Speaker 1: Imagine just for a second that you are standing in
a room and it's completely utterly pitch black.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: You can't see your hand in front of your face,
you can't see the walls, you can't see the door.
Speaker 2: But.
Speaker 1: You know someone else is in there with you, you
just know it. You can't see them, you can't hear
them breathing, but you can feel I don't know, the
floorboards shifting under a heavy weight.
Speaker 2: That's a creepy thought, right.
Speaker 1: You can feel the air sort of swirl as something
massive moves past you. You can hear objects on a
shelf across the room or rattling, even though you didn't
touch them. It's that primal feeling of a presence you
cannot verify with your eyes, but your gut, your instincts,
they tell you it is undeniably real.
Speaker 2: That is a terrifying image to start with. It's straight
out of a horror movie.
Speaker 1: It is, isn't it. It's so visceral. But that specific feeling,
that sense of an invisible presence manipulating the environment, that
is exactly what is happening in our solar system right now.
Speaker 2: It's a perfect analogy.
Speaker 1: The outer reach, the deep dark backyard of our sun
are misbehaving, and we aren't talking about a few loose
rocks tumbling around. We are talking about the fundamental architecture
of our home.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're essentially looking at a cosmic crime scene. The
suspect has fled or is hiding in the shadows, but
they've left fingerprints everywhere. Fingerprints are like that massive gravitational
fingerprints that simply shouldn't be there if the room was empty.
Speaker 1: And that's what we are doing today. We are looking
at those fingerprints. We're talking about objects way past Neptune,
way out in the boonies that are clustering together in
ways that defy.
Speaker 2: All logic, all known logic.
Speaker 1: Anyway, right, Mathematically, the chance of this happening by accident
is less than one point.
Speaker 2: One percent, less than a tenth of a percent.
Speaker 1: So we aren't talking about a fluke. We are talking
about a ghost in the gravity, a massive invisible object,
what we're calling Planet nine, pulling strings from the darkness.
Speaker 2: And that's the hook for me. It feels like a
ghost story, you know, it feels like science fiction. But
what we are going to talk talk about today is
actually hard, rigorous physics. It's data It's a story about data,
not magic.
Speaker 1: Welcome to thrilling Threads. I am so excited for this one. Today.
We are grabbing a massive stack of research, new studies
from twenty twenty four, twenty twenty five, some archiabal data
that's been dusted off, and some incredible physics to unravel
perhaps the biggest mystery of our cosmic neighborhood.
Speaker 2: Our mission today is really to complete the map. I
think most people have this mental model of the Solar System,
some eight planets, asteroid belt.
Speaker 1: Maybe the Kuiper Belt, if they're paying attention in school.
Speaker 2: Right, they're really paying attention, and then nothing, just empty
space until the next star. But the data, it suggests
we are missing a massive piece from the.
Speaker 1: Puzzle and we are living through what you've called a
Laverie moment, which sounds very fancy, but I want to
break that down because it really frames this whole discussion.
It does this isn't just about finding a rock. It's
about a specific way of seeing the universe.
Speaker 2: Right, that's absolutely right. To understand where we are now,
we have to look back way back to eighteen forty six. Yeah,
because this has happened before. It's the story of a
French astronomer named Urban Leverier.
Speaker 1: I love this story because it involves a guy with
a pen defeating a bunch of people with telescopes.
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate triumph of the nerd.
Speaker 1: So what was happening?
Speaker 2: Essentially, Yes, in the mid nineteenth century, astronomers had a problem.
They were tracking the planet Uranus, which at the time
was the furthest known planet, and Uranus was well, it
was misbehaving. It wasn't following the rules.
Speaker 1: And when you say rules, you mean Newton's laws of
gravity exactly.
Speaker 2: Newton's laws are very, very strict. They predict exactly where
a planet should be based on the mass of the
Sun and the other planets. It's a clockwork universe, supposedly.
Speaker 1: But Urinus was off schedule.
