Planet 9: Is A Stolen Alien World Hiding In Our Solar System?
A new study posits that Planet 9, that as-yet-undiscovered theoretical world that exists somewhere far beyond Pluto, might not be a natural-born member of our Solar System. Instead, it very well could be that the Solar System is a cosmic thief, having stolen Planet 9 from other star’s planetary system billions of years ago.
Fox News reported June 2 that Planet 9 could very well have begun its existence as an alien world orbiting a far-off star, but, as cosmic fate would have it, got pulled away from its parent star by a young Sun’s greater gravitational attraction. In fact, scientists from Sweden’s Lund University constructed computer simulations proposing a new theory about how Planet 9 — if such a world actually exists — became part of the train of planets in the Solar System. The proposition? That Planet 9 was stolen by the Sun from an alien star approximately 4.5 billion years ago.
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Alexander Mustill, who does research out of the department of astronomy and theoretical physics at Lund University, explained the theory in a press release (per UPI).
“Planet 9 may very well have been ‘shoved’ by other planets, and when it ended up in an orbit that was too wide around its own star, our sun may have taken the opportunity to steal and capture Planet 9 from its original star. When the sun later departed from the stellar cluster in which it was born, Planet 9 was stuck in an orbit around the sun.”
In short, the world that is Planet 9 would have begun as an exoplanet, most likely within a star cluster of which our own Sun was a member. Over time, as the close-knit family of stars had begun to move farther apart, the Sun’s gravitational attraction simply pulled what became Planet 9 into the Sun’s sphere of gravitational influence. Succinctly, our Solar System stole Planet 9 from a star cluster sibling.
Of course, as previously stated, Planet 9’s origin as an exoplanet is predicated on the theory that the world actually exists. As reported by NPR, its existence was theorized earlier this year by two Caltech scientists, Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin, when they discovered that the alignment of about a dozen of the larger known objects in the Kuiper Belt were similar in direction and tilt in relation to the ecliptic plane (the plane in which all planets in the solar system tend to orbit, believed to be a product of all the planets being produced from a single protoplanetary disc).
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Brown and Batygin concluded, after employing modeling and computer simulations, that the planet would have to be about 10 times the mass of Earth. It would also orbit somewhere around 500 times the distance from the Sun to the Earth, completing just one orbit around the sun (its planetary year) every 10,000 to 20,000 years.
Mustill and the Lund team readily admit that there is still no empirical proof of Planet 9, no image, not so much as even a point of light. Still, there are scientists who have speculated as to what the mysterious planet might look like. The Mustily-led study also notes that finding Planet 9 will aid scientists in not only learning more about the Solar System but also in learning whether or not the world is actually a captured exoplanet.
If Planet 9 ultimately turns out to be in the Solar System and became a system member by way of cosmic theft, it will then become the closest exoplanet by far. At present, the closest exoplanet is believed to be orbiting the star Alpha Centauri B, which is part of a binary star system just over 4.3 light years away. Two planets have been detected circling our second-closest stellar neighbor (Proxima Centauri is the closest star to the Sun), but one, Alpha Centauri Bb, has been found to most likely not exist, while Alpha Centauri Bc, an Earth-like planet situated very close to its parent star, has yet to be, like Planet 9, confirmed or disproved.
[Image via Wikimedia Commons]
