Cassini is unaffected by Planet 9's gravitational charms
Well, it's close to Saturn and it's very big. Even an uncharted moon of Saturn will have more effect.
Saturn spacecraft immune to mysterious Planet 9's charms
NASA has been obliged to clarify that if the hypothetical Planet 9 exists, it is not responsible for "unexplained deviations" in the orbit of the Cassini spacecraft around Saturn. Back in January, CalTech boffins Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown claimed to have found evidence for a mysterious body, around 10 times the mass of …
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Monday 11th April 2016 18:33 GMT TimeMaster T
Re: Cassini is unaffected by Planet 9's gravitational charms
The article mentions that "Planet 9" would not be able to directly affect Cassini but could affect Saturn's orbit which WOULD affect Cassini's position relative to the Earth since Cassini is within Saturn's gravity well.
But they didn't find anything that showed an effect on Saturn during Cassini's time there. This lack of detection could mean;
The current positions of Saturn and Planet 9 are so far apart that any deviance in Saturn's orbit is so small it is below the detection threshold of the instruments. This could be the case if "9" is currently near the outer end of it's orbit. So effort must continue using other methods.
OR
There is no "Planet 9" and the evidence so far is just random orbital noise that looks like a pattern
I'm hoping its the former, it would be really cool if a new, big, planet was found during my lifetime. Sadly there would not be a mission to it within whats left of my lifetime. A planet so far out would likely be so cold, and has stayed that way, as to have preserved information about the dust/gas cloud that formed the solar system.
Side note; Pluto comes in close enough to the sun that it gets enough heat at times to maintain a gaseous atmosphere for a time, so some of the Hydrogen and other lite gasses would have had a chance to boil off a little since Pluto formed. Planet 9 might be far enough out and big enough to have held onto more of its original gasses.
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Monday 11th April 2016 12:55 GMT David Nash
Re: Planet 9???
In that case then it's planet 14.
From http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/dwarf/sats
"The first five recognized dwarf planets are Ceres, Pluto, Eris, Makemake and Haumea"
http://seldomsirius.net/ has a nice way to remember:
My Very Easy Method Can Just Speed Up Naming Planets However Many Exist.
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Monday 11th April 2016 14:26 GMT Sir Sham Cad
Re: why Pluto "haters"?
Aside from the OP having tongue firmly in cheek with that comment, it references some of the popular outpouring of scornful disbelief at the time that Scientists could demot^W reclassify the Solar System object that had been known as the Planet Pluto all their lives to something less than a "full" planetary status for any other reasons than Pluto must have once kicked someone's cat.
As if that particular lump of space rock and ice actually cares what a bunch of overeducated apes at least 2.7 billlion miles away call it.
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Monday 11th April 2016 19:13 GMT Stevie
Re:As if [Pluto] cares ... (4 Sir Sham Cad)
The salient point is that if as much energy had been spent actually doing proper space science as blithering about the proper way to call things too far off to see, we might actually have been able to go out and have a look for ourselves instead of getting all our info third hand from the Anti-Pluto League and their exclusive access to mega-telescopes.
There's another bunch who are bleating about Lake Huron not being a real lake at all, just a bulge and that means it shouldn't be called a lake and that is important because ... well, it seems to be the only way to get your name on a paper if you are a lackluster waste of space who can't think up any real lake-science to publish.
When you let lab-shy chemists loose in the halls of academia you end up with the mind-numbing dross that is the end of the periodic table. The pioneers found stuff and named it later - even stuff that needed a nuclear accelerator and a very fast stopwatch to find. The current useless bunch name stuff and argue about naming stuff and are so busy doing so they haven't got time to actually fire up the Relativistic Collidotron and find any of it.
Scientists! Do science first, argue about what to call it after!
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Monday 11th April 2016 13:22 GMT Stevie
Re: Pluto haters 4 hplasm
Yes, isn't itbriveting how much popular science blither has been written about dwarf planets?
Oh, that's right, there hasn't been any to speak of because everyone knows Pluto==planet and the Degrasse Tyson claque == nitwits and the so-called astronomers were so busy arguing about renaming Pluto they didn't notice there was no real reason to do so.
This is what happens when all the good science has been used up by Victorians.
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Monday 11th April 2016 14:53 GMT Richard Simpson
It's Saturn's orbit which is at question
I may not have understood correctly, but when I read the paper about Planet 9 and Cassini it seemed to say:
1) That perturbations in the orbits of the planets limited the possible locations where Planet 9 could be in its orbit (even assuming that it exists).
2) That the orbital models being used relied on the motion of all the planets and numerous asteroids going back several decades.
3) That slight changes in the orbit of Saturn were a particularly relevant part of the data set and that Cassini was simply a handy way (via radio ranging) of finding out exactly where Saturn was.
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Monday 11th April 2016 22:05 GMT Destroy All Monsters
So...
I have heard Internet rumors that well-known supermassive tinfoil planet Nibiru will "arrive" this month (disappointingly not having arrived in any preceding month or even year, thus giving a full-fat two-finger salute to the ever-hopeful predictions that are well explained in hardcover books which can be picked up at the next Internet tat store for a fee), causing "unprecedented mass extinctions" (that would then be "massively massive mass extinctions" of heretofore unheard-of massivity. Professor Quatermass sure will have something to say).
I totally need some clarifications on where Nibiru has been before this month, where it will arrive from and by what means this is supposed to happen. Otherwise I'm going to log off!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
