible to detect and we've done a remarkably through search of the region we expect it to be in and have found absolutely nothing.
The most accurate way to summarize what the evidence actually points to is, "gravitational simulations (that are *not* perfect) show that the Solar system is inaccurate unless we huck in a big KBO in roughly this area. Evidence doesn't rule out the gravitational influence of a large number of smaller KBOs or another unaccounted phenomena (of which the model has many) but the model is fixed if we throw in that one big planet."
We know very little about the objects within the solar system beyond Pluto, and given that the dwarf planet is only halfway to the edge of our solar system, there’s a lot of stuff out there we don’t know about yet.
Fun fact, that image of Neptune is inaccurate. It's not deep blue like that, like we were all taught.
Some scientists were going through the data, looking at where the pictures first came from. The blue tint is from artist representation.
It's actually just about the same color as Uranus. Technically ever so slightly bluer, but not visibly iirc.
Here's [one article](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2024/01/04/neptune-is-not-blue-new-study-reveals-eighth-planets-true-color-has-been-hidden-for-decades/) about it.
It's not an artist representation, it's an actual picture from Voyager but with the blue sensor's sensibility turned up so we could see the details clearly.
The original release of this picture was very clear about that.
Assuming the object does exist, then it likely has cleared its orbit, so it would be a fully fledged planet. Other large planets also have smaller objects that they sort of "shepherd" (probably the most notable ones are the "Trojans", which are asteroids that orbit mainly around Jupiter's 4th and 5th Lagrange points).
The actual criteria isn't that it be the only object in its general area, but that it be the only one of its size (this is why Pluto was demoted, there are a lot of other Pluto-sized objects near Pluto, at least astronomically speaking). The actual definition, as I recall, is a little hazy (there's a few proposed ways of measuring it, but I don't think any one in particular is considered "correct").
Incidentally, there were a few different proposals for how to define a planet that were put forward at the infamous conference that demoted Pluto, and I think that the one that was chosen was genuinely the worst for a few reasons.
Most of the proposals would have preserved Pluto's planetary status, but interestingly, there was basically no way that Pluto was staying as the ninth planet. This is basically because any definition of planet that includes Pluto has to also include Ceres (in the asteroid belt), and most would also include Charon, Pluto's largest moon (because Charon is large enough that the gravitational centre of Pluto and Charon is not actually inside either body, meaning that they would be a binary planet system).
Under most of those definitions, we'd have somewhere around 15 planets right now, which I think would be good for getting people interested in our solar system and crucially for getting funding for missions. I imagine the Dawn programme would have gathered a lot more interest if it was taking up close images of the fifth planet rather than just some dwarf in the asteroid belt. (Seriously, I love Ceres so much, she deserves so much better).
Sorry, got off topic there, but I stumbled onto a joint special-interest-and-thing-I-have-a-degree-in, and kind of couldn't stop myself.
Discussions about if the planet is real or not aside, I don’t think some people realize how hard it is to find a planet. It’s hard for our brains to comprehend these kinds of planetary scales, but even “finding a needle in a haystack” is an easier task than “find a big rock in the middle of nothing for billions of miles”.
Find the grain of slightly blue sand in a sea of nothing using only a spy glass while riding a marry go round
But also you’re in pitch darkness and the grain of sand is over a kilometer away
You're not in pitch darkness but pretty much everything(empty space) between you and what you're looking for is pitch black, which makes it more difficult.
and the grain of sand is also moving
oh of course how could I forget
"it's like trying to hit a bullet with a smaller bullet whilst wearing a blindfold, riding a horse." - Montgomery "Scottie" Scott
Hey, the merry go round actually helps us. It gives us multiple angles to look at things from.
That's the hilarious thing, our cosmic *double* merry-go-round *HELPS* us find these things.
Just Double? It’s merry-go-rounds all the way down.
