Yet the most distant ones, according to the full suite of observations available, showed orbits that were swept off in one particular direction and tilted in the same direction. If you only had one or two objects doing this, you might chalk it up to random chance, but we had six; the odds that this would be random was around 0.0001%.
I would say it's always a major red flag when you get very small numbers being used to claim seemingly huge significance but on what's actually a very small sample (1 system) that makes the significance extremely hard to judge.
There's a big survey going on to hunt for worlds beyond Neptune in our Solar System: OSSOS, the Outer Solar System Origins Survey. It found over 800 objects during its duration, looking at eight different well-defined patches of sky over a four year timespan. And of these hundreds of objects, eight of them have the long-period properties that would show evidence for-or-against Planet Nine.
The results are definitive... and damning. The eight OSSOS discoveries have orbits oriented across a wide range of angles. The observed orbits are statistically consistent with random. The OSSOS detections do not all follow the pattern seen in the previous sample.
Well, like I said...
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/JeFx13ZJ1BB
Originally shared by Ethan Siegel
“Of course, this study isn’t enough to rule out Planet Nine; it still could be out there. As a counterpoint, Mike Brown has contended that a different survey strategy could have been definitive, and OSSOS simply isn’t a good survey for indicating yea or nay on Planet Nine. But remember, the old saying goes, “where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” indicating that if you observe an effect, it likely has a cause.
If you all of a sudden discover that what you thought was smoke was a figment of your imagination, it doesn’t mean there wasn’t a fire, but it sure does make the hypothesis that there ever was a fire a lot less compelling. The OSSOS study doesn’t rule out Planet Nine, but it does cast doubt on the idea that the Solar System needs one. Unless a deeper, better survey indicates otherwise, or Planet Nine serendipitously turns up, the default position should be its non-existence.”
Is there another massive planet in the Solar System? Do we have a super-Earth after all, between the masses and sizes of Earth and Neptune? And has it only gone undiscovered until now owing to our telescopic limitations, and the fact that it’s so much more distant than the presently known planets?
It’s possible. That’s the radical idea behind Planet Nine, proposed nearly three years ago by Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown. They looked at the unusual orbits of a number of Kuiper Belt objects, and conjectures that a ninth planet, located hundreds of times as distant as Earth is from the Sun, could be the culprit. But on closer inspection, the evidence that they’re looking at might just be biased, and there may be no Planet Nine at all.
There may not even be a puzzle to solve. Come get the scientific story on Planet Nine that you haven’t heard today.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/09/14/this-is-why-scientists-think-planet-nine-doesnt-exist/
The evidence wasn't just the Kuiper belt objects. They also looked at perturbations in the orbits of the other planets, the ~6° inclination of the sun's orbit, and the stability of all of these directly observed phenomena.
ReplyDeleteI would also refer you to Konstantin Batygin's response, which reiterates that the orbits alone are not the evidence, but also the stability of these orbits, which Batygin contends is made possible by the presence of a ninth planet.
adsabs.harvard.edu - Dynamical Evolution Induced by Planet Nine