Planet X is found (kinda)!

[repoman]

sorry guys, this is not planet x

 

[repoman]

oh wait, maybe I was wrong.

Looks like "Nibiru-Planet X is Coming at Us Like a Runaway Freight Train" according to Planet X researchers!



Step aside Mike Brown!

 

[repoman]

ok, in all seriousness the previous two videos I posted (that had no response) were just showing how kooky some people on youtube can be about this topic.

I have a real question about how the finding of Planet X will happen. So, currently the much of the sky has been digitized at a resolution needed to see planet X and what is really needed is for this object to show up in a different place in a second or third round of the survey.

What I am unsure about is how quickly the analysis happens that alerts the scientists that there is an object that seems to have moved the right amount to be in the range of where Planet X should be. Will it be in just a few hours?

If Planet X was found tonight on a second pass of the sky survey, how long would it take for this to be published after all the double checking of the data and new images are made and compared?

I would guess that Mike Brown would not want the survey data (and its comparator data to previous scan) to be available in real time to other scientists or the general public. But in a way, I don't see why not. If Planet X was found in the swath of sky that his team determined then they should get the credit even if someone else crunched the survey comparison first.

 

[repoman]

I looked again at this topic, and I am confused. It looks like the WISE mission already ruled out the Brown team guess of how far and how large Planet X would be.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4073

This recent study, which involved an examination of WISE data covering the entire sky in infrared light, found no object the size of Saturn or larger exists out to a distance of 10,000 astronomical units (au), and no object larger than Jupiter exists out to 26,000 au. One astronomical unit equals 93 million miles. Earth is 1 au, and Pluto about 40 au, from the sun.

"The outer solar system probably does not contain a large gas giant planet, or a small, companion star," said Kevin Luhman of the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds at Penn State University, University Park, Pa., author of a paper in the Astrophysical Journal describing the results.

Ok, after searching I think I have the reason that makes sense:

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/01/feature-astronomers-say-neptune-sized-planet-lurks-unseen-solar-system

At first blush, another potential problem comes from NASA’s Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), a satellite that completed an all-sky survey looking for the heat of brown dwarfs—or giant planets. It ruled out the existence of a Saturn-or-larger planet as far out as 10,000 AU, according to a 2013 study by Kevin Luhman, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University, University Park. But Luhman notes that if Planet X is Neptune-sized or smaller, as Batygin and Brown say, WISE would have missed it. He says there is a slim chance of detection in another WISE data set at longer wavelengths—sensitive to cooler radiation—which was collected for 20% of the sky. Luhman is now analyzing those data.

I wonder if that data has already been crunched.

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The Subaru telescope in Hawaii will take 5 years to go through most of the survey area. Too bad WISE didn't use the low frequency survey for all the sky.

 

[rjh01]

If they do find an infrared source they will want to find out how far away it is. So take another picture six months later. Then they can find the distance via the parallax method. And then take another picture six months after that to see if the object itself has moved. A planet will move in a year, but not a star.