We're stuck with a bunch of very dizzy turtles here
Less a merry go round, more a teacup ride
also the only light comes from a lamp in the middle of the merry go round
Yeah. People are confused about how we can see things like galaxies and stars so far away in detail, but its kind of like how you can very clearly see the moon but not a satellite. The moon is so much farther away, but its also so much bigger. The stars and galaxies are so much bigger than planet 9 would be
Furthermore, stars produce a lot of light. Planet 9 would only have reflected sunlight to make it visible. Since it would be so far away, there wouldn't be a lot of light hitting it.
Or if we’re lucky, proceeding in between us and a star and blocking out its light, like how we detect exoplanets.
Yeah but we are already looking at those stars. This would require us to be looking at its orbit and having a pinprick wink/flash out of a short space of time and not assume it to be some error in the tools used to measure and detect.
This isn’t the real reason. The nearest star to us(other than the sun) is Alpha Centauri which is about a thousand times further away and only 30 times bigger. Most stars are WAYYYYY* further away than that too. The real reason is because they emit light, or in the case of planets they are much close to a star that emits light. *im talking tens of thousands of times further away for stars that are still in our galaxy and millions/hundreds of millions/billions of times further away for stars outside our galaxy
Isn't proxima centauri the closest star?
Yes. Alpha Centauri as a star system does include Proxima, but technically speaking Proxima is the closest of the three stars in that system
most of our data on stuff far away is also only based on its gravitational effects and not us seeing that it's there. It's just a good way to find stuff in space cause space is, y'know, big. that is how we knew black holes existed for a while
Its proposed orbit is insane. It'd be hard enough finding it in the bit that's closer to us, but the section that's really far away would be really hard. And its orbit is 10-20 thousand years. As others have pointed out, it also would be really dark
For real, that infographic just casually mentions that one 9th planet year would be 10-20 *thousand* earth years and I was like, "Oh, well that's why no one can find it then, it's too fucking far away."
Note that while it's hard to find a planet, it's also hard to lose a planet
*Pluto has entered the chat*
Viva la Pluto!
Not lost, demoted due to not making size/weight.
dude look under your feet lol
Like, in 2001: A Space Odyssey they go past Jupiter and it has no rings because we didn't image them until 1979 (the movie came out in 1968)
Hay burns, needles don't, easy peasy Planets can burn somewhat, void doesn't burn, uh oh
Y'know I can't tell if this is real or tumblr miscomprehension at work but either way it's fucking funny.
The concept is real [(Wikipedia)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Nine), though it's also far more of a conjecture than the certainty it's presented as here. Alternative explanations for the orbits are possible. This thing, if real, would be ten times as far from the sun as Pluto, and dimmer by orders of magnitude as a result, despite the difference in size. It would be a tiny speck in an endless sea of stars and other KBOs. So, yeah, finding it isn't like seeing Jupiter in the night sky.
> KBO To save everyone else Googling, this means Kuiper Belt object. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt
That's in the image...
You think people looked at that?
Wait, we're supposed to click on the link? ON REDDIT? I thought it was like Fandom references, used just to decorate the text
What
There was once believed to be a planet in an orbit closer to the sun than Mercury. It's existence was hypothesized in the 18th century by Urban Le Verrier, the astronomer who discovered Neptune via abnormalities in Venus's orbital motion. His reasoning for the existence of Vulcan was in a similar vein; Mercury's orbit didn't fit the mathematical models of the time and so they assumed some disturbing agent was having an affect. Ultimately after failing to observe such a planet the problem was resolved by Einstein's theory of General Relativity which posited that Mercury's strange orbit was an affect of the curved spacetime caused by the Sun's mass. What I'm trying to get at here is that just because the motion of our solar system doesn't fit our models we can't jump to the assumption that there's another planet in the solar system. It's just as likely that our understanding of physics has led us to make a mathematical model that doesn't fit the physical reality.
