"Aernus", A proposed new planet in the Kuiper Belt Options

[ustrax]

Tomorrow at DPS Patryk Lykawka will make a presentation where he points out to the existence of a planet with the diameter of the Earth at 100AU.

I received his answers regarding the work done yesterday, here's some of it (the rest is you know where...):

"This massive planetesimal would be, now, at this moment in the history of the Solar System, orbiting the Sun at a distance of, at least, 100 AU, or, simplifying, 3 to 4 times more distant from our star than Pluto.
A far, massive, transplutonian planet in the Lykawka’s description who remarks the importance that the orbital evolution of this planet may be the key to answer several unexplained enigmas of the Kuiper Belt, among which he points out a few…:
The excitation actually observed in the region between 40 and 50 AU is one, another are the populations of different types of objects in the Belt and their orbital characteristics.
Another two pieces of the puzzle can also be put into place under Patrik work: the Belt’s truncated region in the 48 AU region and its small total mass."

What's your opinion regarding this?...
According to him this is not like Planet X, his study even erases Planet X from the map...

EDITED: "Aernus" is the name I'm using, it was the divinity of the Zoelae, a pre-historic tribe that lived in the most remote corner of my country...

[dvandorn]

Okay -- let's look at this from the back forward, rather than as a snapshot of "right now."

The Solar System accreted from an accretion disk, correct? Every body that accreted from this disk occupies a pertty narrow range of obliquities, within less than 10 degrees of one another. This covers everything from Mercury out to Neptune. It includes all but the smallest of the asteroids, as well.

Then we find a population of bodies that does *not* fall neatly into that ecliptic plane. What is the most natural conclusion to be drawn from that? The conclusion I draw is that the accretion disk had ceased to be a flat disk by the time we got out that far from the sun. Lack of tidal forces and all that.

So, matter that is still gravitationally attached to the Sun but beyond the forces that draw the matter into a disk -- in what way would it form itself? I would think physics would demand that such matter would arrange itself as a sphere around the Sun. Just as the farther-out shell of cometary debris, the Oort cloud, has.

Now, I will admit that I haven't read each survey. But from the results that get talked about (i.e., the discovery of pretty much any body large enough to have been found thus far), not only are we *not* seeing a majority of these objects in the ecliptic, my understanding is that *none* of the more massive objects have been found in anything except inclined orbits.

What does it say about the general distribution of KBO objects when none of the larger members of that population thus far discovered orbit within the ecliptic? How can that be worked back into a population that has its greatest density in the ecliptic with a population that thins out as you move away from the ecliptic (i.e., a torus)?

This is the logic chain that leads me to believe that the KBO population distribution is closer to spherical than to a toroidal "belt."

As with all things, I could, of course, be wrong...

-the other Doug

[Del Palmer]

Then we find a population of bodies that does *not* fall neatly into that ecliptic plane. What is the most natural conclusion to be drawn from that? The conclusion I draw is that the accretion disk had ceased to be a flat disk by the time we got out that far from the sun. Lack of tidal forces and all that.

Er, not quite. You need a lot of energy to escape the ecliptic plane. Those high-inclination bodies are known as "scattered-disk" objects -- they were most likely formed in the ecliptic plane but were gravitationally tossed into such odd orbits by Neptune.

Just as the farther-out shell of cometary debris, the Oort cloud, has.

Likewise, those objects are believed to have been put there by Jupiter and Saturn...

[dvandorn]

You need a lot of energy to escape the ecliptic plane.

Only if you started out there in the first place.

Also, I have an image of an evolving Solar System that resembles many of the stars-with-disks that Hubble has imaged. Most of these have been in "nursery" nebulae, and the new star is in the process of clearing the smallest gas and dust particles from its vicinity. There is usually a half-spherical "bow shock" effect along the interface between the star's out-pushing solar wind and the dust and gas in the nebula, often defined by the star's trajectory through the nebula.

So -- you have a newly-formed Sol with its accretion disk forming the majority of the Solar System, and a half-sphere shell of bow shock between its solar wind and the gas and dust of the nebula in which it formed. Thus you have accretion going on in two different places, out of two different basic types of materials, one in a tightly planar disk and another along the surface of a spherical area of interaction between the star's violent outgassing and the womb of the nursery that gave it birth.

In such a genesis scenario, I can easily see population of outer system objects being created in spherical shells at various distances from the Sun, remnants of conditions throughout the first few million years after Sol formed.

Again -- I'm not running this through mathematical models. I'm just putting together what I've learned with what I've observed. And while I *do* understand that most current theories still try and keep the genesis of all SS objects as within the accretion disk and discount the possibility of non-planar accretion, I guess I'm saying that my temptation is to describe that thinking as "clinging to" a planar-only genesis concept. I've seen almost nothing in print on the concept of accretion along a bow shock wave in such curcumstances.

In my little gedanken-model, here, I see the current state of the outer System as a depleted version of a young system, which would contain a nice little set of worlds accreted out of a disk and a vast, low-density cloud of "wastage" formed roughly into a sphere around the star. Gravitic resonances from the planar System as well as perturbations by passing stars will have altered it significantly over the life of the System. But my image is still of a roughly spherical shell of only lightly assembled flotsam.

-the other Doug