Speaker 2: It was accelerating and decelerating along its orbit in a
way that made no sense. It was lagging behind where
it should be that it would speed up. It was
as if something invisible was tugging on it.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the astronomers are scratching their heads. They're checking
their telescopes, maybe assuming their charts are wrong or something right.
Speaker 2: They're looking for an error in their own work. But
Leverier sits down. And you have to remember, no supercomputers,
no AI, just pen, paper and a candle, basically.
Speaker 1: And a whole lot of mass.
Speaker 2: An incredible amount of math. Yeah, and he crunches the numbers.
He realized that the only explanation, the only thing that
could make Urinus do that, was that there had to
be another massive planet further.
Speaker 1: Out, an unseen planet.
Speaker 2: Totally unseen. Yeah. That was gravitationally interacting with Uranus. And
he didn't just say there's a planet out there. He
calculated its mass, its orbit, and the specific coordinates of
this invisible object.
Speaker 1: He drew a map to a place no one had
ever seen.
Speaker 2: She did. He sent a letter to a deservatory in
Berlin saying, effectively, point your telescope at this specific patch
of empty sky, you'll find it.
Speaker 1: And this is the part that gives me chills every time,
me too. They pointed the telescope aut his coordinates, and
that very night, the very night.
Speaker 2: They found Neptune. Just like that, what in one degree
of whereas math said it would be one degree. That's
the width of your pinky finger held at arms light.
Speaker 1: That is just incredible. He found a planet with the
tip of his pen.
Speaker 2: He discovered a world without ever looking through a telescope,
and that established this fundamental precedent. Gravity acts as a
tracer for the invisible. Right, if the math doesn't balance,
it means there is mass hiding somewhere. And today you
fast forward nearly one hundred and eighty years and we're
doing the exact same thing.
Speaker 1: Okay, but this time it's not Urinus that's being pulled on.
We've already accounted for Neptune in our models, correct, So
what's the evidence now, what's misbehaving?
Speaker 2: It's things much much further out. We were looking at
the Kuiper Belt, which is that big ring of icy
debris beyond Neptune.
Speaker 1: Like where Pluto lives exactly.
Speaker 2: But we're looking even beyond that at a group of
extremely distant objects called said nooids. Said nooids.
Speaker 1: Good name is that from the dwarf planet said Nah Yes, named.
Speaker 2: After no which is one of the most famous of
these distant objects. It's a dwarf planet candidate that takes
over eleven thousand years.
Speaker 1: To orbit the Sun eleven thousand years.
Speaker 2: These are objects that spend most of their time in
the deep, deep frieze of space. Now here's the key.
In a stable eight planet Solar system, these objects should
be scattered randomly.
Speaker 1: Okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 2: Their orbits should point in all different directions because of
billions of years of chaotic gravitational interactions.
Speaker 1: Right, it's like entropy. If you spill a bag of
marbles on the floor, they'd roll everywhere. They wouldn't all
just roll into one corner and line up neatly.
Speaker 2: That's a perfect way to put it. Yeah, but when
we look at these said nois, and we only know
of a handful because they are so incredibly hard to see,
that is exactly what they are doing.
Speaker 1: Are lining up.
Speaker 2: They're physically clustered in space. They're all swinging out in
the same direction, and their orbits are all tilted at
similar ankles away from the main plane of the Solar system.
Speaker 1: And the odds of that being a coincidence are dely zero.
Speaker 2: As we said, it's less than point one percent. So
in twenty sixteen, two astronomers at Caltech, Constantin Batagen and
Mike Brown, who are I mean, absolute titans of planetary astronomy.
Speaker 1: Mike Brown is the guy who killed Pluto, right, He's the.
Speaker 2: Guy he feels a little guilty about it, I think,
so he wants to find a new planet to make
up for it.
Speaker 1: Fair enough, so.
Speaker 2: They publish a model. They ran simulations and asked what
could possibly.
