For decades astronomers have looked for possible “planet X” somewhere in the far reaches of our Solar system, knowing that if they are hiding something big and dark, its gravitational influence will significantly affect the objects that we observe. Not to say that their search has not brought results: when astronomers searched for a planet X beyond Uranus in 1846, they found the Neptune; when I was looking at the Neptune in 1930, Pluto was found. Since the search for planet X beyond Pluto became too prolific — astronomers have discovered many TRANS-Neptunian objects that led to the exclusion of Pluto from our planetary family.
Despite the fact that the largest of novoobrazovany TNO was the size of Pluto, astronomers knew that there’s nothing left that could even remotely be considered a planet X.
But now, things can change. On 8 December, scientists from Sweden and Mexico quietly filed two papers in the prestigious journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, which celebrated the opening of not one, but two possible candidates for planet X. the Lull was short-lived. Although work had not yet been published, some of them in arXiv, a public repository of works to print. Now, when statements about the detected planets rolled by a wave in the world, other astronomers looking at the work and react, for the most part skeptical.
“Usually I prefer to upload only those accepted, says Wouter Vlemmings, an astronomer at the Technological University of Chalmers in Sweden and co-author of both studies. This time, however, we have exhausted our ideas. Download on arXiv we especially wanted to reach out to the community, which could point us to something that we overlooked, therefore, confidently dispatched. What I personally didn’t consider is that all this will evolve beyond the astronomical community.”
One of the candidates, nicknamed the “STA” (named after the rapid goddess from Norse mythology) appeared in the sky next to the star W eagle, and another, yet unnamed, seemed next to our nearest star system alpha Centauri. Astronomers have discovered both objects using Atamanskogo array telescope ALMA, a large group of radiotrack located in high-altitude desert in the Chilean Andes, and first decided that the bodies were a weak reflection of a distant background galaxies. But pictures taken for a certain period, showed that both objects are moving quickly on a “fixed” background stars, assuming their relative space proximity to our solar system. Regarding the properties of both the object present considerable uncertainty, since each of them was observed only twice, and the measured brightness could explain body wide range of sizes, compositions, and distances from us.
GNA, as the researchers say, likely to be 200-kilometer asteroid, floating between Saturn and Uranus, but also can be free-floating planet the size of Neptune, drifting hundreds of times farther, or failed star — a brown dwarf the size of Jupiter — in the nearby interstellar space. Similarly, an object which was discovered in the direction of alpha Centauri, may be a brown dwarf nearby, super-earths in size between our planet and Neptune is six times farther from us than Pluto, or a giant piece of ice very close to us.
Furthermore, both objects can be illusory, random reflections on the background noise that passes through the most sophisticated arrays of radio telescopes in the world. According to Scott Sheppard, planetary scientists from the Institute of science Carnegie who has been researching the outer Solar system, the fact that both observations speak almost about the same, does not inspire confidence. “Anything can generate two random detection, and you can always draw a straight line between two points,” says Sheppard. The demonstration of the reality of each object will require a third discovery, which will show a clear, linear movement of object with constant speed.
What are these objects and are objects at all, these questions are still open. But we can say for sure that the previously conducted studies which have established restrictions on the possible existence of “planet X”. The sky survey with the space telescope NASA WISE previously showed no signs of the existence of additional planets in our Solar system, excluding any possible body the size of Jupiter within three trillion kilometers from the Sun and bodies the size of Saturn within half this distance. Something smaller and dimmer, like super-earths, could be lurking there, unseen, but find it easy with this intuitive sagacity in routine measurements ALMA seems statistically improbable, say the astronomers.
Mike brown, the astronomer at Caltech, who calls himself “Pluto killer” (because I have opened several large TNO, which overthrew the former planet), put forward a statistical argument in response to the statements about new planets. “If it’s true that ALMA accidentally discovered a massive object in the outer Solar system in a very, very, very small field of view — written by brown on his Twitter, then in the outer Solar system should be something like 200 000 planets the size of Earth. And this is, uh, no.”
“Even better, he added later — I just realized that this many planets the size of Earth would destabilize the entire Solar system, and we’d all be dead.” And yet “the idea of the existence of large planets hiding in the outer Solar system, has a full right to life”.
Most of the harshest reactions were from astronomers discussing the results in the public group on Facebook dedicated to the imaging of exoplanets — i.e. planets around other stars. Astronomer of University of Rochester Eric Mamajek noted that he considers relevant to serious inconsistencies in the measurement of the movement and brightness of both objects. “Please accepte what they’re Smoking in Oncale,” he added.
In the same group astronomer Bruce Macintosh of Stanford University called “striking coincidence” that the first two TRANS-Neptunian object, discovered ALMA, were found near bright stars. McIntosh suggested that it is more likely that the alleged objects are “some residual artifacts” — mirages produced data after a complex and intricate methods of calibration of ALMA.
Vlemmings insists that he and his colleagues have checked these and several other options, but to no avail. Whatever they were, these objects seem too bright and point, to explain to distant galaxies, and their proximity to bright stars, he says, actually helps to calibrate data and reduce the probability of errors of observation.