A new planet has been discovered in the solar system. This discovery was made by California Technical University astrophysicist Konstantin Batygin. The author of the sensation admits that no one was specifically looking for the ninth planet. The discovery, which is destined to become the main one in astronomy for two and a half centuries, was, as often happens, made by accident.

A strange anomaly that led scientists to the discovery of the ninth planet

Konstantin was approached by his colleague, astronomer from California, Michael Brown. He asked the astrophysicist to make calculations that would explain why some objects in the solar system behave strangely. We were talking about the Kuiper belt. This is the region farthest from the Sun. There is space debris left behind: small asteroids, blocks of ice, star dust. It is from there that many comets that roam our system come from. Astronomers around the world have been watching the Kuiper belt very closely for a long time, but only now an important discovery has been made.

If you examine the Kuiper belt, it is a field of icy debris beyond the orbit of Neptune. Most of them walk in very eccentric and elongated orbits, conditionally randomly oriented in space. But if you concentrate on the outermost orbits, those that move farthest away from the Sun in , you will notice that they are all oriented in approximately the same direction and lie in approximately the same plane. It was this orbital alignment that seemed anomalous to scientists.

It was this anomaly that Konstantin Batygin was asked to explain from a mathematical point of view. The astrophysicist put forward an assumption: objects in the Kuiper belt are oriented towards an unknown large cosmic body. This gave astronomers their first clue in centuries. The familiar atlas of the solar system is incomplete. There must be another planet, and it's gigantic.

According to the new model, the ninth planet has a mass equal to ten or twenty times the mass of the Earth, that is, it is in principle comparable to Uranus and Neptune. Knowing only the mass, one cannot accurately judge its composition. However, one can compare it with other planets and assume that Planet Nine was formed from the same materials as other planets with a similar mass.

After analyzing data on the mass and size of the ninth planet, Konstantin Batygin suggested that, most likely, it is a gas giant, exactly the same as Uranus and Neptune.

Sumerian mention of the ninth planet

The mention that there is a planet in the solar system with an irregular orbit, different from all the others, is found among the ancient Sumerians. It was called Nibiru. The planet Nibiru, judging by the Sumerian legends, entered the solar system at a fairly high speed. She moved along an elongated epileptic orbit, moving away from the Sun to a considerable distance, then returning. The orbital period was 3600 years. This follows from the chronicle of the Sumerians.

Sumerian history is carved into clay tablets that are nearly 6,000 years old. It follows from them that once upon a time, on the territory of Mesopotamia, a highly developed civilization suddenly arose. The Sumerians had very detailed knowledge of space. They believed that Nibiru was not a lifeless planet. It was inhabited by creatures similar to people - the Anunnaki. They came to Earth to... According to one version, precious metal The aliens needed it to save their planet, which was rapidly losing its atmosphere. The gold was crushed, practically turning into dust, and this allowed heat and light to linger on Nibiru, maintaining conditions for life.

For hundreds of thousands of years, the Anunnaki developed the deposits on their own, but then, as the Sumerian chronicles tell, there was an uprising of workers. The work was too hard. I had to. But the anthropoid apes that then lived on the planet were too primitive even for such work. According to myths, the Anunnaki went to... By mixing the DNA of earthlings and their own, they got completely new look. They created more so that a person could do more complex work than a monkey.

On Sumerian clay tablets this process is depicted in the form of two snakes intertwined. This symbol is very reminiscent, and perhaps this Sumerian myth explains to us one of the biggest historical mysteries. Why can't they still find an intermediate link between a monkey and modern man. If you believe the ancients, then it simply cannot exist. and the monkey are actually genetically distant from each other.

After all, even on our own planet we find life in the most unexpected places and species. In the ocean, at a depth of thousands of meters, there live creatures that can withstand colossal pressure. And recently, scientists from Princeton University discovered that underground, at a depth of almost three kilometers, life is teeming. Bacteria live there and use uranium ores as . If such amazing phenomena We record on earth, what can we then say about distant space? On the ninth planet? There, for example, there does not have to be an atmosphere, or it can be liquid, or so dense that the pressure there will exceed all imaginable limits.

When it comes to life, first of all we mean intelligent life. Who said that all sentient beings in the Universe must be like us?