Speaker 1: Cause this, and the answer wasn't bad luck.
Speaker 2: No. The simulations show that if you introduce a ninth planet,
something roughly five to ten times the mass of the Earth,
into the deep Outer Solar System, huh, it's gravity would
naturally herd these objects. It acts like a sheep dog.
It forces them into these synchronized, clustered orbits over millions
and millions of years.
Speaker 1: So without the planet, the system makes no sense.
Speaker 2: It makes no sense. But you add the planet and
everything clicks perfectly into place.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's profile the suspect. We know it's there
because of the math, But what is it? What are
we actually looking for? Because Planet nine sounds a little.
Speaker 2: Generic, it's a working title. What we are really looking
for is a super.
Speaker 1: Earth, which is a term I hear a lot, especially
in science fiction, and I think people picture like crypton
or something, But what does it mean physically in astronomy.
Speaker 2: It's actually a pretty simple definition. It refers strictly to mass.
A super Earth is a planet that is larger than
Earth but smaller than Neptune. So Neptune is about seventeen
Earth masses. Earth is well one Earth mass. We're looking
for something in that sweet spot that five to ten
Earth mass range.
Speaker 1: And here's where it gets really really interesting for me
looking at the context you provided, when we look outside
our Solar System at other star systems yet exoplanets, Yeah,
super earths are the most common type of planet out there.
They are literally everywhere.
Speaker 2: They are the standard galactic furniture. If you look at
the data from the Kepler Space Telescope or the Test mission,
super earths are the medium planet. They are the fault model,
but we don't have one currently. No, we are the
odd ones out. Our Solar system has small, rocky worlds
like Earth and Mars, and then we have massive gas
giants like Jupiter and Saturn. We are missing that whole
middleweight category.
Speaker 1: It's like walking into a house that has tiny footstools
and massive sectional sofas but no regular sized chairs.
Speaker 2: That's a great way to put it. It's a genuine
architectural gap in our Solar system's design. Finding Planet nine
would actually make our Solar system normal.
Speaker 1: It would stop us from being an anomaly.
Speaker 2: It would stop us from being the weirdos and align
our architecture with what we see happening all across the galaxy.
Speaker 1: So it's big, five to ten times the massive Earth.
But where is it? Because if it's that big, shouldn't
we have I don't know, tripped over it by now?
Speaker 2: Well, it is incredibly far away. Its orbit is highly
elongated or eccentric. It's not a nice circle like Earth's.
It takes somewhere between ten thousand and twenty thousand years
to circle the Sun just.
Speaker 1: One time, twenty thousand years for one year. That is
just it's mind boggling. That means the last time it
was in this part of its orbit, humans were just
figuring them out agriculture.
Speaker 2: Even earlier than that, maybe we were still paintying gabes. Wow.
To give you a sense of scale, we use a
measurement called an astronomical unit, or AU. One AU is
the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
Speaker 1: Right about ninety three million miles.
Speaker 2: So at its closest approach to the Sun, what we
call parahelium, planet nine is about two hundred AU away,
so two hundred times further than us, but at its
furthest point, it's a felion. It swings out to maybe
a thousand au.
Speaker 1: One thousand, and for comparison, Pluto is what thirty or
forty au away exactly.
Speaker 2: Pluto's orbit varies between about thirty and fifty AU. So
Pluto is practically in our backyard compared to this thing.
This object is in the deep deep freeze.
Speaker 1: Okay. So we have this massive object five to ten
times the size of Earth. We know roughly where it
should be because of the math. This leads to the question.
I think every single listener is screaming at their device
right now.
Speaker 2: I know the one.
Speaker 1: Why haven't we seen it? Why can't we just point
the Hupace telescope at that spot and snap a picture?
Speaker 2: That is the most common question. If it's so big,
why is it invisible? And the answer lies in the
fundamental physics of light, specifically a little something called the
inverse square law.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack the inverse square law, because this explains
why space exploration is so hard in general. It's not
just that things get a little dimmer further away.
