Planet 9 with Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin

so what else is new with you guys how's everything going it's all cool it's all great welcome back to the launch pad i'm christian reddy your friendly neighborhood astronomer also tonight you're very annoyed astronomer i really am very sorry for all the technical difficulties we've been we had this evening this was quite bizarre but i can see that i'm being seen and that is wonderful thank you all very much and thank you for sticking around and waiting for us again my name is christian reddy for those of you don't know this is launch pad astronomy and in my day job i'm also a professor at towson university where i am the director of the watson king planetarium given that we normally would do planetarium shows on the third friday of every month well given that we would except for like the thing you know i just thought we could do these online and uh when when we do planetarium shows online it's kind of hard to do planetarium shows per se and since we are running just a few minutes late i thought i would just jump right on in to our topic this evening because if you are looking in the direction of the constellation orion that's that unmistakable constellation with the you know kind of looks like what it says on the tin right it looks like a hunter it's got the belt on and all that kind of stuff well when you are looking in that general direction what you may not realize that you may in fact be looking in the direction of an unseen planet lurking at the very outer edges of our solar system at least that is according to my two guests tonight which uh if you'll bear with me as i literally try to re configure everything from you know what i had starting out to what i had to do after i rebooted but my guests tonight are dr mike brown at cal tech university and a professor of planetary astronomy and constantine botegan a theorist as well as an astrophysicist at caltech and by the way mike is also the author of how i killed pluto and why it had it coming yes ladies and gentlemen it's that guy mike brown and constantine fatigue and also the people who firmly believe that there is a thing as a ninth genuine bonafide planet at least according to you two gentlemen gentlemen good evening and welcome hi christian all right so again i'm going to be adjusting the audio levels and maybe the camera brightnesses as we have to uh tonight again i apologies for all the uh all the goof ups but um we've uh what i what i've been i've been a bit of a fan of your work and i shouldn't say a fan but yeah i've been interested in what you guys have been doing i mean it's uh because you're claiming that there's a planet out there and yes i know people are saying there's pluto's and i plan and so forth but we're not talking about that we're not talking about a dwarf planet we are in fact where you are in fact describing or fairly convinced that there is a planet out there that has to be very substantial in mass and something way beyond maybe even a terrestrial-sized planet i was wondering if you could tell tell us a little bit about how you came to this uh hypothesis uh might yeah we could talk about yeah go ahead go for it go ahead mike um so so it really really all started with a couple of different disparate observations that other astronomers had made some of them actually we had made ourselves uh even starting back as early as the the 2003 discovery of the very very distant dwarf planet sedna which was in this very strange elongated orbit sort of pulled away from the rest of the the solar system which was strange we came up with some ideas on where it was then then other astronomers realized that there were these objects which are called centaurs which are things that come in close to the to the sun close means about the orbit of jupiter that's close to us close to the sun but then go really far away and that this was potentially evidence for something strange some maybe a planet in the outer solar system then some other astronomers uh realized that there was some weird patterns going on in the outer part of the solar system and and looking at all these things together um constantine and i realized what uh what what finally put all those different pieces into to make them all make sense we realized what was really going on is that there is a set of very distant kuiper belt objects that are all on these elongated orbits going around the sun like this and they're all kind of fanned off in one direction and after a lot of time of trying really hard to convince ourselves that it was not because there's a planet out there because that just seemed dumb people you know everybody knows there's not another planet out past neptune um but we really came to the conclusion that there really is no other explanation for that behavior that we're seeing in the uh the most distant solar system than a a planet maybe six times the mass of the earth so like the the legitimate fifth largest planet of our whole solar system um out at some distance that's like uh 10 or 20 times the distance of neptune so so really large but really really far away so when you're saying okay so again there's a few things we probably ought to unpack there really quick i mean your your gave a great overview there but obviously the first thing we have to uh dispel anybody that's can that has i think you've called it the lunchbox model right you know there's some of the plants and so forth and it's all right there solar system's a lot bigger than we think right what we think of as the outer solar system jupiter saturn and so forth that's really more like the middle part of the solar system then you've got regions even further beyond you've got the kuiper belt but you're talking about even beyond the kuiper belt am i correct i understand yeah yeah so these are these are objects that are that are further out than even oh there's sedna so here's here is uh this is this was one of the figures we made way back um almost 20 years ago when we discovered sedna and you can see what's weird about said now here's the the solar system jupiter