Twist in search for mysterious 'Planet Nine' in the dark depths of our solar system
Scientists hunting for Planet Nine, an elusive planetary body that could change our understanding of the solar system, have found something.
Planet X is a hypothetical planet seven times the mass of Earth tucked just behind Pluto.
Despite possibly being the fifth most massive planet, scientists have never tracked the white whale of astronomy down – that is, if it even exists.
But a trio of American scientists trying to find the elusive gas giant have discovered a new planet… of sorts, a dwarf planet called 2017 OF201.
According to a study, which has not been peer-reviewed, 2017 OF201 is roughly 430 miles across, three times smaller than Pluto.
The object is an extreme trans-Neptunian object (eTNO), a minor planet that orbits the Sun far beyond Neptune.
So far away, in fact, OF201 would take 25,000 Earth years to complete a solar lap. Its orbit even swings out into the Oort Cloud – a sphere of icy comets a trillion miles from the Sun.
OF201 can only be observed from Earth 0.5% of the time, making its closest approach to us in 1930 and won't do so again until 26,186.
The International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center added 2017 OF201 to its database last week. Five other dwarf planets are officially recognised: Pluto, Eris, Ceres and two others beyond Neptune, Haumea and Makemake.
The search for a ninth planet in our solar system has been going on for a century.
The evidence for it that hunters have long clung to is how six objects – dwarf planets and chunks of ice – have been discovered in the vastly empty outskirts of the solar system.
Bizarrely, they huddle together as they orbit, as if something a gassy behemoth of a planet were shepherding them, said Imo Bell, astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich.
They told Metro: 'Some astronomers believe that proving the existence of this planet would explain the behaviour of many other eTNOs with highly elliptical orbits clustered on one side of the Sun.
'It's thought that Planet Nine, with a mass of about five Earths, would explain the confined orbits of these eTNOs.'
Sihao Cheng of New Jersey's Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University graduate students, Jiaxuan Li and Eritas Yang, discovered 2017 OF201.
They did so by combing through an archive of images of the outskirts of the solar system, taken by the Blanco telescope in Chile, as well as by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii.
Over time, they realised that tiny dots in the images were a single dwarf planet-sized rock with a wide and eccentric orbit.
Yang said: 'It must have experienced close encounters with a giant planet, causing it to be ejected to a wide orbit.'
Yet the discovery isn't exactly what the team had hoped for, explained Bell, as it's not part of the pack of eTNOs that imply Planet Nine exists.
They said: 'The discovery of 2017 OF201 is significant because it's found in a region of the Solar System thought to be empty, and it's presence points to the existence of other similar eTNOs with orbits that challenge ideas about Planet Nine as they are not clustered in the way that has been seen with other eTNOs.'
Yang's simulations only considered one proposed orbit of Planet Nine, meaning that the findings don't disprove the planet's existence altogether.
Cheng hasn't lost hope, saying that the existence of 2017 OF201 suggests there 'could be another hundred or so other objects with similar orbit and size'.
'They are just too far away to be detectable now,' he added.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.