Speaker 2: No, it's not a linear dimming. Think about a simple
light bulb or a candle. If you're standing one foot
away from it, it's bright. Sure, if you step back
to two feet away, it's not just half as bright,
it's one quarter as bright. The intensity of the light
drops off with the square of the.
Speaker 1: Distance, so if you go three feet away, it's one
ninth is bright.
Speaker 2: Precisely. Now apply that to the sun. Sunlight has to
travel let's pick a number, say seven hundred au out
to hit planet nine.
Speaker 1: That's a long way.
Speaker 2: By the time the sunlight gets there, the light is
incredibly weak. It's spread out over a huge area, so.
Speaker 1: It's basically twilight or even darker.
Speaker 2: On this planet, much much darker. Imagine a single candle
in the middle of a football stadium at night. But then,
and this is the absolute kicker, that tiny amount of
light has to reflect off the surface of the planet
and travel another seven hundred AU all the way back
to our telescopes on Earth.
Speaker 1: So the dimming happens twice.
Speaker 2: It gets hit by the inverse square law on the
way out and again on the way.
Speaker 1: Back, so it's really the inverse fourth power.
Speaker 2: Then, effectively, yes, the result is that planet nine is
thousands upon thousands of times dimmer than even distant objects
like Pluto to a standard optical telescope that's looking for
a reflected sunlight. It is effectively a black object sitting
against a black background.
Speaker 1: So looking for it with a normal camera is like
looking for a piece of coal and a dark cellar
at midnight while wearing sunglasses.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's just incredibly difficult.
Speaker 1: Okay, that makes sense. So that strategy is out, which.
Speaker 2: Is why researchers have shifted their strategy. They aren't just
looking for reflected light anymore. They are looking for heat
and for red exactly. Even a very cold planet way
out in the vall still retains some heat from its
formation billions of years ago. It's warmer than the absolute
zero of empty space, so it should glow faintly in
the infrared spectrum.
Speaker 1: So we just need to put on our heat vision goggles. Basically,
that sounds much easier.
Speaker 2: You would think so, But of course there's a catch there.
Chair This was always a catch, and the catch is
the Milky Way.
Speaker 1: Wait, our own galaxy is in the way.
Speaker 2: How well, the galactic plane, that bright, hazy band you
can see in the night sky from a dark location
is crowded with billions of stars and clouds of dust
and gas. All of that stuff emits infrared radiation. It's
infrared noise.
Speaker 1: So it's like static.
Speaker 2: It's like trying to hear a specific faint whisper and
a screaming stadium full of people. If Planet nine happens
to be passing in front of the dense part of
the Milky Way in its orbit, it's hidden. It's completely
hidden behind this wall of infrared noise. And unfortunately, the
predicted orbit takes it right across the galactic plane.
Speaker 1: Of course it does. So it's faint, it's far, and
it might be hiding in the galactic crowd. But despite
all of that, we have some major breakthroughs happening right now.
Speaker 2: You do.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about the twenty twenty five study. I believe
it was led by a researcher named Terry Longfan. This
felt like a moment where the detective work really leveled up.
Speaker 2: This is a brilliant piece of science. They used what
we call the shift in stack method, but they did
it using archival data.
Speaker 1: I love this because it shows you don't always need
a new, shiny, billion dollar telescope. Sometimes you just need
to look at the old tapes differently precisely.
Speaker 2: It's so clever. They took data from the IRAS satellite,
which was an infrared satellite that scanned the sky way
back in nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's old data.
Speaker 2: Very old, and they compared it with data from the
Ocardi satellite, which is a Japanese infrared satellite that flew
in two thousand and six.
Speaker 1: That's a twenty three year gap between the two pictures, and.
Speaker 2: That gap is the key. Remember, Planet nine moves, but
from our perspective, it moves very, very slowly across the sky.
