Wednesday 17 February 2021

Claim for giant 'Planet Nine' at Solar System's edge takes a hit

Claim for giant 'Planet Nine' at Solar System's edge takes a hit

For planetary scientists, it was the boldest claim in a generation: an unseen extra planet, as much as 10 times the mass of Earth, lurking on the Solar System’s frontier, beyond Neptune. But the claim looks increasingly shaky, after a team of astronomers reported last week that the orbits of a handful of distant lumps of rock are not bunched together by the gravity of “Planet Nine,” as its proponents believe, but only seem clustered because that’s where telescopes happened to be looking.

Continue reading...

No comments:

Post a Comment