MORE: Saturn in Aries for the first time since 1999 will impact these five star signs most
MORE: Nasa warns of huge solar flares that could cause blackouts on Earth
MORE: Here's the best spots to see the Northern Lights tonight
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The National
14 hours ago
- The National
Humanoid robots pose an ethical dilemma we've long prepared for
Earlier this week, an Edinburgh University lab exemplified the second option. Looking like a toad made from rubbery stickle bricks, it's a 'soft robot' – one that can (with a whiff of air pressure) walk out of its own 3D-manufacturing unit. They'll be useful for nuclear decommissioning, biomedicine and space exploration, says the lab. Great! Robots as curiously shaped facilitators of a cleaner, healthier, more ambitious world. Safely in the background. READ MORE: I've voiced ScotRail trains for 20 years and was replaced with AI without being told And then there are the humanoid robots (or HRs), currently cavorting all over your news feed. They're landing punches as Thai boxers in Hangzhou, China. They're playing badminton (admittedly with an extra two legs) in Zurich, Switzerland. A BMW factory, in the improbably named American town of Spartanburg, already has humanoid bipedal robots assembling parts on the production line (they're also starting in a Hyundai plant later this year). Chinese state-run warehouses in Shanghai have human operators manipulating HRs, getting them to fold T-shirts, make sandwiches and open doors, over and over again. All generating data they can learn from, to act effectively in the near future. Those who keep half an eye on radical technology may be a bit perplexed. Wasn't there some relief in the utter klutziness of robots, as they attempted to negotiate a few stairs, or turn a door knob? Didn't we share their pratfalls gleefully on social media – the bathos (if not hubris) that kept us relatively sane, in these accelerating times? Computers might thrash us at most cognitive tasks. But tying shoelaces, making pizza, wiping a child's nose? Not yet, and maybe not ever. Hail the embodied human, and their evolved physical capabilities! Well, there's a different track opening up. It's partly driven by the sci-fi imagination of the tech bros, East and West: most of these humanoid robots look like the rebellious droids in the 2004 movie I, Robot. But it's also an assumption that the new, actively-learning models of artificial intelligence can do for humanoid robots what they've done for language, visuals and coding. Which is to generate plausible and coherent behaviour in the physical world, as they generate the same for prose or images. Just to state the obvious: there's economic interest here. The target of these companies is a unit that can learn skills as required, flipping from task to task like a human worker. 'You can imagine a supply store has one, and that robot can be in the backroom depalletizing, cleaning, stocking shelves, checking inventory, just a huge range of things,' says Jonathan Hurst, co-founder and chief robot officer at Agility Robotics. Working 24/7, only stopping to be charged: 'That's where the real value comes in', concludes Hurst. READ MORE: Union slams Scottish companies using voice data without consent for new AI announcers The point of a humanoid-like machine seems obvious to most of these entrepreneurs. The world is already designed for humans, and maximum profitability will come from robots stepping competently and confidently into this environment. As the big business consultancies are predicting, the price for a working humanoid might descend to as low as $15,000 within the next few years, certainly lower as production scales up. That starts to become a viable business case for many enterprises – if the devices deliver on the performance promises currently being made. Let's assume (and it may be a major assumption) that physical robotics is on the same exponential curve as the computations of AI (and indeed directly rides on the latter's ascent). What that instantly opens up is a vast archive of myths and tropes about the fearful prospect of creating artificial humans, and how they'll live among us. We've been preparing for this ... READ MORE: From the editor: We're all sick of Farage. But we can't 'just ignore him' Greek mythology had Hephaestus making automatons – self-moving golden handmaidens with 'intelligence in their hearts'. Pygmalion the sculptor fell in love with his statue Galatea; Talos, a giant bronze automaton powered by ichor, guarded Crete. Across ancient India and China, still more defensive robots were imagined: the Buddhist text of Lokapannatti describes mechanical warriors that protected relics in subterranean cities. Back in Europe, the golem was raised to defend the Jewish ghettos. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein directly addresses our capacity to make humanoid subjects, and the ethics of the life we might share with them. And we mustn't forget that the term 'robot' itself comes from the Czech genius Karel Čapek, and his 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) – 'robota' being Czech for forced labour. So right at the core of this domain's name sits the main anxiety we have about it. What does it mean for us to create an entity that we intend will work (or fight) entirely on our behalf? It's one of the deeper, more civilisational arguments against a humanoid robot. Which is that it revives a master-slave framing from the worst of our past. An original cruelty of power that generates many others. The great auteur of human weirdness, filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, articulated this well in his final movie, A.I. (posthumously realised by Steven Spielberg). The robot boy David – and we shouldn't forget the underlying Pinnochio reference – is eventually discarded: he was a substitute for a real boy, who eventually revives from his coma. Kubrick/Spielberg show how distorted human relations become – how resentful, harsh and violent – when these ever-more-perfect humanoid entities move among them. Their various roles of servitude do not protect them. The end of the movie delivers a severe judgement on human morality. The robot boy is rediscovered, by beautifully communal 'mechas', on an utterly drowned and terminated Earth. On David's request, the mechs revive a clone of the human 'mother' who pushed him out into the forest. They are able to share one last, gentle day together. READ MORE: How much has your MP claimed in expenses? See the full Scottish list here The movie never fails to break my heart. But given the ethical dilemma it presents – do we really want to be masters in a society of slaves, again? – we might hope that the humanoids keep failing to turn that doorknob. We really don't know what's coming. From the AI side, will developments in computation generate artificial consciousness, as well as artificial intelligence? By consciousness, I mean an entity which knows that it exists, experiences the world, has goals and desires and values. If that intentionality and interiority appears, and begins to talk with us, we may anticipate one of its explicit interests: the rights of robots, operating under conditions of servitude. How might we respond? I'd suggest A.I. the movie shows us how we shouldn't. Perhaps I'm operating in a very Western framework. As many scholars note, animist religions (whether Japanese or Chinese) do not sharply divide between the animate and inanimate. The robot in Japan is not necessarily monstrous, but can possess 'kokoro' (heart/mind). Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy, flying about the comic strips of a traumatised Japan in the 1950s, was a great example of this. A moral child-robot with atomic powers, seeking justice. I duly note that the most-watched Netflix production this week is The Wild Robot. The machine ROZZUM (Unit 7134) lands on an island teeming with wildlife, to which it slowly begins to relate and co-exist with. Kept in a bubble from marauding, egoistic humans, Roz is able to establish a kinship with these fundamentally different entities, evoking the most profound ecological themes. Our sense of kinship with non-human animals should be obvious: the bass note of our responsibility to protect and honour the natural world. But should we prepare for kinship with these artificial entities? And should we ask whether casting them in humanoid form lays in more trouble than it's worth? Edinburgh's stickle brick frog is made from gel, wobbly but ready for its limited tasks. It may be a more tractable robot than the gleaming Optimals marching – or we may still hope, shuffling – out of Silicon Valley.
Reuters
21 hours ago
- Reuters
Possible new dwarf planet spotted near the edge of the solar system
WASHINGTON, May 30 (Reuters) - Scientists have identified an object about 435 miles (700 km) wide inhabiting the frigid outer reaches of our solar system that might qualify as a dwarf planet, spotting it as it travels on a highly elongated orbital path around the sun. The researchers called it one of the most distant visible objects in our solar system, and said its existence indicates that a vast expanse of space beyond the outermost planet Neptune and a region called the Kuiper Belt may not be deserted, as long thought. The Kuiper Belt is populated by numerous icy bodies. Given the name 2017 OF201, the object falls into a category called trans-Neptunian objects that orbit the sun at a distance beyond that of Neptune. The object takes about 25,000 years to complete a single orbit of the sun, compared to 365 days for Earth to do so. The researchers said 2017 OF201 was identified in observations by telescopes in Chile and Hawaii spanning seven years. "It is potentially large enough to qualify as a dwarf planet. Its orbit is very wide and eccentric, which means it experienced an interesting orbital migration path in the past," said astrophysicist Sihao Cheng of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who led the study with collaborators Jiaxuan Li and Eritas Yang, graduate students at Princeton University. Its size is estimated to be a bit smaller than Ceres, which is the smallest of the solar system's five recognized dwarf planets and has a diameter of about 590 miles (950 km). Pluto, the largest of those dwarf planets, has a diameter of about 1,477 miles (2,377 km). The mass of 2017 OF201 is estimated to be about 20,000 times smaller than Earth's and 50 times smaller than Pluto's. "We don't know the shape yet. Unfortunately it is too far away and it is a bit difficult to resolve it with telescopes," Cheng said. "Its composition is totally unknown yet, but likely similar to other icy bodies." The discovery was announced by the Minor Planet Center of the International Astronomical Union, an international organization of astronomers, and detailed in a study posted on the open-access research site arXiv, opens new tab. The study has not yet been peer reviewed. Earth's orbital distance from the sun is called an astronomical unit. 2017 OF201 is currently located at a distance of 90.5 astronomical units from the sun, meaning 90.5 times as far as Earth. But at its furthest point during its orbit, 2017 OF201 is more than 1,600 astronomical units from the sun, while the closest point on its orbit is about 45 astronomical units. That means it sometimes is closer to the sun than Pluto, whose orbital distance ranges from 30 to 49 astronomical units as it travels an elliptical path around the sun. The researchers suspect that the extreme orbit of 2017 OF201 may have been caused by a long-ago close encounter with the gravitational influence of a giant planet. "We still don't know much about the solar system far away because currently it is difficult to directly see things beyond about 150 astronomical units," Cheng said. "The presence of this single object suggests that there could be another hundred or so other objects with similar orbit and size. They are just too far away to be detectable right now." The five dwarf planets recognized by the International Astronomical Union are, in order of distance from the sun: Ceres, which is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, then Pluto, Haumea, Makemake and Eris, which all orbit beyond Neptune. The organization defines a planet and a dwarf planet differently. A planet must orbit its host star - in our case the sun - and must be mostly round and sufficiently large that its gravitational strength clears away any other objects of similar size near its orbit. A dwarf planet must orbit the sun and be mostly round but it has not cleared its orbit of other objects. Cheng said the discovery of 2017 OF201 has implications for hypotheses involving the potential existence of a ninth planet in our solar system, dubbed Planet X or Planet Nine. This is because 2017 OF201's orbit does not follow the pattern exhibited by other known trans-Neptunian objects, which tend to cluster together. Some scientists had hypothesized that such clustering was caused by the gravity of a yet-to-be discovered planet. "The existence of 2017 OF201 as an outlier to such clustering could potentially challenge this hypothesis," Cheng said.