saturn you're i does my mouse show up on here no actually mike this is mine but if you'd like to we could switch over to yours if you if you have your slide up uh this is fine but you can see you know the the the giant planets there you can even see pluto just for entertainment even though it's not a planet and then you see this uh orbit sedna on this very evening elongated orbit much much further out than the than the planets and the other objects that we we realized were also part of this family of objects are also on orbits very much like that uh that that have similar very distant um orbits to them so so this is uh i'm just showing the orbit of sedna here uh and there's more of a zoomed out version of it and again this is this is neptune's orbit folks right here in purple right that's what we're talking about so we're we're way out there and by the way we already have our first super chat holy mackerel i can't believe it uh it's are there any compelling hypotheses for what's been observed well i think we're about to answer that question if i uh if i understand the question correctly uh but thank you so much for the super chat it's very generous i'm going to try to get to all of your questions tonight as as quickly as i can uh but um again just kind of doing some of the setup work here and i'm just really just trying to show the uh uh so this is i think an artist's impression of sedna is that correct yeah if you show if you show my slides you can see let's go back to yours yeah for sure so let me get to okay there you are mike oh and i have to add your again folks my apologies we had the we had that little problem with uh oh you know getting having to restart everything and i'm kind of rebuilding it as we go are you sharing your screen mike i am uh oh no i'm not look at that so it was before and then i wasn't so let's do that oh uh and wow we have another very generous super chat from nicholas paulsen uh from thank you for having dr b on he's a cool guy i've learned a ton from him watching this lectures yeah me too you know what he he's got a fantastic free course on solar system science we should be plugging that as well all right so i think i see your i think i see your uh uh i do believe i see your slides i'm gonna go ahead and oh my goodness we there we go we have your name screen okay great so you're up okay you are up and running mike okay so you can see this this tiny little circle right there that's the orbit of neptune and that's the tiny circle that's in the center barely discernible amid the glow right of the sun uh sedna is this one right here in slightly different color purple okay and then these other distant objects you can see are on these very distant orbits that go very far away come back in to this region of the kuiper belt and they're all splayed off in this direction those were the original six objects that we we uh first recognized as special and and telling us something as of now um there are i'd say they're about 13 that are kind of doing that same thing that are continuing to reinforce that story that there's something going on out there so when you so you said these are just the original uh you said that these were just the original six objects uh those are just the original six objects but were there more objects that i mean like okay you see six and that's pretty that's cool that's nifty but that's not primo fascia proof or evidence of a planet nine is it heck yeah it is yeah oh well look i mean here we have to be right we have to be careful because there there are more objects in the distant kuiper belt than there are the original six and in fact even the original six only four of them are the ones that really count uh largely because you only want to look at the orbits that are stable okay they're objects that are not being whipped around and perturbed strongly by neptune now if you kind of look at how the data set has progressed since 2016 here can you fire up my slides real quick um yeah so this is where uh yeah this is what the data set looks like now and as you can see there's a strong propensity to a whole to have a whole bunch of orbits all pointing in the common direction but there's also you know they're also differently colored uh here the green ones are the ones that are interacting with neptune so strongly that they don't really tell you anything they're the ones that are chaotically diffusing and in any case are kind of on their way out of the solar system you should only really focus your eye on the purple and the metastable the stable purple and the metastable gray orbits and what you'll see is that the data set has more than doubled over the course of the last five years and this tendency for the objects to cluster together in physical space is very much still there now we have done a considerable amount of work to ask ourselves the question of is this by chance is this uh some sort of you know an observational bias and and the simple answer is that there is a chance it's and it's one in 500. so so when you if you don't believe what the data are telling you you are making a one in 500 bet against the house if you will how do you determine uh that it's one one chance in 500 that that is a just a purely chance alignment like where did you know i mean clearly that's not a number you're pulling out of the air that's no no this is actually work that that mike led so i think mike should explain this particular thing it it it was a it was a substantial body of work so the the the hard part is you could imagine if if for some dumb reason astronomers only looked at the sky in one direction then all the objects you would find would be in that direction and and nothing would be meaningful in that sense and uh and and some people suggested when we first saw this pattern that that's what was going on basically and so there's always a chance you know there's always a chance that it's it's not the p that astronomers are dumb and only look in one direction but what if the weather is always better in one season than another it's also not really true because these observations have taken place