"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...

[Greg Hullender]

If it's true that you maximize discoveries by looking for bodies near the ecliptic, then ipso facto the Kuiper Belt is not spherically distributed. Anyway, the catalog does show a handful of objects with highly inclined orbits, so it's not that no one is looking for them; they're just rare.

Back to the topic. Patryck has some nice diagrams of what he's talking about on his page:

http://harbor.scitec.kobe-u.ac.jp/~patryk/.../planet-en.html

I do wonder why his object has such an elliptical orbit though.

I found a no-subscription-required link to his last paper

http://xxx.tau.ac.il/ftp/arxiv/papers/0712/0712.2198.pdf

And I sent him an e-mail asking for a copy of the new one.

What's depressing is that a search for his name yields a huge number of psuedoscientific sites that try to cite his work as "proof" of their crazy ideas about how "Planet Nibiru" caused all the disasters in the Bible. Adding a "-nibiru" flag to a web search (minus in front of a term tells the search engine NOT to show pages with that word) cleans most of it up. This isn't Patryck's fault, of course, but it bothers me that I easily found pages and pages about the mythical Nibiru, but was unable to even learn the title of Patryck's new paper.

--Greg

[JRehling]

If it's true that you maximize discoveries by looking for bodies near the ecliptic, then ipso facto the Kuiper Belt is not spherically distributed. Anyway, the catalog does show a handful of objects with highly inclined orbits, so it's not that no one is looking for them; they're just rare.

Actually, it could be spherically distributed and the searches still be biased if the searchers BELIEVE that it's not. But the fact that more objects are in prograde orbits than retrograde indicates some degree of nonrandomization. However, the fact that some highly inclined orbits have been discovered does NOT mean that searchers are looking outside the ecliptic -- inclined orbits cross the ecliptic.

The larger point is that the orbits definitely deviate from the ecliptic, though not fully randomly. But we can't use the discovered objects to characterize the population because of a bias in the searches. The mean inclination observed so far can't be used as a measure of the actual mean inclination.

[Greg Hullender]

Actually, it could be spherically distributed and the searches still be biased if the searchers BELIEVE that it's not.

Actually, no. If the objects were spherically distributed, then observers looking on the ecliptic would not find more objects than observers looking away from it. That would not be consistent with YOUR claim that looking near the ecliptic "will be the best use of telescope time if your aim is to maximize discoveries."

Or did you mean to include yourself among the biased researchers? :-)

--Greg