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A ninth planet?


Spaceception

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1 hour ago, Nuke said:

it occurred to me that you really cant call it planet X anymore. since the demotion of pluto you are actually looking for planet IX.

Oh the irony: the ex planet cost us our planet x...

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Planet nine was not seen by the WISE survey a couple years ago, Which means it is not radiating enough heat to be visible, now all gas giants need to have some heat source, even gas has a freezing point and unless it has a good source of sunlight or a hot core the atmosphere will freeze and snow down to the surface,  So i think it very likely that planet nine is the largest terrestrial world in the solar system in that it is quite possible a dead gas giant that has long since cooled and frozen. If it had an internal heat source WISE would have seen it.

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Looking at vapor pressure of H2, even at 20K, it will have a 1bar atmo. And the melting point for it is 14K. In contrast, the longest wavelength WISE was looking at was 22 microns, which corresponds to something like 100K peak. Which means that Planet Nine can still have a Hydrogen ocean and a substantial Hydrogen atmosphere without being detectable to WISE.

Anything like Methane will, of course, be frozen. Given the pressure and feasible temperature ranges, it's entirely possible that there is not enough Hydrogen to cover the entire surface, and we'd be looking at something that resembles Titan, with lakes of liquid Hydrogen on terrain made up of frozen Methane. Could be a very interesting world.

P.S. In either case, I expect Hydrogen clouds, and it'd be exciting to see for that alone. Shame it's so far away.

Edited by K^2
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Just now, K^2 said:

Looking at vapor pressure of H2, even at 20K, it will have a 1bar atmo. And the melting point for it is 14K. In contrast, the longest wavelength WISE was looking at was 22 microns, which corresponds to something like 100K peak. Which means that Planet Nine can still have a Hydrogen ocean and a substantial Hydrogen atmosphere without being detectable to WISE.

Anything like Methane will, of course, be frozen. Given the pressure and feasible temperature ranges, it's entirely possible that there is not enough Hydrogen to cover the entire surface, and we'd be looking at something that resembles Titan, with lakes of liquid Hydrogen on terrain made up of frozen Methane. Could be a very interesting world.

I hope so, perhaps even underground caves warm enough to sustain life, and maybe a family of moons with enough tidal force to warm the interior :D

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10 hours ago, Kobymaru said:

So basically, it's not that Planet X has ever encountered those rocks, it's more that it flung out everything on the other side of the system, where itself is supposed to be. Correct?

No, it's the other way around. The trajectories of objects it boosted must still intersect original trajectory, which puts the periapsis of Planet Nine on the same side as apoapsides of observed objects. Since they all seem to point in one direction, the apoapsis of Planet Nine is in the exact opposite direction, giving a very close estimate to where it must pass. However, the only parameter this establishes precisely is the inclination. The semi-major axis and argument of periapsis would be slightly less restricted, but still in the ballpark. And the worst information is on eccentricity, other than it's pretty eccentric. We can also put some lower limit on the periapsis, which is estimated to be about 200AU. Likely significantly higher, however.

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Well, assuming it has a periapsis of 200AU and an apoapsis of 700AU (as predicted by Caltech), it would dip out of the Heliosheath at the top of it's orbit and come about 100AU from outside edge of Termination Shock. Voyager 1 is technically in Interstellar Space, but isn't anywhere CLOSE to emerging from the Heliosheath.

2 hours ago, K^2 said:

Given the kind of rockets we can realistically build, we might be able to make a probe that gets to it in a few centuries.

Assuming we launched a space probe on top of the SLS, used gravity assists where we could and aimed it perfectly for an encounter at blazing speeds, I'd have to agree with K^2; maybe in 100-500 years. Only problem with THAT is (let's be optimistic and say that humanity is still around:wink:), at our current rate of technological discovery, we'll probably have some form of extremely fast transportation. Maybe super efficient and powerful ion engines, maybe, just maybe, we'll even have near light speed travel. Some genius might solve the equation to teleportation, but who knows. Still, I doubt we'll actually see it in detail anytime soon.

