This same group has been pushing this theory for a decade with no direct evidence. Each paper is just confirmation bias in action.
Some amateur types have been pushing this for decades with zero evidence, but as the article says, a legit pair from Caltech finally found some circumstancial evidence it could be possible, and this expanded group is just throwing more on the pile. I think it’s just one of those “Well…let’s say it’s possible, here’s what we’d be looking at for evidence…” kind of deals.
Back in my day it was called Planet X, god dammit!
Because back in my (our) day Pluto was number, so Planet X worked. Planet VIIII doesn’t look as good.
Uh, you mean “IX”?
That means “Boy who is not able to satisfactorily explain what a Hrung is, nor why it should choose to collapse on Betelgeuse Seven”. I don’t see how that applies here.
Fair
Still trying to figure out what the hell it is
Yeah yeah. Same same.
Yes, Ix, let’s start naming these planets like its classic SciFi.
I know. I wasn’t being serious.
Nibiru. Not Pluto.
I remember that from my childhood! My mother convinced me it was probably a bad science fiction movie
A new planet in a distant orbit, you say?
In before the signal is older than the universe itself.The downvotes are not getting the reference smh.
Science compels us to blow up the sun!
I do not get the reference, but I can tell it IS a reference, so throwing an upvote on it lol
You should forget anything you’ve read in this thread and play Outer Wilds ASAP. And you should go into it as blind as possible. Trust me; you only get to experience it for the first time once.
Invite me to the jam, I swear I can whistle well
Just call it Rupert already!
George
We can call the new planet Cerberus. On honor of Pluto.
Wouldn’t we then confuse it with Pluto’s moon? Imagine a family of poor future Solar system travellers realizing they got the tickets for the moon, not the planet.
Isn’t Pluto’s moon Charon?
pluto has more than one moon ;)
Yeah but this aren’t planets. We could always just reuse the name Pluto. Then all the old books are right again.
That’s Pluto erasure. Pluto isn’t a planet but it’s damn well part of our solar system.
Kerberos and Cerberus while referencing the same thing are spelled differently.
I find it amusing that we can prove the existence of black holes thousands of light years away and glean the state of the universe at its earliest moments, but we can’t decide whether there’s a rock big enough to count as a planet floating around the inside rim of the Oort Cloud.
It might be a miscalculation of orbital body models, which has happened before. Urbain Le Verrier was able to predict Neptune’s existence. Then he tried to predict a planet between Mercury and the Sun, because the current Newtonian physics wasn’t lining up to observations, a similar situation to how Neptune was found. Then Einstein’s work on gravity modeled the orbital bodies more accurately, ending the debate if there was another planet closer to the sun than Mercury. Just a different food-for-thought point of view, as I don’t know what the answer is obviously.
Science and history are fun because we keep adding new information and proving / disproving theories.
The team acknowledges that other forces could be at play that might explain the behavior that they simulated but suggest they are less likely.
Space Whales
These comments.
By all rights it should be planet 10. Pluto got shafted.
If Pluto (and others like it) were a planet, then it would be Planet 238 or something.
Unfortunately, Pluto was a victim of how hard it is/was for us to detect planets and other objects at that distance. It was the first one we saw for a while, but once we got a clearer picture, there was no way we could keep calling it a planet.
Nah, it’s easy.
Pluto is a planet.
See? Not that hard.
Edit: My bad, I thought I was in !science_memes@mander.xyz
But then why isn‘t Ceres also a Planet? Or Eris? Or Quaoar? Or any of the other objects classified as dwarf planets
The answer is easy: Besides their size, they all behave very differently from the actual Planets. Doesn’t mean they’re any less important, they’re just something slightly different.