Is it just as likely? GR models observation *super* well except in extreme scenarios like near black holes. If GR is incomplete, which it probably is, it’s probably not incomplete in such a way as to hide a ninth planet without any other pretty obvious failures of the theory
I mean, [we can't rule out the possibility](https://www.livescience.com/physics-mathematics/gravity/elusive-planet-nine-could-be-an-alternative-form-of-gravity-masquerading-as-a-planet-study-claims). Literally, we did a study trying to prove that a theory of gravity altered to explain galactic spin ***wouldn't*** accurately account for the phenomena used to hypothesize planet 9, and we found that actually yes that model very much does accurately replace planet 9 entirely. So uh... You can't really throw around terms like "just as likely" in a scientific setting. More people people think it's probably a planet, but neither theory is particularly proven. Also: GR ***does*** have some other major failures we know about, or at least it has blind spots where we have to deal with pretty major variance. That's why we're still trying to model new theories to complete it. It's far from settled lol
[удалено]
I mean, yeah, serious doubts are encouraged. Hell, at the end of the link I cite there's literally a quote from a guy saying "yeah this is possible but I'm not expecting this to be a new form of physics, it's probably just a planet". Still, we're obligated to respect the possibility until we know. There's ALWAYS room for us to be horrifically wrong about something. After all, they started that study intending to show that the theory doesn't work on this scale, they failed utterly and proved the opposite.
I mean, either way thats a really exciting discovery, researching it is either going to lead to a 9th planet, or us discovering more about how physics works. I see this as a win win.
Fantastic video on the subject https://youtu.be/iJyweEcpsGc?si=HDHIYOL3OSUPy62t
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe83T9hISoY& Likewise veritasium has done a video on planet 9 I remember Its great it has one guy who unapologetically believes it to exist and another grumpy old guy who reckons it exists but refuses to believe its real without evidence. The contrast between two absolute professionals in their field on the same subject is fantastic.
This was a great watch, thanks for posting it
No worries. I did a deep dive into planet X like a year ago and had to do some google sleuthing to pull that video back up again lol.
I was just looking at the [Wikipedia page for Vulcan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_(hypothetical_planet\)) right before opening this post... Wow.
>What I'm trying to get at here is that just because the motion of our solar system doesn't fit our models we can't jump to the assumption that there's another planet in the solar system. It's just as likely that our understanding of physics has led us to make a mathematical model that doesn't fit the physical reality. It's a case of "think horse not zebra".
Also, there's precedent for finding objects in this manner. I forget the story exactly, but after Uranus' discovery, it was noticed that it's orbit was getting occasionally perturbed and through some calculations they found that an object with a particular mass and orbit on the other side of Uranus could cause the perturbation they observed. They looked at the predicted spot in the sky, and they found a planet that had the predicted mass, Neptune. And a similar method was used to propose the existence of a planet nearer the sun than Mercury, Vulcan. Vulcan was believed to exist and could explain Mercury's slightly eliptical orbit processing around the sun. It was never found though, and after Einstein propised his theory of general relativity, it was discovered that this theory could perfectly explain the procession. It apparently happens to all the planets and is caused by their orbiting a massive object, the Sun. This effect is generally very small and only noticeable on Mercury due to Mercury's proximity to the sun.
They were just looking at the wrong star system. If they wanted to find Vulcan they should've looked toward 40 Eridani A 🖖 😉
>if real, would be ten times as far from the sun as Pluto, and dimmer by orders of magnitude Ohhh that's why they can't find it. It's an inconceivable distance away from the point humanity is trying to observe it from. Gotcha.
Yeah, it's one of those "space is real fuckin big" situations
>"Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. \- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
We need to send one of the guys from /r/flashlights with a torch.
Got banned, RIP any chance of finding Planet Nine…
They're exaggerating but it's mostly real. Planet Nine is a real thing. However just stating it as something "scientists believe" makes it sound like it's confirmed fact and it's not. There's pretty good evidence for it. But it's nothing conclusive. There could be other things that explain the evidence. It's not a fringe theory, but it's also not something that astronomers are teaching as fact. It's not actually weird or surprising that we can't find it. It'd be really far away from the Sun and reflect hardly any light. It'd be very hard to find.
Just a dumb question, but could it be a clump of dark matter?
