Largest planet in the solar system could be about to be discovered

[Kyle]

Has the legendary Planet X been found?

Largest planet in the solar system could be about to be discovered - and it's up to four times the size of Jupiter

Tyche, Giant Hidden Planet, May Exist In Our Solar System

Scientists believe they may have found a new planet in the far reaches of the solar system, up to four times the mass of Jupiter.
Its orbit would be thousands of times further from the Sun than the Earth's - which could explain why it has so far remained undiscovered.
Data which could prove the existence of Tyche, a gas giant in the outer Oort Cloud, is set to be released later this year - although some believe proof has already been garnered by Nasa with its pace telescope, Wise, and is waiting to be pored over.

 

[Blacklight]

I'm treating this news VERY skeptically. If this were true, it would be all over NASA's web page.

 

[C3PO]

I love it when they tell us what they're soon going to discover. :rofl:

 

[fireballs619]

I love it when they tell us what they're soon going to discover. :rofl:

I guess it doesn't quite make sense, when you think about it :lol:

 

[IgnoreThisBarrel]

I personally hope this is true, though I must retain my optimism and treat this very skeptically.

Still though, even the possibility of a new planet being discovered in our solar system is exciting.

Edit: Whether or not exists how can I resist making an addon for it?

 

[Linguofreak]

I love it when they tell us what they're soon going to discover. :rofl:

Well, if it's not total crap to begin with, that sort of language tells me that the people that think they may have found this planet aren't entirely convinced by their own data and are hedging their bets. "If data from this source confirms it, what we're seeing in this source may be a new planet."

 

[tblaxland]

Sounds like a cry for more funding :shrug:. Good luck to them though.

 

[Artlav]

There's a nice breakdown of it by Phil Plait:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/b...-of-a-giant-planet-in-the-outer-solar-system/

 

[SiberianTiger]

The name Tyche sucks to my taste.

 

[orb]

The name Tyche sucks to my taste.

And we already have 258 Tyche in the Main Belt.

 

[Urwumpe]

Reminds me on the story how Pluto was discovered. People often claim that Pluto was found by seeking for an object that caused unexplained perturbations in the Neptune orbit, but that is wrong. Pluto was far away from the calculated position, and the perturbations had already been identified as measurement errors by the time Pluto was discovered.

I don't think it exists, because the data in its favor is simply too limited. The existing data fits much better to be caused by the already known planets, and still we lack proper data on the region.

Even more, we could even have small extrasolar objects that could cause the effects.

 

[Pyromaniac605]

In this day and age, with Hubble being able to look far away at distant stars and planets, and there is still a planet in our own solar system we haven't discovered, I think humanity deserves a big red FAIL stamped on it. :facepalm:

Edit: Maybe if it was a small, insignificant planet humanity would be fine, but FOUR TIMES THE SIZE OF JUPITER! How would you not notice that!?

 

[RisingFury]

He believes the planet is so huge, it will ahve a raised temperature left from its formation that will make it far higher than others, such as Pluto, at -73C, as 'it takes an object this size a long time to cool off'.

Great, just great. The Daily Mail has once again proven that the amount of science they know and understand can be drowned in my cut of tea.

 

[dougkeenan]

Jungles, dinosaurs ... and did I mention the women?

 

[Sky Captain]

Wouldn't the planet that is 4x bigger than Jupiter have enough internal pressure and temperature to start a thermonuclear fusion and become a red dwarf? 4x bigger - that would be ~ 500 000 km in diameter.

 

[RisingFury]

Well, I did some checking and you people might as well calm down.

Articles with "Planet Tyche" have appeared before - some even related to 2012 doomsday, so it might be that one of the tabloids stumbled on a website and decided it was "hot new news"...

So far the earliest article I can find was April 30th 2010, then there are a bunch appearing in early December 2010 and now a bunch again 14th and 15th February 2011...

 

[orb]

Wouldn't the planet that is 4x bigger than Jupiter have enough internal pressure and temperature to start a thermonuclear fusion and become a red dwarf? 4x bigger - that would be ~ 500 000 km in diameter.

Nah, too low weight for that. The lightest [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_dwarf"]brown dwarfs[/ame] have ~13 Jupiter masses. And it's the weight which is 4 times higher than Jupiter's, nothing about diameter there.

 

[Stoat]

Yeah its diameter could be a little smaller than Jupiter's. The fun thing is that if it's about 200 a.u. out in the boonies, then the solar system's barycentre would be somewhere between Earth and Mars. So, the sun would revolve round the earth and all those ancient nutcases would be sort of right.

Then we'd also have to look at something called the Kozai effect. Where a body can trade off eccentricity for a circular orbit.

 

[RisingFury]

Yeah its diameter could be a little smaller than Jupiter's. The fun thing is that if it's about 200 a.u. out in the boonies, then the solar system's barycentre would be somewhere between Earth and Mars. So, the sun would revolve round the earth and all those ancient nutcases would be sort of right.

Yea, I was just thinking about that... and given that the planet could be so far out, we wouldn't be able to detect the movement of our Sun around the barycenter in the paralax of nearby stars...

Still, planets so far out don't come without their own problem... they would be very loosly bound by the Sun's gravity well and any close encounter with another star throughout the eons could flip it into or out of the solar system completely.

 

[Stoat]

I think it should be fairly safe from any threat of being thrown out of the solar system. I don't think that close encounters with stars are that common. Though there is the theory that Sedna's orbit is due to a close encounter with a brown dwarf.

A good pub question that always comes up with a wildly wrong answer is, if the sun were the size of a billiard ball, where would the earth be? Just about everybody puts it at about 200 mm (8 inches) It should be about 7.6 metres! Jupiter is going to e forty metres away, and this planet x about 1500 metres.

This thing would be very hard to spot, about the twentieth mag but it should show up on very old glass plates, if it's there. My first thoughts on detecting any movement round a new barycentre would be to look at pulsars. However, I think the error bars for frequency changes would make this difficult. Leaving aside whether anyone would even want to do the work involved.