In a day or even a year, it barely budget
against the background stars. But in twenty three years it
moves just enough to be noticeable.
Speaker 1: So if you layer the two images on top of
each other, you shift and stack them. The stars should
stay still, but the planet should jump from one spot
to another exactly.
Speaker 2: You layer the images to digitally cancel out all the
static background noise, the stars, the distant galaxies, and you
look for the one faint pixel that shifted position.
Speaker 1: It's like looking at two frames of a movie. Real
the background scenery doesn't change, but the actor moves from
left to right.
Speaker 2: That's the idea, and they found something.
Speaker 1: They found a candidate.
Speaker 2: They identified a very promising signal that appears in both
data sets from both nineteen eighty three and two thousand
and six, and its movement pattern matches the mathematical prediction
for planet nine perfectly.
Speaker 1: But I can hear a butt in your.
Speaker 2: Voice, but it is extremely faint. It sits right at
the very very edge of the detection limits for those
old instruments. It's a ghost of a.
Speaker 1: Signal, so it could be noise.
Speaker 2: It could be a glitch in the data processing, or
a random cosmic ray hitting the sensor in just the
right way in both data sets, though that's unlikely. It's
the most promising lead we have from archival data, but
it requires conformation. We need a better look with a
more powerful instrument to be sure it's a solid body.
Speaker 1: So that's the visual hunt. We have a maybe, a
very exciting maybe. But the mathematical case just got a
huge upgrade too.
Speaker 2: It did.
Speaker 1: In twenty twenty four, Vatagen and Brown, the original duo,
they dropped a new paper, and this one involves something
called neptune crossing TNOs.
Speaker 2: This for me, is arguably even more compelling than the
clustering of the said noise we discussed earlier.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's break it down. What is a Neptune crosser.
It sounds like a traffic violation in space.
Speaker 2: It's pretty much exactly what it sounds like. These are
trans Neptunian objects or tno so icy bodies in the
Kuiper Belt. But their orbits are so eccentric, so stretched out,
that they periodically cross inside the orbit of Neptune.
Speaker 1: And that's dangerous.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Neptune is a gas giant's huge. If you get too
close to that, it's gravity should what kick you out?
Speaker 2: Right. Neptune is a bully, It's a gravitational monster. Under
normal physics, if a small icy rock crosses Neptune's path,
one of two things is going to happen, and quickly. Okay,
Either Neptune's gravity swallows it, pulling it in to crash
into the planet, or Neptune acts like a gravitational sling
shot and flings it out of the Solar System entirely.
Speaker 1: So these objects should not be stable.
Speaker 2: These should not exist. They should have been cleaned up
and vanished within a few million years of the Solar
System's formation.
Speaker 1: But they're still there. We see them, we see them.
Speaker 2: They exist. Yeah, and that was a huge puzzle for
a long time. Why hasn't Neptune cleaned up its neighborhood.
Speaker 1: So Beigeen and Brown ran these things called n body simulations,
which or what they're massive computer models that calculate the
gravitational pull of every object on every other object over
billions and billions of years.
Speaker 2: And what did the simulation say.
Speaker 1: It showed that if you only have the eight known
planets in your model, the Neptune crossing objects vanish every time.
They simply cannot survive for the four point five billion
year age of the Solar System.
Speaker 2: But if you add planet nine into the simulation.
Speaker 1: The bodyguard arrise, bodyguard arrives.
Speaker 2: Planet nine acts as a shepherd. Its gravity, even from
way out there, exudes this subtle but persistent pull that
keeps these objects in a state of what we call resonance.
It gently nudges them, preventing them from getting too close
to Neptune on their orbits.
Speaker 1: So Planet nine is actively protecting these erratic objects from Neptune.
Speaker 2: It's actively managing their orbits. And the statistical confidence here
is what blew everyone away. They found the result was
five sigma.
Speaker 1: Five sigma. Now, for listeners who don't speak statistics, what
does that actually mean? I know sigma from like six
sigma in business, But this is physics.