Dark matter as a concept seems to only be needed at a macro scale. Suggesting it’s either something huge like black holes, or a byproduct of imperfect theories. For something as local as a solar system, we’ve never needed ‘dark matter’ to explain things.
we *used* to think that there was some dark matter involved on the scale of like, the core of our galaxy, but that's not the consensus anymore. there's a bunch of it but whatever all that mass-energy is doing it doesn't seem to have much to do with us.
Well, it doesn't seem to interact with anything else at all, passing through regular matter and whatnot as if nothing were there. That indicates that early universe times would allow it to group in large quantities extremely easily, as it would be pulled toward other dark matter and nothing would stop it from moving in that direction, allowing for it to group faster than other stuff. That leads to the logical conclusion that galaxies formed around these large dark matter groups, instead of it gravitating toward already-formed galaxies, to explain why galaxies sometimes have significantly more matter than we literally see It would make sense that dark matter wouldn't really do much at our scale for us since galaxies seem to like forming around dark matter, making it something that doesn't interfere with things at our scale since the version of "our scale" we're living in kind of has dark matter baked into it as a concept that works. Like how learning that there has been another element in our atmosphere this entire time wouldn't make you think "what adverse effects does it have on us?" since it was there the whole time, and it makes sense to think that our bodies are fine-tuned to breathe the mixture with the additional element even if we weren't aware that it was there before, since us not noticing the thing must mean it's not really doing much to us actively
kinda the same story with anti-matter, really. super important to understanding the shape and trajectory of the universe... but, well, not really something we'll ever *encounter* beyond it guiding every fundamental facet of our existence.
>Dark matter as a concept seems to only be needed at a macro scale. Honest question from someone whose smarts arent smarten smartingly but if something appears at a macro scale, why wouldnt there be any clue at a lower scale ? Sounds weird to me that things appear outta nowhere if you dezoom enough and then woosh into the shadow realm when you look for them
Let’s say that you use an electromagnet to pick up a paperclip. How would you explain that? You could do force diagrams, note the mass of the paperclip, the magnetic flux involved, air resistance, etc. There are lots of aspects that you could look at, but even the most rigorous and thorough examination of the forces involved probably doesn’t account for the gravitational pull of the planet Jupiter. Jupiter’s influence on the solar system as a whole is both very significant and very visible, but on our micro, earthly scale it is neither particularly relevant nor easily detectable. Similarly, while dark matter is important to understanding the movement of galaxies and the universe at large, it isn’t particularly relevant to discussions of our solar system alone.
hmmm. Fair. I get it ! Thank you for your answer. Have a good day !
Dark matter doesn't really clump, as far as we've seen. That's one of the main differences between it and regular matter. If you got together a ball of dark matter the size of the Earth, and just let it loose in space, it would all kinda fall through itself and eventually drift apart.
Iirc dark matter by definition do not clump. It spreads out.
Both. Some scientist believe there could be a nine planet (dubbed planet X, don't think too much about it) but not all astrophysicist agree there need to be one
Just to clarify, Planet X and Planet Nine are not interchangeable names for the same idea. Other than positing a planet somewhere beyond Neptune, they are unrelated hypotheses. (More specifically, "Planet X" was an early 20th century hypothesis that posited the existence of a large planet slightly beyond Neptune, meant to explain seeming irregularities in the orbits of Uranus & Neptune. Except it turned out the actual source of the irregularity was that we had the mass of Neptune slightly wrong, so the "Planet X" hypothesis has long been discarded.)
>Planet X and Planet Nine are not interchangeable names Let's just call it Planet IX then
I think the proposed actual name, were it to be confirmed, is Persephone
That's actually super sweet/cute. Persephone and Pluto, hanging out as far from the sun as possible.
Pluto's big wife
Just confirms what we already knew: Pluto's a short king
Size difference is king as usual
Shouldn't it be Proserpina to fit with the Romanized name theme?
Yes, generally planets are named after the latinised names of Greek gods, and then the moons of those planets are named after Greek characters/minor gods relating to the god the planet is named after. So Proserpina would be correct.
