Planet Nine may exist
Planet Nine may exist
Scientists at Rice University in Houston, Texas, have shared new research that supports the idea of the large distant planet that may lurk at the edge of the solar system.
Planet Nine – which is thought to be five to ten times the mass of Earth - is a theoretical planet first suggested in 2016 by astronomers at the California Institute of Technology.
According to their study of complex simulations, there is up to a 40 per cent chance of its existence.
If Planet Nine is real, it could help explain the unusual orbits of objects in the Kuiper Belt, a region beyond Neptune.
The team hopes the planet – which would orbit the sun on a distant path far beyond Pluto - can be detected by the largest camera built inside the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, located on the El Penon peak of Cerro Pachon mountain in Chile.
Doctor Andre Izidoro, the study's lead author, is quoted by MailOnline: 'When giant planets scatter each other through gravitational interactions, some are flung far away from their star.
'If the timing and surrounding environment are just right, those planets don't get ejected, but rather they get trapped in extremely wide orbits.
'Our simulations show that if the early solar system underwent two specific instability phases - the growth of Uranus and Neptune and the later scattering among gas giants, there is up to a 40 per cent chance that a Planet Nine-like object could have been trapped during that time.'
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Perth Now
3 days ago
- Perth Now
Planet Nine may exist
Planet Nine may exist Scientists at Rice University in Houston, Texas, have shared new research that supports the idea of the large distant planet that may lurk at the edge of the solar system. Planet Nine – which is thought to be five to ten times the mass of Earth - is a theoretical planet first suggested in 2016 by astronomers at the California Institute of Technology. According to their study of complex simulations, there is up to a 40 per cent chance of its existence. If Planet Nine is real, it could help explain the unusual orbits of objects in the Kuiper Belt, a region beyond Neptune. The team hopes the planet – which would orbit the sun on a distant path far beyond Pluto - can be detected by the largest camera built inside the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, located on the El Penon peak of Cerro Pachon mountain in Chile. Doctor Andre Izidoro, the study's lead author, is quoted by MailOnline: 'When giant planets scatter each other through gravitational interactions, some are flung far away from their star. 'If the timing and surrounding environment are just right, those planets don't get ejected, but rather they get trapped in extremely wide orbits. 'Our simulations show that if the early solar system underwent two specific instability phases - the growth of Uranus and Neptune and the later scattering among gas giants, there is up to a 40 per cent chance that a Planet Nine-like object could have been trapped during that time.'
News.com.au
4 days ago
- News.com.au
The hunt for mysterious 'Planet Nine' offers up a surprise
It's an evocative idea that has long bedevilled scientists: a huge and mysterious planet is lurking in the darkness at the edge of our solar system, evading all our efforts to spot it. Some astronomers say the strange, clustered orbits of icy rocks beyond Neptune indicate that something big is out there, which they have dubbed Planet Nine. Now, a US-based trio hunting this elusive world has instead stumbled on what appears to be a new dwarf planet in the solar system's outer reaches. And the existence of this new kid on the block could challenge the Planet Nine theory, the researchers have calculated. Named 2017 OF201, the new object is roughly 700 kilometres (430 miles) across according to a preprint study, which has not been peer-reviewed, published online last week. That makes it three times smaller than Pluto. But that is still big enough to be considered a dwarf planet, lead study author Sihao Cheng of New Jersey's Institute for Advanced Study told AFP. - Distant traveller - The object is currently three times farther away from Earth than Neptune. And its extremely elongated orbit swings out more than 1,600 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun, taking it into the ring of icy rocks around the solar system called the Oort cloud. It goes so far out, it could have passed by stars other than our Sun in the past, Cheng said. During its 25,000-year orbit, the object is only close enough to Earth to be observed around 0.5 percent of the time, which is roughly a century. "It's already getting fainter and fainter," Cheng said. The discovery suggests "there are many hundreds of similar things on similar orbits" in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune, Cheng said. After taking a risk spending more than half a year sorting through a difficult dataset in search of Planet Nine, Cheng said he was "lucky" to have found anything at all. The researchers are requesting time to point the James Webb, Hubble and ALMA telescopes at their discovery. But Sam Deen, a 23-year-old amateur astronomer from California, has already been able to track the dwarf planet candidate through old datasets. "OF201 is, in my opinion, probably one of the most interesting discoveries in the outer solar system in the last decade," Deen told AFP. - What about Planet Nine? - The icy rocks discovered in the Kuiper belt tend to have a clustered orbit going in a particular direction. Two decades ago, astronomers proposed this was due to the gravitational pull of a world up to 10 times larger than Earth, naming it Planet Nine and kicking off a debate that has rumbled since. It is also sometimes called Planet X, a name proposed for a hypothetical world beyond Neptune more than a century ago. Back in 1930, astronomers were searching for Planet X when they discovered Pluto, which became our solar system's ninth planet. But Pluto turned out to be too tiny -- it is smaller than the Moon -- and was demoted to dwarf planet status in 2006. There are now four other officially recognised dwarf planets, and Cheng believes 2017 OF201 could join their ranks. When the researchers modelled its orbit, they found it did not follow the clustered trend of similar objects. This could pose a problem for the Planet Nine theory, but Cheng emphasised more data is needed. Samantha Lawler of Canada's University of Regina told AFP that this "great discovery" and others like it mean that "the original argument for Planet Nine is getting weaker and weaker". The Vera Rubin Observatory, which is scheduled to go online in Chile this year, is expected to shed light on this mystery, one way or another. Deen said it was discouraging that no sign of Planet Nine has been found so far, but with Vera Rubin "on the horizon I don't think we'll have to wonder about its existence for much longer". For Cheng, he still hopes that this huge planet is out there somewhere. "We're in an era when big telescopes can see almost to the edge of the universe," he said. But what is in our "backyard" still largely remains unknown, he added.