Speaker 2: Five sigma is the gold standard in science. It's the
official threshold for declaring a discovery definitive. To give you
some context, the discovery of the Higgs boson the god
particle five sigma discovery.
Speaker 1: So it's a big deal.
Speaker 2: It means there is a one in three point five
million chance that this is a statistical fluke.
Speaker 1: One in three point five million.
Speaker 2: Yes, so this moves planet Metane from Hey, this is
a possible explanation for some weird clustering we see to
this is a mathematical requirement for the Solar System to
exist as we currently observe it.
Speaker 1: That is heavy. It's not just a guess anymore. The
math is saying the building falls down without this pillar exactly.
Speaker 2: And this study was so crucial because it addressed the
skeptics who would say, well, maybe you're just looking for
clustered objects in the wrong places. This isn't about observational bias.
It's about the fundamental physics of survival. For these objects.
They shouldn't be here, but they are. Okay.
Speaker 1: So the math is screaming it's there. The archival data
is whispering. I think I see it, but we want
to see it for real. We want the mugshot, We
want the picture. Enter the eye of the future. The
verraa C. Reuben Observatory.
Speaker 2: This is the game changer as of early twenty twenty six.
It is full operational and chili and it is an
absolute beast.
Speaker 1: It's not just a normal telescope, right, It's not like
looking through a small tube.
Speaker 2: No, not at all. Think of it as a high
speed mapping system. It has a huge eight point four
meter mirror. But the camera is the real star of
the show. It's a three point two gigapick.
Speaker 1: The camera three point two gigapixels. My phone has what
twelve megapixels? Maybe forty eight.
Speaker 2: It is the largest digital sensor ever built for astronomy.
To put another way, the field of view is so
wide it can capture an area of the sky equivalent
to forty full moons in a single snapshot.
Speaker 1: Forty full moons. And what is it doing with all
that power?
Speaker 2: It's creating what they call a cosmic movie. It scans
the entire southern sky every few nights, over and over
and over again. Yeah, for ten years.
Speaker 1: So instead of staring at one tiny spot for a
long time like.
Speaker 2: Hubble does, right, Hubble has a tiny pinprick field of view.
Speaker 1: Rubin is monitoring everything.
Speaker 2: All the time, everything, And this is the perfect strategy
for finding something like planet nine. Because Planet nine is
faint and it moves right, the Ruben observe itt to
or he can detect objects down to a brightness level
or magnitude of twenty four point five in a single shot,
which is already very faint. But because it visits the
same patch of sky over eight hundred times during its survey,
you can stack the images or back to the shift
in status on.
Speaker 1: A massive industrial scale. When you stack a year's worth
of Reuben data, the sensitivity goes down to magnitude twenty
seven point eight, which means in plain English, it means
it can see things that are incredibly, unbelievably dim. Planet
nine is expected to be about six hundred times fainter
than Pluto. Reuben can see that, no problem, and.
Speaker 2: We already have a proof of concept that the system works.
From January of twenty twenty six.
Speaker 1: Yes, the very first pure viewed paper to come out
of the Reuben Observatory Science operations identified a new fast
spinning asteroid called twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2: M N forty five, So a different object.
Speaker 1: Yes, that was much closer between Mars and Jupiter. But
it proved the software works. It proved the automated system
can isolate a single moving object from millions upon million
of static stars.
Speaker 2: So the trap is set, the camera.
Speaker 1: Is rolling, the trap is set, the timeline is promising.
If planet nine is where we think it is and
as bright as we think it is, Ruben has a
very strong chance of identifying it within the first one
to two years of the survey. We're literally just waiting
for the computer to ping. Now, in the spirit of
good science, we have to look at the other side
of the coin. Of course, is there any chance planet
nine isn't a planet? What are the skeptics saying? Because
I know there are some pretty wild alternative theories that
don't involve a giant rock.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, science requires us to challenge every hypothesis. You have
to try to break the theory to see if it
stands up. And there are three main alternatives on the
table right now.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's run through them. Theory A, the laws of
gravity are wrong.