all around the world so it's it's a little bit hard to make those arguments nonetheless it's an important argument to rule out so we actually went through very exhaustive analysis of the discovery of every single body in the kuiper belt and understood which direction people were looking when they found it how bright it was what it tells us about the circumstances and how that influenced the other discoveries out there and then we can say yeah it is true actually in one direction there's a little bit bigger chance to find it because the weather is better in the northern hemisphere and a lot of the observations in the northern hemisphere and so we can take that into account and ask ourselves the question with with understanding all of those what we call them observational biases understanding all those observational biases what's the chance that we would get a clustering as strong as the clustering is that we see today and that's the answer that constantine said it's it's uh it's one in 500. so probably that cluster is because there's a cluster you know when you see a cluster like that it's a good chance there's a cluster i mean one of the things that i think is really compelling to me is that five years ago when we had half as much data we said look if we're wrong the next set of discoveries will be spread across the sky uniformly and this will disappear it didn't happen we doubled the size of the data and the signal just got stronger that's pretty good evidence that what you're seeing is something that's real uh the other so just to add to this the other thing that you know i find interesting is that if you look at the data you can really see the dynamical effect right you can see that the orbits that are purple that are not interacting strongly with neptune and that have the chance to be shepherded by whatever gravity is further away are better aligned than the ones that are being whipped around by neptune you can talk about all kinds of observational biases weather or galactic plane yada yada it's impossible to have an observational bias that somehow selects for dynamical stability on billion-year time scales that's something that's true theory predicts i would like to say that constantine who really started this game as a purely theoretical astrophysicist just made a really smart observational point that it had never occurred to me before you and i have not talked about that that's a really good point um i'm gonna steal that one from you like it's almost like you understand observations what's going on here i don't i that that is an illusion okay it is an illusion i understand nothing about observation all right you sure you're not veering out of your lane constantine yeah he actually like it's been pretty fun so he and i have taught each other a lot um and i i can pretend to know a little bit of theory and uh he's he like understands the sky in ways that i don't think most theoretical astronomers do mostly what i learned is that is that observing is hard because you got to stay up the entire night like that's that's oh yeah yeah it's bs as well it it's it's it's not fun uh and and you're right it's it's a i mean i've done it myself uh you know i although at least i think when you guys were at your telescope you were inside a warm room you see back in my day no i'm scared uh but yeah um it it is long and tedious work and uh to that end um you know you've had five years so how can you haven't found it yet right i mean you know what the shorter answer is the sky's a big place yeah um it's it's a very weird search that we're doing um unlike anything that has really happened successfully um in uh in a couple centuries if we were saying there's one object for which we're looking and it's somewhere in the sky and we have good predictions on the path that it takes through the sky but not on where along the path is and so trying to find a single object in the sky means you have to have to cover a lot of the sky and you have to cover it repeatedly and you have to get lucky to make sure that the thing you're looking for wasn't right next to a really bright star the day the night you happen to look it's a it's a really difficult thing to find one single object in the sky when you don't know where it is that's faint we're up all night up all night to get lucky that's what we do and also exactly you know the other thing that i found out uh sort of doing uh who's doing this search together with mike is that you know theory you can do theory uh anywhere right you can in fact it is better done in weird places with observing it's not like you know every night we get up and take a look and say uh today is not the night right the number of actual observations successful observational uh you know campaigns that we've had is so limited and this is because this is such a sensitive search everything's got to go right you know and it goes everything goes right so rarely and and by bad luck the uh when we're looking for it the the sky as you as you showed is kind of the region of orion that region of orion is up overhead all night in december-ish our survey is happening on mauna kea december in mauna kea is not a great place to be unless you want to take the you know opportunity to ski in hawaii that's uh we've had often had those opportunities to uh to bring our skis with us and go down the hill that doesn't mean doesn't mean you're observing those nights well i i to that end what i like to do we've had just loads and loads of questions first of all i should say there's like 254 people watching thank you all for for joining us tonight this is this is so exciting um if i may uh if will you guys be up for a few questions here we got like oh a ton we're ready okay uh and so folks what i'm doing is i'm just gonna i'm just scrolling back through the comments and i'm trying to figure out is there a question there and uh i'm just gonna start hitting them so if i don't get to your question feel free to ask it again i'll do my best to get to it but uh trevor fever asks is it a gas planet or a rocky one well i that kind of uh i know the answer i know the