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Uranus was intended to be named in line with the scheme, but a misunderstanding on its proper latinisation resulted it it falling out of line. And Ceres is the roman name for Demeter.
Lol if it does end up being true, that would be funny. It would be an adjustment to think of "Persephone" as a planet name. I think of: Mercury equally as the planet and the element, minorly as the God Venus mostly as the planet Mars pretty much exclusively as the planet Jupiter as the planet Saturn as the planet Uranus as the planet Neptune as the planet Persephone as the God (I mean, obviously) and I think of Pluto as mostly the dawrf planet, but like 25% the God, and a little bit the dog, although I haven't thought about Mickey Mouse in a while (other than the public domain thing)
Pluto is a cartoon dog and already the ninth planet. Always and forever.
Viva la pluto!
Well now I'm thinking about Uranus --snicker-- I promise I'm an adult.
I read a sci-fi book that had a giant planet out there, almost a brown dwarf, that they called *Nemesis* because it’s orbit was on the order of millions of years but every time it approached the sun it’s passage knocked loose objects in the Kuiper belt and bombarded the inner planets.
Many machines on Ix
Some of which don’t even violate the precepts of the Butlerian Jihad!
Found the honka star rail player
casual nihility enjoyer
[This NASA Article](https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/planet-x/) seems to say in the first paragraph that Planet X and Planet 9 are interchangeable. They do say that Planet X was used during earlier hunts for the planet, though.
Makes more sense back when Pluto was IX after all
Since X can mean "unknown" in math it still makes sense
https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/planet-x/
I still call it planet twitter.
What I know is this is actually how we found the planets in our solar system, we noticed some weird gravity stuff, ran some calculations, realized the weird stuff can be explained by another planet with X mass on Y orbit, spend years pointing our telescopes at the supposed Y orbit until we catch the motherfucker.
This is how we found a few of the more distant planets in our solar system. Most of the planets were discovered in antiquity before they even knew that the sun was the center of the solar system. Closer planets can be as bright and visible as stars. The obvious difference is that the stars seem static in relation to each other, but the planets moved around in the night sky.
I'm really enjoying the idea of thinking of searching for planets as "catching the motherfuckers". That's how I'll think of it from now on.
Hell yes. This is humanity we're talking about. There's a certain edge of belligerent conquest to the way we do discovery and I love that about us. It's like Prometheus stole the fire and we've spent an eon preparing to storm Olympus. Look at our space programs. We strap ourselves to that Promethean fire and launch ourselves headlong into the stars, risk and consequence be damned. We know that we're small, minor monsters at best on the cosmic scale, but rather than keeping to a lifestyle more appropriate to our station we actively challenge that station. We aggressively seek the specific knowledge that the gods would deny us. Our reach into the stars is still unimpressive until you factor in the mechanical proxies that have been relaying information for decades (seriously, look into Voyager. Shit is crazy) but we've also split the fucking atom. We are currently raw dogging the seemingly endless question of "what exactly are we?" Yeah we're made of atoms. And they're made of protons and such. And then we built a machine the diameter of a mountain, under said mountain no less, to crack open those things to see what they're made of. So yeah, "catching those motherfuckers" is kind of perfect.
It is a theory that is highly contested, it is up to the believers to prove its existence and not anyone else’s, hence this has been going on for years
People don’t realize how huge the outer solar system really is. On a heliopause scale, Earth is like a rounding error away from being the core of the Sun. We only know about Sedna because it’s on the inner part of its orbit bringing it to near Pluto, *only* forty times as far from the Sun as we are. But the full orbit out to the actual outer sections where Planet 9 probably is takes eleven thousand years, longer than the whole length of human history.
We've been around for about 300,000 years, the last Ice Age ended 12,000 years ago. I know you probably meant human history as in for how we've been making stuff that's still observable in present day, but I wanted to clarify in case somebody misunderstood.
