2 new planets in solar system?

[YellowSubmarine]

Equipment farther out than Earth's orbit wouldn't necessarily make it easier to find them if the planets end up in a very different locations in their orbit. And it will take hell of a long time until the orbits of the planets and the orbit of said equipment align. Pluto has yet to make a single orbit since we first spotted it.

Damn, it is weird – and probably lonely – to be dozens of AU and more away from the Sun. That makes these alleged planets, Pluto as well as New Horizons pretty interesting to me.

 

[Kobayshi Maru]

Well we have a probe on the way there now. Might find some new things.

The other potental two planets will need better sensors to find. Or equipment farther out than Earth's orbit.

Too bad, we likely won't live long enough to find out.

 

[Christopher]

Equipment farther out than Earth's orbit wouldn't necessarily make it easier to find them if the planets end up in a very different locations in their orbit. And it will take hell of a long time until the orbits of the planets and the orbit of said equipment align. Pluto has yet to make a single orbit since we first spotted it.

Alignment has nothing to do with it. It's not like a telescope can only point in one direction. The benefit of sending telescopes farther out could be one of parallax -- getting images from two telescopes with a wider baseline between them could let you improve detection of near-ish things changing position against the background stars. Or it could be one of interferometry; two or more telescopes a given distance apart can behave like a single telescope that same distance across, so the greater the separation between the components of an interferometric array, the huger the telescope you effectively have. For instance, if we put one space telescope in Earth orbit and another at the L3 point on the opposite side of the Sun from Earth, then we'd essentially have a telescope as big as the Earth's orbit, and it would be incredibly sensitive.

 

[BK613]

^^ If Gaia does all that is hoped, these objects might fall out of the data.
From the ESA website:

Gaia will not exclusively observe stars: all objects brighter than G ≈ 20 mag will be observed, including solar-system objects such as asteroids and Kuiper-belt objects, quasars, supernovae, multiple stars, etc.

 

[YellowSubmarine]

Equipment farther out than Earth's orbit wouldn't necessarily make it easier to find them if the planets end up in a very different locations in their orbit. And it will take hell of a long time until the orbits of the planets and the orbit of said equipment align. Pluto has yet to make a single orbit since we first spotted it.

Alignment has nothing to do with it.

In astronomy, alignment refers several objects being arranged in the same line, not the ability to point your telescope or whatever you're talking about. It was evident I was using that in the broader sense where the two objects lie in approximately the same vector from the sun, i.e. conjunction, which I explicitly mentioned it in the bolded part. Why would anyone think I was worried about pointing telescopes is beyond me. Being a hundred years apart has a lot to do with it, because the Earth is closer than the probe would be. 1 AU being negligible distance, there's a 66% probability the Earth will be closer to your planet if you're sending your probe blindly but knew its orbital plane.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Or it could be one of interferometry; two or more telescopes a given distance apart can behave like a single telescope that same distance across, so the greater the separation between the components of an interferometric array, the huger the telescope you effectively have. For instance, if we put one space telescope in Earth orbit and another at the L3 point on the opposite side of the Sun from Earth, then we'd essentially have a telescope as big as the Earth's orbit, and it would be incredibly sensitive.

Given the way interferometry works, it would be remarkable if such a device as you describe could be made to work. The feasibility of a meta-telescope anywhere close to the size you discuss has never been demonstrated.

Here's what the Darwin project (a project that never made it past study of the proposal) had to say about getting just a small constellation of satellites to work as an astronomical interferometer, as of 2007 when the study ended (web page last updated in 2009, boldfacing mine):

For Darwin to work, the telescopes and the hub must have stayed in formation with millimetre precision. ESA was planning to achieve this aim using a variation of the highly successful Global Positioning System (GPS) that provides so much of the satellite-based navigation on Earth.

But this was not enough, as the light collected by the telescopes was supposed to be recombined at very high precision. A deviation of more than just 100 thousandths of a millimetre could have ruined the observation.

Although this sounds like an impossible feat of accuracy, ESA together with European industry had started some of the pre-developments for the necessary metrology and optical equipment that would allow such precision. The full demonstration of the final feasibility of the approach would have required more detailed studies.