answer okay go ahead yes okay you heard it here why women um what yeah well look we cannot say anything about the planet all we can say is the gravitational field and the orbit that it occupies we have ways to calculate that we can't say anything about the planet itself it could be a burrito it could be it could be you know mike yeah chimichanga hamburger it could be any of these things or it could be a rocky planet or an icy one or uh preferably it would be an icy one with a little bit of a gas atmosphere so that it's easier to observe but really we don't know anything about five earth mass planets we don't have a close up analog okay and well you you you just zero in on something i don't think we've covered yet and that is you said that you you estimate that this planet would need to have a mass of about five times earth's mass six times six five to six six six six not five definitely not five so constance for five for six uh folks in the chat please tell us what you think is the mass of this planet let me say um as much as we are we are being honest about uh our ignorance about the nature of the planet we do have we have our we have hypotheses about what it is likely to be which are just informed by what we think about where it came from and the evolution of the solar system frequently what we think about where things came from and the evolution is wrong so you should take it all with a with a grain of salt but uh our our our favorite hypothesis for how it got there is that it's a a planet much like uranus or neptune formed in the same region as uranus and neptune and got ejected to the outer parts of the solar system and has been hanging around there ever since then so my guess is that it is a sort of uh ice icy gassy planet like uranus and neptune um but if i'm wrong about that guess it would not surprise me all that much because we are frequently wrong about things we don't know about the solar system and planets in general so uh it could be a super earth or a mini neptune or something in between because earth is one earth mass i think uh neptune is 14 earth masses so five kind of five to six kind of puts it yeah yeah i mean the exciting thing about all this is that five earth masses appears a fiber mass object appears to be a dominant outcome of the planet formation process throughout the galaxy most exoplanets that we found are sort of in that in that size and mass range so um this would be the closest thing we'll have to a window to kind of really zero in and study the most common type of planet in in the galaxy right yeah yeah most of most of the plants out there are in this intermediate range and we don't have anything like that nearby what do we do well i mean nearby nearby because how far are we talking how how far what is the semi-major axis of this planet well way down here and then you got this great big ellipse so drumroll please i was actually beating up on constantine out of normal that is hundreds of astronomical units uh what we disagree about are the error bars and uh and i think i'm right um but um you know i would venture a guess that the semi major axis is something like 500 500 i'm okay with that unless okay i'm okay with 500. okay all right so uh so i guess i'm trying to go through a few of these other questions here uh we had some we had some super questions right are we supposed to answer the super questions we we are uh yeah i would like to go ahead and give the super chat since they were generous enough to to donate i want to give them a kind of a heads up here oh wow okay so um super chat 29 thank you so much for the super chat thank you for sharing time things with us regarding the potential formation of planet nine what do you think of david well nezubornis i messed that up theory about pluto kicking it out of its orbit uh look so there's there's two different uh models out there that talk about kicking things out of the solar system the one that david has worked on and we worked on as well back in i guess 2012 yeah was it we were yeah that was a little long um well look it's that that model almost certainly has nothing to do with planet nine and here's why um let me backtrack a little bit the idea here is that the solar system formed in a more compact configuration and then as the uh gas went away you know during the kind of period of the solar system's transient instability one planet could have been ejected could it have been planet nine i think no because during this time you have to form the oort cloud okay the the oort cloud where the long period the really long period comets come from had to have formed during this uh ejection of icy material into the distant realms while this is happening the solar system cannot be embedded in his birth cluster okay because if it's there then the passing stars in the birth cluster of the sun would have made the orb cloud unbound this means that there wouldn't have been the perturbations from the passing stars to park planet nine into its orbit so all of this goes to say that if that the interactions the ejection that would have produced planet nine predated the nisborny ejected planet so i'm not sure i'd buy that but but okay okay well you know sounds good let me let me uh let me bring up this next uh super chat uh let's see here i why can't i uh okay super chat from rick thank you so much rick i wonder if the vera rubin telescope will help define planet nine mike seems extraordinarily skeptical but uh i'll go ahead mike would you mind sharing your thoughts as to why my my prediction if i had to bet money right now um i would bet that the vera rubin telescope finds planet nine so so here's why for for those who haven't been paying attention the vera rubin telescope uh the one that used to be called the lsst is the new big telescope that they're building in in chile that's going to basically survey the entire sky once every approximately three nights with about a six meter telescope there it is and it is going to be fantastic and so if if we have not found planet nine by the time this starts operating planet nine is not gonna be able to hide um from