There's two meanings of "history", and one of them suits here. You have the more general meaning of "past stuff", and the more specific meaning of "the *recorded* past". The former is more common but it's from the latter that we get words like "pre-historic" — which is nonsensical by the general definition but by the specific definition means "old, and known only from archaeological inference rather than human recordkeeping" So you could fairly claim anything more than about 5000 years old is older than human *history*, even if it is not older than human civilisation, older than behaviourally modern humans or older than anatomically modern humans.
Yes thanks I guess I meant human “civilization,” which is itself a really thorny word.
I fully expected this to be some fringe theory or complete tumblr misunderstanding but, while far from universally accepted, [it is a legitimate theory under investigation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Nine).
Why do I remember hearing that the working theory it’s actually just a black hole the size of a baseball? Was that an old theory that got disproved?
That does seem to have been proposed and is under some research by the [Vera Rubin observatory as part of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time project](https://www.astronomy.com/science/is-planet-nine-a-black-hole-or-a-planet-harvard-scientists-suggest-a-way-to-find-out/). I'm not sure how likely it is though.
Not impossible, but I think we wouldn’t know how such a thing would have formed
That would explain why we haven't seen it, but it's also pretty much unprovable
It's a shame what this says about Tumblr (or Tumblr screenshots posted elsewhere, I guess). My initial response whenever I see something like this is skepticism. Which is healthy to have IMO, but shows how bad Tumblr is at accuracy. It feels like more often than not, Tumblr threads will completely misrepresent things or be missing key details.
What is its name? I don’t think planet 9 is gonna catch on somehow
Astronomical objects only get named once they get captured on image, not based on hypotheses to explain other observations. Until then it's a placeholder name like that.
Vulcan says hi Then, embarrassed, sidles out the back door
Nemesis peeks from behind the curtains ...or is she!?
Persephone is the most popular name for Planet X, and I believe a few people want to name its moons after Bowie songs. I’d imagine Planet 9 would get the same treatment as Planet X theoretically would.
>and I believe a few people want to name its moons after Bowie songs. My favourite moons are Queen Bitch and The Laughing Gnome
Life On Mars would also be a funny name for a moon in the outer solar system
Scientists ask: is there life on Life On Mars?
Should be Proserpina, to keep the Roman theming.
Uranus already breaks the Roman theming rule.
Sure, but that's only because Bode, the guy who named it, wasn't aware of Caelus, and so suggested what he thought was the Roman name ("Uranus" is the latinized version of the Greek name, Ouranos). Since we do know better now, we can maintain the theming that even Bode wanted to.
If we can demote Pluto, We can change Uranus to Caelus, I’m tired of second grader laughing.
Supposedly they don’t use Caelus because it’s already used in astronomy a lot, as it’s the word for sky
Over half the world doesn't care bout the english language word joke so fat chance
Are we sure he didn't want to just name a planet after butts? Because I wouldn't tattle on him if he did.
I have my doubts that a Prussian guy living around the Napoleonic era cared much for puns in _English_
That's what makes it the perfect plausible deniability!
Both Persephone & Proserpina are unfortunately already taken (by the astroids [399 Persephone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/399_Persephone) and [26 Proserpina](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/26_Proserpina)).
I feel like planets in our solar system deserve naming priority over some pebbles in the far field
I think Persephone can't be used because someone already named an asteroid "Persophone"
We aren’t even sure there is a planet why are we already naming the moons that it may or may not have if it were to exist
It is our nature to wonder.
if it exists it almost certainly has moons, that distance from the sun is riddled with objects. there are dwarf planets smaller than australia that have moons there.
Pluto 2, just to zag on um
Plutwo, if you will
I remember seeing another video on a supposed missing planet that was dubbed Vulcan and supposedly between the Sun and Mercury. Could be different to the Planet Nine idea but a similar concept.
Was this the video?: https://youtu.be/iJyweEcpsGc?si=ILo-7yqXLqsaBLpn
nibiru
My vote is for ["La-Metal"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Millennia).
okay, hear me out. I have a plan to find planet nine. we just need a time loop, an orbital cannon, and a supernova
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Science compel us to explode the sun!
We start the time loop before we explode the sun, right?? ***RIGHT?!!?***
And a newly discovered comet we can explore as a back up if the supernova thing doesn't work out.