Our science understands the word life only as a protein-nucleic form, the main “zest” of which is the cell. If this cell is not there, then there is no life. But it’s another matter if by life we ​​mean something else. For example, Tsiolkovsky spoke about a radiant person. What is it? Intelligent, consisting of some kind of energy formations?

Perhaps someday we will be able to solve these amazing mysteries of the Universe, but perhaps we will never be allowed to do this...

Two American astronomers, one of whom is a native of Russia, stunned the scientific world on Tuesday after sensational news spread across the media: on the outskirts solar system They discovered the ninth planet! The first news about this was published by the California Technological University, where both scientists and Mike work, and later by the authoritative scientific journals Science and Nature.

“She will be the real ninth planet. Only two valid planets have been found since ancient times, and this will be the third. This is a significant part of our solar system that has remained undetected, and it’s exciting,” says Brown.

It is reported that the planet was found by mathematical analysis disturbances experienced by many icy bodies from the so-called Kuiper Belt - a huge region of space beyond the orbit of Pluto. Calculations have shown that the planet revolves around the Sun at a distance of 20 orbits of Neptune, its mass is 10 times greater than the mass of the Earth.

Due to such a distance from the Sun, the planet is not visible and makes a full revolution around the Sun in 10-20 thousand years.

“Although we were initially skeptical that this planet could exist, as we continued to explore its orbit, we became increasingly confident that it was indeed there,” Batygin said.

The calculated mass of the object leaves no doubt that it can be confidently classified as a planet, because it is 5 thousand times heavier than Pluto! Unlike the vast number of small objects in the solar system, such as dwarf planets, Planet Nine gravitationally dominates the extended region of the Kuiper Belt where it orbits. Moreover, this area is much larger than the space in which all the other known planets of the Solar System dominate.

This, as Brown puts it, makes it “the most planetary of the planets in the solar system.”

Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin

The work of scientists, which may become epoch-making, entitled “Evidence for a Distant Giant Planet in the Solar System” was published in the journal Astronomical Journal. In it, the authors find an explanation for many previously discovered features in the movement of icy bodies in the Kuiper Belt.

The search for the planet began in 2014, when a former Brown student published a paper claiming that 13 of the most distant Kuiper Belt objects had similar oddities in their motion. Then a version of the existence of a small planet nearby was proposed. Brown did not support this version at the time, but continued his calculations. Together with Batygin, they began a year and a half project to study the orbits of these bodies.

Caltech/R.Hurt (IPAC)

Quite soon, Batygin and Brown realized that the orbits of six of these objects passed close to the same region of space, despite the fact that all orbits were different. “It’s as if you looked at six watches on six hands that go with at different speeds, and at that moment they would show the same time. The probability of this is about 1/100,” explains Brown. In addition, it turned out that the orbits of all six bodies are inclined at an angle of 30 degrees to the ecliptic plane. “Actually, this could not have been accidental. So we began to look for what formed these orbits,” the astronomer explained.

Almost by accident, scientists noticed that if a heavy planet was included in the calculations,

whose perihelion is 180 degrees away from the perihelion of these six bodies (that is, the Sun itself is between them), then its perturbations will precisely explain the observed picture.

“The healthy reaction was that such a geometry is impossible, the orbits cannot be stable for a long time, because in the end this will lead to a collision of objects,” Batygin believes. However, a mechanism known in celestial mechanics as mean motion resonances prevents this from happening: objects approaching each other exchange energy and fly apart.

For every four revolutions of the ninth planet, there are nine revolutions of those same objects, and they never collide. As often happens in astronomy, the hypothesis was confirmed when its prediction was confirmed. It turns out that the trans-Neptunian object Sedna, discovered in 2003 by Brown, Trujillo and Rabinowitz, and another similar object, 2012 VP113, do indeed slightly deviate their orbits where predicted. But the main assumption that came true is the existence, thanks to a heavy planet in the Kuiper Belt, of objects whose plane of rotation is completely perpendicular to the plane of the Solar System.

It turned out that over the past three years, astronomers have found at least four such objects whose orbits correspond to the predictions.

Where did the planet hidden in the depths of the Kuiper Belt come from? Scientists believe that the solar system originally had four cores that formed Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. “But there could have been five,” says Brown. This fifth protoplanet, coming too close to Jupiter or Saturn, could be thrown into a distant eccentric orbit.