Metro
a day ago
- Metro
Twist in search for mysterious 'Planet Nine' in the dark depths of our solar system
Scientists hunting for Planet Nine, an elusive planetary body that could change our understanding of the solar system, have found something. Planet X is a hypothetical planet seven times the mass of Earth tucked just behind Pluto. Despite possibly being the fifth most massive planet, scientists have never tracked the white whale of astronomy down – that is, if it even exists. But a trio of American scientists trying to find the elusive gas giant have discovered a new planet… of sorts, a dwarf planet called 2017 OF201. According to a study, which has not been peer-reviewed, 2017 OF201 is roughly 430 miles across, three times smaller than Pluto. The object is an extreme trans-Neptunian object (eTNO), a minor planet that orbits the Sun far beyond Neptune. So far away, in fact, OF201 would take 25,000 Earth years to complete a solar lap. Its orbit even swings out into the Oort Cloud – a sphere of icy comets a trillion miles from the Sun. OF201 can only be observed from Earth 0.5% of the time, making its closest approach to us in 1930 and won't do so again until 26,186. The International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center added 2017 OF201 to its database last week. Five other dwarf planets are officially recognised: Pluto, Eris, Ceres and two others beyond Neptune, Haumea and Makemake. The search for a ninth planet in our solar system has been going on for a century. The evidence for it that hunters have long clung to is how six objects – dwarf planets and chunks of ice – have been discovered in the vastly empty outskirts of the solar system. Bizarrely, they huddle together as they orbit, as if something a gassy behemoth of a planet were shepherding them, said Imo Bell, astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich. They told Metro: 'Some astronomers believe that proving the existence of this planet would explain the behaviour of many other eTNOs with highly elliptical orbits clustered on one side of the Sun. 'It's thought that Planet Nine, with a mass of about five Earths, would explain the confined orbits of these eTNOs.' Sihao Cheng of New Jersey's Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University graduate students, Jiaxuan Li and Eritas Yang, discovered 2017 OF201. They did so by combing through an archive of images of the outskirts of the solar system, taken by the Blanco telescope in Chile, as well as by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii. Over time, they realised that tiny dots in the images were a single dwarf planet-sized rock with a wide and eccentric orbit. Yang said: 'It must have experienced close encounters with a giant planet, causing it to be ejected to a wide orbit.' Yet the discovery isn't exactly what the team had hoped for, explained Bell, as it's not part of the pack of eTNOs that imply Planet Nine exists. They said: 'The discovery of 2017 OF201 is significant because it's found in a region of the Solar System thought to be empty, and it's presence points to the existence of other similar eTNOs with orbits that challenge ideas about Planet Nine as they are not clustered in the way that has been seen with other eTNOs.' Yang's simulations only considered one proposed orbit of Planet Nine, meaning that the findings don't disprove the planet's existence altogether. Cheng hasn't lost hope, saying that the existence of 2017 OF201 suggests there 'could be another hundred or so other objects with similar orbit and size'. 'They are just too far away to be detectable now,' he added. Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ For more stories like this, check our news page. MORE: Saturn in Aries for the first time since 1999 will impact these five star signs most MORE: Nasa warns of huge solar flares that could cause blackouts on Earth MORE: Here's the best spots to see the Northern Lights tonight