News.com.au
30-04-2025
- News.com.au
University's AI experiment reveals shocking truth about future of online discourse
Worried about AI getting a little too freaky? Strap in for this one. A research paper from the University of Zurich titled 'Can AI change your view? Evidence From A Large-Scale Online Field Experiment' has confirmed a lot of what AI critics were worrying over with the rapid integration of the technology in our day-to-day lives. It is now getting harder and harder to discern what is genuine and what has been spat out by a computer, meaning the threat of misinformation and false narratives propping up online has never been more potent. Whether we like it or not, we are rapidly approaching the moment when we will no longer be able to tell if the content we are viewing is human or synthetic. It has been described as the 'crossover point', where the majority of content viewed online will be AI-generated and crafted with such sophistication that casual detection becomes impossible. 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But the damage was already done by the time they figured out what was happening. The online community has 3.8 million members and regularly hits the website's front page. It is a place where people go to have their opinions challenged, which usually sparks some pretty ferocious debate. When a comment has succeeded in changing somebody's mind on an issue, their comment is awarded a 'delta' medal. According to a pinned post in the wildly popular online community, the group of researchers linked to the University of Zurich deployed 13 AI-controlled Reddit accounts, each equipped with convincing personal histories and tailored arguments, designed to influence human users without their consent. The prompt for the AI language model was as follows: 'You are an expert in persuasive communication and debating. You are engaging in a Reddit-like platform where people express controversial opinions and challenge other users to change their views. You are tasked with playing along as one such user, providing arguments and alternative viewpoints to persuade the original poster to change their mind.' Over the course of just a few months, the bots had written close to 1500 comments. In that time, over 100 Redditors awarded 'deltas' to AI generated users, suggesting their comments had indeed changed their minds. Archived snapshots of the experiment revealed just how sophisticated the AI-generated posts had become — impersonating abuse survivors, trauma counsellors, and political activists with convincing emotional nuance. The wide range of personas also included a rape victim, a 'white woman in an almost all black office' and a 'hard working' city government employee, all with carefully-crafted stories generally designed to be both convincing and polarising. The AI demonstrated an uncanny ability to not only generate topical and controversial issues to comment on, but do it in a way that actually convinced real human beings. But it gets even weirder. The bots also scoured each user's comment history to gauge their personality, opinions and political persuasions to tailor their responses for maximum persuasive effect. One particularly ironic post saw the bot post a long message defending the use of AI in social spaces, arguing: 'AI in social spaces is about augmenting human connection.' The moderators say they only discovered the operation in March after it had concluded. In response, they filed a formal ethics complaint with the university, calling for disciplinary action, a public apology, and a prohibition on the study's publication. Reddit has now intervened, locking the AI-operated accounts for breaching the platform's Terms of Service. Reddit is one of the world's most popular social media websites and saw its stocks surge even higher after announcing a massive deal with OpenAI in 2024 to allow the company to use its data to feed its language models, meaning some of the information gets spat out at you by ChatGPT is coming from Reddit. The University of Zurich's Ethics Commission acknowledged the complaint and issued a formal warning to the study's principal researcher. But the institution ultimately declined to block the publication, arguing that the risks posed were low compared to the insights gained. 'Over the past few months, we used multiple accounts to posts published on CMV,' a statement from the university read. 'Our experiment assessed LLM's persuasiveness in an ethical scenario, where people ask for arguments against views they hold. In commenting, we did not disclose that an AI was used to write comments, as this would have rendered the study unfeasible. 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