Speaker 2: This is a concept known as m own ND modified
Newtonian dynamics. The core idea is that at very very
low accelerations, like what you'd experienced way out in the
deep boonies of the Solar System, gravity just doesn't behave
the way Newton ORNs Steins said it does.
Speaker 1: So we don't need a new planet, we just need
new math exactly.
Speaker 2: A twenty twenty three study by researchers named Brown and
Mother suggested that the Milky Way's own galactic gravitational field
could be tugging on the outer Solar System in a
subtle way that mimics the pull of a planet. They
call it the external field effect.
Speaker 1: So the ghost in the room is the whole galaxy.
Speaker 2: It's a valid theory, but it requires rewriting fundamental physics,
and generally in science we follow Oukham's razor. The simplest
explanation is usually the best.
Speaker 1: And a planet is simpler than new physics.
Speaker 2: Planet nine just requires adding one more rock to the inventory.
Monda requires changing the fundamental laws of the universe. Okham's
razor usually favors the rock.
Speaker 1: Fair enough, okay. Theory B. This one is my favorite.
The primordial black hole.
Speaker 2: This one is fun. It was proposed by Unwinded Schultz.
They suggest that the mass out there isn't a planet
at all, but a black hole the size of a grapefruit.
Speaker 1: A grapefruit size black hole that just sounds terrifying.
Speaker 2: It would have the same mass as five to ten Earth,
but compressed it to a tiny, tiny point. It would
explain the gravity perfectly, and it would also perfectly explain
why we.
Speaker 1: Can't see it because black holes don't emit or reflect
any light.
Speaker 2: It's the ultimate stealth object.
Speaker 1: So could Ruben see that?
Speaker 2: No, not directly. If this is true, the Ruben Observatory
won't see it. You'd have to look for very subtle
gravitational lensing events starlight bending around it as it passes
in front. Would be a nightmare to find.
Speaker 1: A fun nightmare though, and theory see.
Speaker 2: The debris disc. This is the idea that instead of
one big planet, it's a huge diffuse ring of millions
of small icy rocks that all together collectively have the
mass of ten earths.
Speaker 1: So like a really heavy hula hoop at the edge
of the Solar system pretty much.
Speaker 2: But the main rebuttal there is heat. If you had
that much dust and debris spread out over that much
surface area, we would likely see the combined infrared glow
from it. We don't see that. Also, use ring like
that tends to be gravitationally unstable over billions of years.
Speaker 1: So after weighing all the alternatives, planet nine is still
the front runner.
Speaker 2: It is still the simplest explanation that fits the most data,
especially the orbital protection of those Neptune crossers. That five
sigma result is very hard to explain with just modified
gravity or a debris disc. Gravity from a single massive
point source handles that shepherding resonance much more cleanly, So if.
Speaker 1: It is there, this changes the map. We aren't just
adding another dot to the chart. We are fundamentally redefining
the Solar system.
Speaker 2: We are proving the existence of what some astronomers are
calling a third zone.
Speaker 1: The third zone. I like the sound of that. What
does that mean?
Speaker 2: Well, we used to think the Solar system is pretty simple.
You had Zone one, the inner rocky planets from Mercury
to Mars. Then you had Zone two the gas and
ized giants from Jupiter to Neptune and then the edge.
Then we found the Kuiper Belt, which was sort of
like the icy shoreline of the Solar.
Speaker 1: System, and Planet nine changes that.
Speaker 2: Planet nine implies a vast, deep third zone far beyond
the giants, a region occupied by at least one massive
world and maybe more. It tells us the Solar System
doesn't just end it Neptune. It has a whole other chapter.
Speaker 1: And this connects to the Nice model, right, the story
of how our Solar system got here in the first place.