from this machine which is just gonna be so amazing it's it'll do a lot of different things but for me it's just it's gonna be finding so many of the moving objects out there in the outer solar system planet nine amongst them so my hope is that we find it before then because it'd be more fun to find it before then but i i like to think of uh vera rubin as as the big back backstop that will make sure that planet nine gets found and so i think that's going to be coming online well i know that they had to pause construction due to the pandemic so i don't know what the expected first light science operations dates are going to be let me get to another one wow we got another from i spammed out thanks man you guys are so generous and and folks listen you don't have to i'm trying to give them priority but you know please is not to say and if you're a student of mine you're you're by definition broke so don't don't do that um but if this planet was both ejected from its initial orbit and is near other objects that aren't orbiting it wouldn't that mean it would technically be a dwarf planet due to not having cleared its neighborhood i mean no it's that is the correct answer well i think i think it's fair to say that um clearing the neighborhood i'll be honest i'm not a big fan of that of the wording there what does it mean to clear something but clearly this object would have dynamically dominated it's it's region of the solar system i mean all of the other the only reason we know it exists is because of its dynamical dominance of that of the entire out of the solar system it is i would say it is the most planety planet out there it's dominating the largest area uh compared bigger than any other planet in the solar system so it's it is by far the most planity in terms of volume of space yeah it's dominating even more space than jupiter is yup wow that's that's phenomenal uh is planet nine the same object as the fifth giant planet in the nice model so we think no but mike mike is less convinced of that negative uh assessment than me well just quickly explain what the niece model is just a quick quick two-step it's actually the exact same question as the nesvorni question those are those i think so yeah i i apologize but i would so let me say though that i you know constantine knows what he's talking about and i'm just a dumb astronomer but i like to make up things sometimes so i i kind of wonder if his his story about the timeline couldn't be modified somehow if you couldn't have things get out into an intermediate org cloud and then slowly so as the as the birth cluster is dissolving that things can sort of dissolve away too but you know i just like to make things up so i don't know i don't know i don't know i mean like we but we don't know i mean possibly they threw they threw a fifth planet in there a fifth core in there and they saw it get ejected um you know but that of course is a computer model we don't know for sure uh exactly uh hiroshi loves you thank you so much for the super chat uh hi mike have you ever considered that if you hadn't killed pluto and heiress with planet x you could have not only one but two nobel prizes many greetings and love from germany well at least it was with love thanks hiroshi um you know i i let me just say that that uh killing pluto or i will say uh helping drive the realization that pluto should never have been a planet to begin with i think was actually really quite important for helping to to drive our understanding of what the real solar system is like uh you know it would have been easy to have jumped up and down and argued that this thing that i discovered was a planet and many of the other things i discovered with the planet but it would have felt fraudulent for a long time so maybe there had been two nobel prizes um but i would have felt pretty fraudulent about about both of them and i have to query just because you know i want to is that uh the the discoveries of these things in the outer solar system um uh were recognized with um with with one of the other big prizes in astronomy the kavli prize and i think that actually is that the fact that they recognized these discoveries not just mine but also dave jewett and jane blue as as important things in all of astronomy i think was uh was a really told how important it was not just the discovery of these objects but the realization of what they mean and what they tell us about the solar system uh we have another super chat from martin stallard two pounds thank you martin could planet nine be a rogue planet now i uh martin i'm not sure what you mean by rogue play but when i hear rogue planet i think interstellar planet just something that's wandering around out there see what it did wander planet so could be it could be a captured uh interstellar planet so uh it can not be a rogue planet for one simple reason which is that in order to shape depends in the outer solar system that we see and that we use basically to infer the existence of planet nine you need billions of years of sustained gravitational interactions right this is not something that can fly by the solar system and kind of modify its structure once and and be done with it uh you really needed to be in orbit of the sun and you needed to be in orbit of the sun for billions of years could it have been captured from another star in the birth cluster of the sun that's one really cool idea that uh i actually like a lot but the calculations uh to date suggests that the the probability of that is negligible um so you're saying it's possible yeah there's a chance there's a chance it's like that dumb and dumber i i i like that idea too it's a very compelling idea just because it's kind of fun but but the dynamical the the dynamical chances are tricky right yeah basically because the third possibilities are good go ahead mike i'm sorry the third possibility is that it actually formed out there um which is not traditionally where we think things that size could have formed and it's a little weird and i don't think it's possible um but it's something we should not discard yet i think well uh