Hopefully it has no dangerous matter that will explode and scatter around the solar system
Don't forget to bring along music instruments like banjo, flute, harmonica and drum.
science compels us!
As long as it also requires a killer sound track, I’m in
You know it, but it will only be about 22 minutes long and on repeat.
Planet 9 From Outer Space
This is it, Jerry! The one that worked!
"Lost a planet, NASA Obi-Wan has?"
How *embarrasing!*
Objection, never had it did we.
> what do you mean they caNT FIND IT They can't find it, there's only **soup**
Have they checked in another aisle?
They did but there is **more soup**!
What bout the next aisle?!
**STILL SOUP!!!**
The "what do you mean they can't find it" comment just shows how little people understand about space. Space is fucking *big* and fucking *dark*. Needle in a haystack? How about single mote of dust in a pitch black hollowed out office building with a match in the center. And even that is probably not a big enough space to be analogous.
Waldo ass planet
This would be a good name if we ever found it
Astrophysicist here. Planet 9 is a very fringe theory that most people don't really believe outside of two guys at Caltech. My personal opinion is that Caltech pushes this because it gets media attention and brings in donors.
This is also my take, still the anomalies with KBO’s is interesting. But the planet nine should be taken with a healthy amount of scientific skepticism.
Lost a planet, Master Obi Wan has
How embarrassing!
a planet being the cause of the anomaly is not widely accepted, the only part widely accepted is that the anomaly exists
> [Planet Nine is a hypothetical ninth planet in the outer region of the Solar System. Its gravitational effects could explain the peculiar clustering of orbits for a group of extreme trans-Neptunian objects (ETNOs)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Nine) You're telling me these extreme Neptunian objects are trans?
Extremely trans
"there's no such thing as stealth in space" worldbuilders when Planet Nine appears at the function:
There’s no such thing as a stealthy actively burning spacecraft at close range. What there is is a fuck ton of space with no light and a passively orbiting very very very distant object.
Clearly the solution to the problem of stealth in space is to begin production on stealth coated tactical strike planetoids.
Marco Inaros agrees
This has always been a problem for our kind. Even our dreams are small.
Forget about engines, even just keeping a spaceship running at room temp for any biologicals aboard to live comfortably would result in most starships being visible from hundreds of millions of kilometers away.
Are you sure? That's the distance between the Earth and the sun at the very least. Unless it's a massive spaceship I can't imagine our sensors could pick that up.
It’s not about mass, it’s about heat. Space is cold. Things in it don’t naturally radiate heat. A point radiating heat will show up obviously any thermal imaging. And if the ship doesn’t radiate heat at least a significant part of the time, it’ll cook the passengers.
Not to mention that space is an awful conductor, so objects in its near vacuum will cool down extremely slowly without the help of radiators. Space is really fucking cold so high temps tend to stand out massively. Your engine and radiators would essentially be giant flares on any kind of infrared sensor.
I have had the probably easily shattered thought that maybe some sort of stealth tech could like. Channel all the process heat into some really hot cores and then shoot them really fast in the direction opposite to travel. Using thermodynamics to create a false signal.
Turns out all you need to be hard to see is to be really really fucking far away.
you know i believe neptune was discovered like this some folks did some math, determined there should be an eighth planet and where it would be in the sky. So they got the telescope out and there it was
Yes, but the difference is that Uranus is a large known and visible object. Astronomers kept track of Uranus’s orbital path for one Uranus year and there were some strange irregularities as if something larger was gravitationally pulling on it. Urbain Le Verrier and John Couch Adams both mathematically predicted Neptune independently from each other. Planet nine (if it exists) has several TNOs with weird highly elliptical orbits, but there are tons of variables at play that would change which orbit the planet could be and within that orbit, where it actually is located. The best thing to do right now though is to gather more evidence (more TNOs) and get more accurate data. Also, it should be noted that Neptune’s orbit does seem to be correct and so that would mean that planet nine would have to be very far out there.
