Planet 9 Presently Got Weirder Video

If Planet 9 exists, it’s been during one hell of an ordeal. That’s the takeaway from a series of latest studies that ask how in the name of Uranus a planet could have gotten itself into such a whacked-out orbit. This in turn strength helps explain the not likely orbits of half a dozen Kuiper Belt objects.
Planet 9 is a hypothetical world approximately the mass of Neptune that orbits our Sun in a giant ellipse, at a distance of 40 to over 100 billion miles. Though astronomers have proposed hidden ninth planets for years, this newest version—the brainchild of Caltech’s Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin—has gained quite a bit of traction since it was announce in January. The potential planet is so compelling that many astronomers has penned follow-up papers describing how we might find it and what it could look like.

 Almost as attractive as Planet 9's there location is how this behemoth wound up cooling its heels ten times further from the Sun than Pluto. Several latest modeling efforts led by researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics are now attempting to answer that question.
There are essentially 3 competing hypotheses. The majority likely, proposed by astronomers Scott Kenyon and Benjamin Bromley, posits that Planet 9 is a gas giant that formed in the inner solar solar system before straying too close up to Jupiter and receiving itself punted out.
“The odds that other gas giants were formed in the early on solar system are very good,” Kenyon told Gizmodo, adding that the only some first million years of our Sun’s life were a chaotic time, with young gas giants sucking up matter and crashing into each other all willy-nilly. “You could have ready ten and Jupiter could have eaten a few.”
There’s presently one problem: once gravity punted Planet 9 into the boondocks, what cause it to brake? Why didn’t it keep on leaving into interstellar space? One possibility, Kenyon said, is that the so-called “gaseous disk” that surrounded our Sun for the opening 20 million years of its life produced sufficient friction to slow Planet 9 down. “If you have the right mass of planet &  the right mass of gas, you can damp the orbit and circularize it,” he said.
Next, the two men proposed an even foreigner possibility: maybe Planet 9 formed in place. In this scenario, Planet 9 is a giant snowball rather than a gas giant, that packed itself up in a extremely slow and extremely cold version of the accretionary process that formed the Earth.
“Our idea is that as the gaseous disk is going left, it develops a hole, which gets larger and bigger until the disk is gone,” Kenyon said. “As this hole is getting bigger, material outside the hole sweeps up solid particles like a snowplow, and deposits them at a huge distance.” Over the course of hundreds of millions of years, all of those plowed up ice shavings snowballed into one another, resultant in a jawbreaker about twice the size of the Earth.

Kenyon admits the idea is speculative. Fortunately, there’s a very excellent way to test these competing hypotheses—by observing Planet 9. “The nice thing about these 2 scenarios is that they predict different things for the planet,” he said. “If it’s a scattered gas giant, it’ll looks like a cold story of Neptune. If it’s an icy object that formed at 500 AU, it’d be a huge version of Pluto.”
The last scenario sounds like a plot line from a B-list scifi movie, and it seems to be comparably unlikely. Planet 9 could be an extraterrestrial invader. “Planet 9 may be an exoplanet in our possess solar system,” said Gongjie Li, another astronomer at Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics whose recent modeling paper explores this very possibility, among others.
Astronomers think our star formed as part of a densely packed cluster that dissipated after about 100 million years. In the early on days of the solar system, close encounters with neighboring stars would have been much extra common. It’s possible—albeit unlikely—that the outer edges of our solar system once exchanged material, counting planets, with another.
“This is a possibility, but I think all has to work out just right,” Kenyon said. “It’s a very finely tuned scenario.”
Li’s models also reveal a small but significant chance that a passing star could have perturbed Planet 9's orbit without breaking it. This could explain why the planet is stuck in such an strangely stretched out ellipse today.
One could argue that all of this conjecture will be moot if we never find a massive object lurking 100 billion miles away. On the extra hand, it’s kind of awesome that the mere thought of Planet 9 is causing scientists to consider all the crazy shit that could have gone down in the early on solar system. Even if our telescopes turn up not anything, a system where rogue exoplanets and larger-than-Earth-sized snowballs are likely is an amazing place to live.