Speaker 2: Exactly the Nice model, which is named after the city
in France where it was developed, Not because it's just
a nice.
Speaker 1: Idea, although it is a nice idea.
Speaker 2: It is a very nice idea. It describes the chaotic
early days of the Solar System. The giant planets didn't
form where they are now. They moved around, they migrated,
and the simulation strongly suggest we didn't start with four giants.
We likely started with five.
Speaker 1: A lost sibling.
Speaker 2: The lost sibling, the models showed Jupiter's immense gravity likely
bullied this fifth giant planet, kicking it violently outward for
a long time. The assumption was that it was ejected
completely into interstellar space to become a rogue planet drifting
alone between the stars.
Speaker 1: But if Planet nine is the.
Speaker 2: It's the one that got away but didn't actually leave.
Speaker 1: It's just moved into the spare room exactly.
Speaker 2: It didn't get kicked out of the house entirely. It
just got pushed up into the attic. It's settled into
this distant, lonely eccentric orbit. Finding it would be like
finding a long lost brother of Jupiter and Neptune.
Speaker 1: That is kind of poetic. It makes the Solar System
feel like a family with the secret history we're just
now uncovering, and it.
Speaker 2: Confirms that our system is normal. If Plant nine is
a super earth, we finally have the matching set. We
finally fitted with the rest of the galaxy.
Speaker 1: So where do we stand right now? We're in early
twenty twenty six. What's the status.
Speaker 2: We are in the final countdown. We're in the endgame.
The search area in the sky has been narrowed down
to less than ten percent of the predicted path.
Speaker 1: That's huge.
Speaker 2: The Ruben Observatory is scanning that very region night after night.
The twenty twenty five archival candidate from the fan study
is being rigorously re examined by.
Speaker 1: Other teams, it really feels like we are right on
the precipice of a major discovery.
Speaker 2: I think detection is getting closer to being a logistical certainty.
The conversation has shifted in the astronomical community. It's no
longer is it there? It's where is it? And who
is going to find it first?
Speaker 1: And once we find it, what then? After the champagne
and the headlines, what happens next?
Speaker 2: We celebrate and then the real science begins. The moment
we have a location, every major telescope on Earth will
point at it. We can use spectroscopy to analyze the
light coming from it, which will tell us what it's made.
Speaker 1: Of, so we can know its composition.
Speaker 2: Does it have a thick hydrogen atmosphere like Neptune? Is
it a rocky world with a thin atmosphere? Does it
have moons? We can start to answer those questions almost immediately.
Speaker 1: Could we send a probe like Voyager or New Horizons?
Speaker 2: We could, but you'd have to pack a lunch. It
would take fifty years or more to get there with
our current propulsion technology. But just knowing it's there it
completes the picture. It changes how we view our place
and the cosmos.
Speaker 1: It's just incredible to think that right now, in twenty
twenty six, we are still discovering may your pieces of
geography in our own home.
Speaker 2: Our home is bigger, weirder, and more crowded than we
ever thought.
Speaker 1: So here's the provocative thought I want to leave you
the listener with. If Planet nine is a captured rogue planet,
or if it's our solar system's lost sibling, what else
is hiding out there in the third zone.
Speaker 2: That's the question that keeps planetary scientists up at night.
The universe rarely makes just one of anything.
Speaker 1: Are we sure it's the only one?
Speaker 2: Or is the darkness full of other ghosts we haven't
even felt yet.
Speaker 1: I love that, and I want to ask you directly
if we find it, When we find it, what should
we name it? The tradition is Roman and Greek gods.
Who's left? Or do you prefer the grapefruit sized black
hole theory? Because that is a movie waiting to happen.
Speaker 2: I'm personally rooting for the planet. I want to see
the picture on add it to the family portrait.
Speaker 1: Me too. Let us know what you think in the
comments below. This has been thrilling threads. Thanks for listening
to us unravel the universe, Keep looking up, see next time.