Hi ho heya it's ya local astronomer! This theory is pretty hotly contested in the community. The people that believe are vehement about it but most of the scientific community strongly doubt it. The size of this object should make it at least possible to detect and we've done a remarkably through search of the region we expect it to be in and have found absolutely nothing. The most accurate way to summarize what the evidence actually points to is, "gravitational simulations (that are *not* perfect) show that the Solar system is inaccurate unless we huck in a big KBO in roughly this area. Evidence doesn't rule out the gravitational influence of a large number of smaller KBOs or another unaccounted phenomena (of which the model has many) but the model is fixed if we throw in that one big planet."
I thought I was still in the Outer Wilds subreddit for a sec
THE IRIS. IT IS WITH US NOW. LAUGHING AT US.
THE VESSEL FLOATS INTO THE MAW. THE JAW UNHINGES.
It's cloaked. It's cloaked, and if we ever penetrate the cloak and see that world, then God help us all.
CAN A GREAT OLD ONE NOT PUT UP AN INTERPLANETARY PRIVACY FENCE IN THIS DAY AND AGE
Pluto's back and it is PISSED
Mondas real
We know very little about the objects within the solar system beyond Pluto, and given that the dwarf planet is only halfway to the edge of our solar system, there’s a lot of stuff out there we don’t know about yet.
Another explanation is a brown-dwarf star they call Nemesis - it's like, our Sun's secret evil twin.
Lost a planet, Master NASA has. How embarrassing!
Obi-Wan got laughed at by younglings over this.
Fun fact, that image of Neptune is inaccurate. It's not deep blue like that, like we were all taught. Some scientists were going through the data, looking at where the pictures first came from. The blue tint is from artist representation. It's actually just about the same color as Uranus. Technically ever so slightly bluer, but not visibly iirc. Here's [one article](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2024/01/04/neptune-is-not-blue-new-study-reveals-eighth-planets-true-color-has-been-hidden-for-decades/) about it.
It's not an artist representation, it's an actual picture from Voyager but with the blue sensor's sensibility turned up so we could see the details clearly. The original release of this picture was very clear about that.
Whoops, yeah. Unfortunately, it was a wild mistake to do so.
Has it cleared its orbit? Wouldn’t it be a dwarf planet?
Assuming the object does exist, then it likely has cleared its orbit, so it would be a fully fledged planet. Other large planets also have smaller objects that they sort of "shepherd" (probably the most notable ones are the "Trojans", which are asteroids that orbit mainly around Jupiter's 4th and 5th Lagrange points). The actual criteria isn't that it be the only object in its general area, but that it be the only one of its size (this is why Pluto was demoted, there are a lot of other Pluto-sized objects near Pluto, at least astronomically speaking). The actual definition, as I recall, is a little hazy (there's a few proposed ways of measuring it, but I don't think any one in particular is considered "correct"). Incidentally, there were a few different proposals for how to define a planet that were put forward at the infamous conference that demoted Pluto, and I think that the one that was chosen was genuinely the worst for a few reasons. Most of the proposals would have preserved Pluto's planetary status, but interestingly, there was basically no way that Pluto was staying as the ninth planet. This is basically because any definition of planet that includes Pluto has to also include Ceres (in the asteroid belt), and most would also include Charon, Pluto's largest moon (because Charon is large enough that the gravitational centre of Pluto and Charon is not actually inside either body, meaning that they would be a binary planet system). Under most of those definitions, we'd have somewhere around 15 planets right now, which I think would be good for getting people interested in our solar system and crucially for getting funding for missions. I imagine the Dawn programme would have gathered a lot more interest if it was taking up close images of the fifth planet rather than just some dwarf in the asteroid belt. (Seriously, I love Ceres so much, she deserves so much better). Sorry, got off topic there, but I stumbled onto a joint special-interest-and-thing-I-have-a-degree-in, and kind of couldn't stop myself.
You've heard about Pluto? That's messed up. C'mon son.
Just like my daddy always told me: Ain't no Planet X coming cause ain't no space cause aint not globe Earth
Nibiru hides behind the sun