According to scientists, if a planet is now close to its perihelion, you can look for it in past sky surveys. If she managed to move away, telescopes like the 10-meter instruments at the Keck Observatory can catch her,

after all, the planet never approaches the Sun at a distance closer than 200 Earth orbits.

There is no consensus among scientists about the discovery. , a specialist in body dynamics from Nice, is confident that this planet exists. But not everyone thinks so. “I've seen many, many statements like this in my career. And they all turned out to be wrong,” says Hal Levison, a planetary scientist at the Boulder Institute in Colorado.

Until 2009, Pluto, discovered in 1930 also thanks to the analysis of the disturbances it creates, was considered the ninth planet of the solar system. Pluto was demoted to a dwarf planet by a decision of the International Astronomical Union. Recently, some astronomers have created a movement to restore it to planetary status following discoveries made by the New Horizons probe.
Konstantin Batygin gave one of his first interviews to a Gazeta.Ru correspondent.

— Konstantin, searching for bodies in the Kuiper Belt is not a very popular topic among astronomers, how many people are doing this?
— There are a little more than a hundred people in the world, I think. It turned out that the most distant objects in the solar system, in physical space, look in the same direction. And the only one theoretically correct model, which we were able to construct - one where their orbits are held by the gravity of one planet.

— What are the prospects for finding a planet using telescopes?
“I think it’s realistic to do this in the next two to five years.” This requires knowledge of the orbit and sufficient observing time on telescopes. Knowing the orbit is what we did in this article. To find it, you need to know where to look. On at the moment we know only the closest part of it.

— I know that you were born in Moscow. How did you end up in the USA?
— We lived in Russia until 1994; I finished 1st grade in Moscow. We moved to Japan, lived there for six years, where I studied from 3rd to 6th grade, and missed the second grade because I was too tall. Then he studied at the Russian school at the embassy in Tokyo. In 1999, we moved to California, where I completed high school, university, and graduate school at Caltech.

— Good luck, we hope that your discovery will be confirmed and we will see your name in textbooks!
- Thank you.

Remember all sorts of conspiracy theories about , but it turns out that another planet still exists. Well, at least with a probability of 99.993.

And this is how it happened.

Astronomers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena reported the discovery of a Neptune-sized object beyond the orbit of Pluto that is 10 times heavier than Earth. The authors published the results of the search for Planet X in The Astronomical Journal, and Science News briefly talks about them.

The planet rotates around the Sun in an elongated orbit (and in an inclined plane relative to the Earth’s orbit) with a period of 15 thousand years. Her chemical composition similar to those of the gas giants Uranus and Neptune. Brown and Batygin believe that the object was knocked out of a protoplanetary disk near the Sun 4.5 billion years ago.

The closest distance between the Sun and the detected object is 200 astronomical units (this is seven times the distance between Neptune and the luminary). The maximum distance of Planet X is estimated at 600-1200 astronomical units, which takes its orbit beyond the Kuiper belt, in which Pluto is located.

The referee for the scientists' work in The Astronomical Journal was planetologist Michael Brown, who, together with his colleagues, discovered the dwarf planet Sedna in 2003, which makes a full revolution around the Sun in 11.4 thousand years. The specialist was optimistic about the chances of Brown and Batygin discovering Planet X.

Scientists discovered the new planet by analyzing data on the gravitational disturbance it exerts on other celestial bodies. As Brown and Batygin note, astronomers will believe in their discovery when they can observe the planet through a telescope. To do this, they reserved time at the Japanese Subaru Observatory in Hawaii.

Confirming the existence of a celestial body will take five years. If discovered, the object could become the ninth planet in the solar system. Brown and Batygin estimate the probability of error at 0.007 percent. Previously, the search for Planet X in the Solar System led scientists to the discovery of Neptune (in 1864) and Pluto (in 1930).

Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin, Photo Popular Science

But back in 2012, according to calculations by an astronomer from Brazil, there was a fairly large space object beyond the orbit of Neptune, which could be recognized as the ninth planet.

This assumption was made by astronomer from the National Observatory of Brazil Rodney da Silva Gomes. He drew attention to the deviation from the calculation data of the orbits of six Kuiper belt objects, among which is a candidate for the title of dwarf planet - Sedna.

According to him, there are several explanations for the unusual behavior of some objects in the belt. The simplest thing is the existence of a large body, a planet, which changes their orbits with its gravity.