Three Years On, The Evidence For A Huge, Dark "Planet X" (Out Past Pluto) Becomes... Overwhelming

Reupping an older one, as this new paper, just released by the same authors of three years past, provides nearly air-tight proof that Planet Nine (or "X", if you prefer). . . . floats mysteriously at the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt, and well beyond Pluto. So we are grinning, anew, ear to ear, here:

"...All the melodies mysterious,
Through the dreary darkness chanted;
Thoughts in attitudes imperious,
Voices soft, and deep, and serious,
Words that whispered, songs that haunted....

All the soul in rapt suspension,
All the quivering, palpitating
Chords of life in utmost tension,
With the fervor of invention

With the rapture of creating...

-- Longfellow (again)

I am still floating, suspended above the Earth, here -- so space science is on tap as early evening fare, once again. . . smile.

It seems that citizen scientists using distributed computing power have identified at least four possible candidates for the elusive, large, dark and distant planet we mentioned in the dead of a deep snowstorm, at the nadir of our funk, in January 2016.[Backgrounder from January 2016 here.] What is astonishing, to me -- is that the world, working together, has identified -- in a year -- what any one science team would have likely taken a generation, to work out.

All by using strictly mathematical models, of where and when, it ought to be seen. Do indeed watch (again!) the Caltech story of Planet 9 unfold, before your eyes (about 2 minutes in duration):



Here's January 2016's blurb from Space.com:

. . . .Citizen scientists have flagged four objects for follow-up study in the hunt for the hypothetical Planet Nine.

The four unknown objects were spotted in images of the southern sky captured recently by the SkyMapper telescope at Siding Spring Observatory in Australia. More than 60,000 people from around the world scoured these photos, making about 5 million classifications, said researchers with the Australian National University (ANU), which organized the citizen-science project.

Astronomers will now use Siding Spring and other telescopes around the world to investigate the four objects to determine if they're viable Planet Nine candidates. . . .

UPDATED --01.22.2019:. . .The most distant Kuiper belt objects appear to be clustered in longitude of perihelion and in orbital pole position. To date, the only two suggestions for the cause of these apparent clusterings have been either the effects of observational bias or the existence of the distant giant planet in an eccentric inclined orbit known as Planet Nine. To determine if observational bias can be the cause of these apparent clusterings, we develop a rigorous method of quantifying the observational biases in the observations of longitude of perihelion and orbital pole position. From this now more complete understanding of the biases we calculate that the probability that these distant Kuiper belt objects would be clustered as strongly as observed in both longitude of perihelion and in orbital pole position is only 0.2%. While explanations other than Planet Nine may someday be found, the statistical significance of this clustering is now difficult to discount. . . .

The evidence for wholly-unseen (but powerful shepherded gravitational) unwasted grace. . . has now become overwhelming. It will be revealed, in time -- as a body.

So, do sleep well, all you precious cargo, on our little third rock. . . as we each traverse separate, but entangled, and yes angled-elliptical orbits -- spanning hundreds of generations of our own life-times, grinning to John Legend acoustics and Vanessa Williams in retro mode -- now we nod off, imagining anew another body of unwasted grace (now silenced), floating as a shepherd moon -- to various other little world-itas. . . fantastic! Be excellent to one another. . . it's almost snowing here, again!

नमस्ते