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12 minutes ago, RuBisCO said:

The only way we would have a mission get to this theorized planet in our lifetimes, is if that EMDrive engine turns out to be real, and I'm not holding my breath on that.

I wouldn't say that that's the most-plausible way. We could do interesting things with ion propulsion, or even direct nuclear propulsion if we were dead-set on it. We could, but we won't, because of how absurdly expensive it'd be. EM drive, even if it was delivering as advertised, would still require a very impressive nuclear reactor that we'd have to launch on an escape trajectory for it to make it out there in a couple of decades.

In terms of what we realistically could do, I can come up with a maneuver that puts a probe 200AU out in 125 years. As I've indicated above, it'd take many centuries to get to the likely location of Planet Nine. Might still be worth it, if we can build a probe that can survive the voyage.

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30 minutes ago, daniel l. said:

I hope so, perhaps even underground caves warm enough to sustain life, and maybe a family of moons with enough tidal force to warm the interior :D

Even for liquid Methane, which is an absolute minimum requirement for any sort of life, you need to go deep enough to where pressures would be too extreme. Moons... well, yeah, there could be a Titan-like moon in theory, but I can't think of any remotely plausible energy source for life there. Lets check on actual Titan first.

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Well it supposedly is anywhere between 200 AU and 1200 AU, which means the amount of sunlight hitting it is between 1 and 34 mW/m^2, which comes to black body temperatures between 11 and 28 K. This assumes no internal heating and perfect black body, which it likely is not and assuming green house effect the temperature may likely be much hotter but I would not put bets beyond 40 K. So finding this thing with inferred light is insane.  I think K^2 predictions are probably accurate.

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Well assuming all those crazy predictions with superconducting EMDrives: a nuclear power EMDriven spacecraft might be able to launch from the earths surface directly. But yeah anything else, High ISP ion drive, dense plasma focus fusion, will still be too costly too ever see make it in our lifetime. 

 

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48 minutes ago, RuBisCO said:

The only way we would have a mission get to this theorized planet in our lifetimes, is if that EMDrive engine turns out to be real, and I'm not holding my breath on that.

Good afternoon, sir, would you care to chat about our Lord and Saviors, Teller and Ullam?

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3 hours ago, daniel l. said:

Planet nine was not seen by the WISE survey a couple years ago, Which means it is not radiating enough heat to be visible, now all gas giants need to have some heat source, even gas has a freezing point and unless it has a good source of sunlight or a hot core the atmosphere will freeze and snow down to the surface,  So i think it very likely that planet nine is the largest terrestrial world in the solar system in that it is quite possible a dead gas giant that has long since cooled and frozen. If it had an internal heat source WISE would have seen it.

This planet is supposed to be smaller than Uranus, and even that is 76 K at 1bar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranus

The smaller mass, plus the distance might mean the instruments just weren't strong enough.

1 hour ago, K^2 said:

Looking at vapor pressure of H2, even at 20K, it will have a 1bar atmo. And the melting point for it is 14K. In contrast, the longest wavelength WISE was looking at was 22 microns, which corresponds to something like 100K peak. Which means that Planet Nine can still have a Hydrogen ocean and a substantial Hydrogen atmosphere without being detectable to WISE.

Anything like Methane will, of course, be frozen. Given the pressure and feasible temperature ranges, it's entirely possible that there is not enough Hydrogen to cover the entire surface, and we'd be looking at something that resembles Titan, with lakes of liquid Hydrogen on terrain made up of frozen Methane. Could be a very interesting world.

P.S. In either case, I expect Hydrogen clouds, and it'd be exciting to see for that alone. Shame it's so far away.

It's supposed to be an ice giant like Uranus and Neptune. I would think the temperature would actually be closer to 50-60K due to internal heating. I would doubt it being solid.

Edited by fredinno
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44 minutes ago, Mitchz95 said:

How much would James Webb/Hubble/etc be able to tell us about this thing once we narrow down its location?

Hubble has main mirror of 2.4m and is diffraction limited in its 300nm UV band. From 500 AU, a single pixel would be about 9,000 km. So in the best case scenario, we are looking at a spot 4-5 pixels in diameter as seen by Hubble. If Planet Nine turns out to be on the smaller end of the scale and further out, we'd be barely able to tell that it's not a point source object.