In 2013, Labeyrie proposed a "Hypertelescope" to the ESA with only 10km meta-aperture size (white paper here). His satellite flotilla is intended to be upgradeable to larger meta-aperture sizes, but it was not known as of 2013 whether doing so is feasible. In the wiki, Malcolm Fridlund, project scientist for Darwin, is quoted as saying of Labeyrie's Hypertelescope that, "The costs would be really prohibitive."

 

[tafkats]

Agree. What's needed is a better definition. Strictly speaking, Jupiter fails the given definition because it technically doesn't orbit the Sun; it and the Sun orbit about a center of mass(barycenter) that lies outside the Sun. Therefore, by that definition, not a planet.

Isn't that technically true of all orbits?

 

[Lynx]

Maybe one of those planets is the Nubiri or whatever the name was, which made certain people hysterical in 2012?

Maybe the evening papers can steer up another outburst of hysteria over the news about new planets.

As for those dwarf planets, I'm still higly annoyed that they didn't name a certain planet they discovered some years ago Xena and it's moon Gabrielle, as they were discussing.

 

[BK613]

Agree. What's needed is a better definition. Strictly speaking, Jupiter fails the given definition because it technically doesn't orbit the Sun; it and the Sun orbit about a center of mass(barycenter) that lies outside the Sun. Therefore, by that definition, not a planet.

Isn't that technically true of all orbits?

Check out these animations: Sun-Jupiter is represented by the second from the left, all other planets the fourth from the left. Its barycenter is located outside the Sun while the other planets' barycenters are inside the Sun.
So, technically, Jupiter doesn't orbit the Sun and therefore, by the definition, cannot be a planet.

A bit of pedantic sophistry? Sure, but only to illustrate the silly and arbitrary nature of this definition.

 

[publiusr]

Calling both Eris and Pluto planets would allow the kids books to be a bit more lengthy. Smaller than Pluto--it's a planetoid, a term I'd like to see come back into vogue.

This way, all the old textbooks are still usable, just incomplete.

 

[Metryq]

This way, all the old textbooks are still usable, just incomplete.

Exactly. Why print new textbooks when the science is settled, right? Look at it this way—with Pluto being "demoted," Holst's THE PLANETS is no longer missing a movement.

I was in grade school in the early '70s and remember the ('50s? '60s?) science textbooks with pictures of astronauts in "worm" suits with goldfish bowl helmets. The caption read, "One day man will land on the Moon."

 

[publiusr]

I prefer the art then to todays slick CGI, unless done well.

 

[Kobayshi Maru]

This way, all the old textbooks are still usable, just incomplete.

Exactly. Why print new textbooks when the science is settled, right? Look at it this way—with Pluto being "demoted," Holst's THE PLANETS is no longer missing a movement.

I was in grade school in the early '70s and remember the ('50s? '60s?) science textbooks with pictures of astronauts in "worm" suits with goldfish bowl helmets. The caption read, "One day man will land on the Moon."

Something like this?

 

[Lakenheath 72]

I remember a book named "Out of the Cradle: Exploring the Frontiers Beyond Earth", with art by Ron Miller and Pamela Lee. My goodness, I was so optimistic then that humans would one day be out there exploring and colonizing our solar system. Sadly, I have lost my optimism. I am beginning to believe that our future will be sometime like that envisioned in the song "In the Year 2525". I think the chances of our present civilization crashing are far greater than us than landing another human on the Moon, or even farther away, Mars.

Returning to the topic, scientists have discovered a large planet-sized body in the Oort Cloud of another system. So, the possibility of one planet-sized body has increased in our system's Oort Cloud. I don't know about two.

 

[scotthm]

scientists have discovered a large planet-sized body in the Oort Cloud of another system. So, the possibility of one planet-sized body has increased in our system's Oort Cloud.

Since our solar system seems atypical compared to other solar systems we've observed so far, I don't know how you can make such an assumption.

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[Christopher]

^Right. For decades, we expected other planetary systems to be much like our own, but now we know they're enormously more diverse than we thought. We can't predict the configuration of other systems based on that of our own, nor can we predict the configuration of our own based on others.

 

[Kobayshi Maru]

I've read an article that says that rogue planets(planets being knocked out of orbit and wandering in the empty space between stars) is a pretty common phenomenon in the Galaxy, they say that there could be hundreds of billions of them throughout the Galaxy. Most of those that have been detected are gaseous giants but that's only because they are so much bigger than telluric planets.