Jupiter's Bigger Brother

Guy's check this out, Jupiter may have a bigger brother!:scope: :bigshock:
www.independent.co.uk/news/science/up-te...-planet-2213119.html

wow, 4 times the mass of Jupiter, wouldnt it be great if it was there !

And here Tom,

www.universetoday.com/83363/about-that-g...-outer-solar-system/

Keith..

Correct me if I am wrong, but I think it's a shame that the cameras on the likes of the Voyagers and and Pioners are not good enough, they might have been able to do some planet prospecting for this monster. The chances of us finding it from Earth are slim in my opinion.

Seanie.

Seanie_Morris wrote: The chances of us finding it from Earth are slim in my opinion.
Seanie.

I understand that WISE (orbiting mission with IR imaging capabilities) ran out of coolant last year. It was then used to take some more images, concentrating on the solar system. My understanding is that these images plus any useful IR images from the full mission will be scoured for "Tyche". AFAIR, the prelim results are due in the next few months (April?) with further data available some time around or after the summer.

Whichever of Pioneer/Voyager was first (Pioneer?), they certainly were before the advent of CCD's. I think they may have used some cutting proprietary imaging devices though. That may also have applied to the later mission (Voyager?).

I could look it up of course, but I'll let ye all do that and correct me...

Dave

In 1999, John Murray of the Open University (UK) did a study of 13 long-period comets and predicted the existence of a planet much further from the Sun than Pluto at 40,000 AU. He suggested that this planet X would be far bigger than any of those in the inner solar system, having a mass larger than that of Jupiter. Also in 1999 Matese, Whitman and Whitmire at the University of Lafayette, Louisiana published a similar study of 82 comets. They made a claim of 3-5MJupiter for the mass of the planet, but at a slightly closer distance of 25,000 AU. However, Horner and Evans have shown that comet discoveries are bedevilled by selection effects. These include anomalies caused by the excess of observers in the northern as against the southern hemisphere, seasonal and diurnal biases, directional effects which make it harder to discover comets in certain regions of the sky, as well as sociological biases.

A few years back Murray surveyed the predicted area of sky down to 21 mag with the 1.2m Schmidt telescope in Sidings Springs. 44 candidates were identified. Using a 0.9m here in Ireland, I imaged all these candidates multiple times to 22nd magnitude at 6 months apart over a 2 year period that had this 13 arc sec shift for that distance. Conclusion is that there were no large planets found.

However, there is every indication that the planet is there not just using the Matese Whitmore calculations based on cometray clumping, but that there is an additional planet much closer based on other parameters caused by the resonances within the Edgeworth Kuiper belt.

Some models show that this nearer planet 80-150 AU demonstrate and explains consistently the following:
1) excitation of the Kuiper Belt
2) the Belt’s outer edge at ~48AU
3) origin of the four main populations of TNOs
4) loss of ~99% of the Kuiper Belt initial mass
5) Neptune’s current orbit at 30.1AU

It means that a massive body (outer planet) was scattered by one of the giant planets in the early solar system. It then stirred the primordial planetesimal disk to the levels observed at 40-50 AU and truncated it at ~48AU, before planet migration (fossilized signatures). The long term signatures of the planetoid's perturbation are the detached and very high-i populations (>40 deg).

The research in narrowing down a smaller predicted field for surveying for this closer planet, may come to a successful conclusion at the end of this year. The planet will be either one of the two nodes. Hopefully the northern one for the next survey.

Eamonn A