James Webb would be able to do a tiny bit better, because of the larger mirror. But since it's shortest wavelength is 600nm, it'd only have about 50% better resolution.

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3 hours ago, K^2 said:

Looking at vapor pressure of H2, even at 20K, it will have a 1bar atmo. And the melting point for it is 14K. In contrast, the longest wavelength WISE was looking at was 22 microns, which corresponds to something like 100K peak. Which means that Planet Nine can still have a Hydrogen ocean and a substantial Hydrogen atmosphere without being detectable to WISE.

Anything like Methane will, of course, be frozen. Given the pressure and feasible temperature ranges, it's entirely possible that there is not enough Hydrogen to cover the entire surface, and we'd be looking at something that resembles Titan, with lakes of liquid Hydrogen on terrain made up of frozen Methane. Could be a very interesting world.

P.S. In either case, I expect Hydrogen clouds, and it'd be exciting to see for that alone. Shame it's so far away.

So basically it's one step 'behind' Titan? So the Methane on P9 is like water ice on Titan and rock on Earth, and the Hydrogen is like Methane/Water?

3 hours ago, daniel l. said:

I hope so, perhaps even underground caves warm enough to sustain life, and maybe a family of moons with enough tidal force to warm the interior :D

I don't see any way there could be a patch of liquid Methane/Water/Ammonia on such a cold planet.

2 hours ago, fredinno said:

It's supposed to be an ice giant like Uranus and Neptune. I would think the temperature would actually be closer to 50-60K due to internal heating. I would doubt it being solid.

I'm with fredinno on this one. Remember that since the planet is so much colder, it can hold onto much more Hydrogen and Helium despite being smaller than the gas/ice giants.

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2 hours ago, fredinno said:

It's supposed to be an ice giant like Uranus and Neptune. I would think the temperature would actually be closer to 50-60K due to internal heating. I would doubt it being solid.

It's also significantly smaller than either of these ice giants, with far weaker greenhouse effect, due to lower illumination. Expecting it to be only 20K colder than Uranus or Neptune is unfounded. RuBisCO's estimate of 40K upper bound is much more plausible.

Lower mass also means significantly less Hydrogen, and methane freezes at 90K. So unlike the ice giants, which are basically huge methane slushies, Planet Nine actually has a pretty good chance to have solid methane "land". All depends on just how much Hydrogen it has.

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3 hours ago, Nothalogh said:

Good afternoon, sir, would you care to chat about our Lord and Saviors, Teller and Ullam?

No I put no stock in it. Just saying that is how radical of a technology we would need to get there in the near term.

 

Oh no if this planet is found then that will mean we won't have sent a space probe past every planet!

Edited by RuBisCO
Oh no I just relized something horrible!
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Of course it must be solid! How else are the Annunakis gonna stand on the planet Nibiru itself!? :wink:

 

But in all seriousness, i'm guessing that it's a gas giant similar to jupiter. I read previously that models suggested that a gas giant may have formed between Saturn and Jupiter, and then flung out into deep space. Additionally, the planet may not be radiating much energy is because it might not have received enough energy from the Sun in the first place.

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7 minutes ago, RuBisCO said:

Just saying that is how radical of a technology

Nothing radical about it.

The hard part is the structure, and any country that can build a blue water submarine can do that.

The only radical thing involved with the whole endeavor would be effect it would have on space access

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Is it not 10 times earth mass or greater?

Also full moon night time here on earth is roughly 13.7 mW/m^2 so lighting on this theoretical planet is at best 248% to 7.3% the brightness of a full moon sky here on earth. In short: it be very dim there. 

Edited by RuBisCO
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16 minutes ago, RuBisCO said:

Oh no if this planet is found then that will mean we won't have sent a space probe past every planet!

OMG! It's a scam! NASA knows that something of the magnitude of New Horizons won't happen again soon, so they have been hiding this planet all these years!

 

WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!

 

Brought to you by the YouTube comment section of [any video about space exploration]

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