actually there's uh uh th this dovetails into the end of the super chat thank you so kindly silly man uh has planet nine has a planet nine like planet been found around a different star actually yeah just uh just recently it's hd something with a bunch of numbers it's got a license plate yeah it starts with this thing yeah yeah hd106 906. that's right it i made a video about it and i kept got to memorizing that so yeah but go ahead and tell us about it or what you know it's there it's what we know about it is that it's it's that it's there and the story for how it got there is basically the one that mike uh mike discussed right the one where you know it's it's orbiting this binary star so the binary star can easily eject things and then if you do that while you're in the cluster with a bunch of other stars you park orbit on a planet nine like um you know planet nine like trajectory and so look it's it's cool because it it's not of course it has nothing to do with planet nine directly but it does tell you that objects like planet nine are out there and that the process that makes such objects might very much be generic i'm having a heart attack uh because uh i'm spammed out with a 100 super chat holy cannoli oh my gosh thank you while i agree pluto shouldn't be a shouldn't be a plan i feel that iu plant definition is embarrassingly shoddy work and i don't think we are any closer to understanding solar system classification as a result of it that means do no do more harm than than the end does good yeah so do you if you if you have a couple hours i'm happy to rant about this i don't i don't actually disagree with um much of uh i i'm spammed out's commentary but i'll point out that it was it was intentionally it's not shoddy it was it was intentionally uh sort of messed up by the people who wanted to keep the possibility that pluto might be classified as a planet so that whole dwarf planet thing was was put in by pro-pluto people in the hopes that they could make dwarf planets planets and so really the the the big problem is that there does not need to be a definition of the word planet there is no definition of any other term in all of astronomy i mean is there a definition of star no there's a concept that we all understand and we talk about galaxies we know what they are there's no iau approved definition the problem is there was a great um uh outcry from the public who wanted to know you know what is and what is not a planet textbooks need to write what is a planet what's not a planet so the astronomers felt obligated to do it it's not easy to write down a definition although it's easy to write down a concept the concept is the large gravitationally dominant objects in the solar system are the planets that's a concept that's it's simple and it's it's if you understand that you can really understand what's going on in your planetary system once you say that you can say well does this does this fit that concept pluto clearly does not fit that concept if you try to make a very lawyer-like definition has to be round has to be in orbit around the sun it has to clear its orbit as soon as you make a lawyer-like definition you'll get lawyers starting to come up with really stupid arguments they're like oh well clearly there are near-earth asteroids so the earth is not a planet hahaha and you're like no dummy um it's just that you're a lawyer and you're reading this in a lawyer-like way it's just like understand the concept forget about the lawyer-like definition understand the concept the concept matters for the physics for understanding what's going on the definition is a kind of a sad thing that i wish would go away i think there's there's really kind of like two uh domains in which we can consider a planet i mean look when i look at pluto you know i'm seeing something that's round i'm seeing something that's going around the sun it's got an atmosphere it has active geology it has glaciers it sure looks a lot like a plant to me in the geophysical sense you know planet is a perfectly reasonable thing that comes to mind it's only when you start to zoom out and you start to see it's you know it's it's weird orbit it's kind of drunk out there you know along with eris and the others are kind of fl you know and they're not shaping i mean you know the moon the moon is a perfectly good planet in that sense too and yeah exactly the moon's the moon's a planet right and and and i understand the argument from the geophysical community or the planetary planetary physics uh planetary geology community where yeah you know we it's easier just to call them planet just for the sake of discussion and i don't have a problem with that either i guess it's just i'm looking at it from like i think let me be let me also be clear that that that argument from the planetary geology community is from the same three people uh all the time it's not a there's there's no widespread planetary geophysics or planetary geology community that's wanting to change this definition of planet it's really the same three guys who have been doing this for for 15 years and won't give up but really everybody else has moved on we know it's not a planet we understand what planets are we understand the concept and we're now willing to talk about why there are only eight maybe we're about to find nine planets in the solar system instead of arguing about does this count or not because that's just like the most uninteresting argument that you can spend your time making okay all right well thank you very much i'm spanned out for that let me get to another question here going back to searching for the planet given the tough sensitivity requirements would it be possible this is from matt goldman thank you so much matt to detect plant knives via an occultation imaging technique that's very interesting we found uh we found an asteroid or two that way haven't we uh no no oh that's right we found we found rings around asteroids i'm sorry that's the problem and so the answer that question is no and that sort of tells you why it's hard it's a great idea we count rings that way once you know i'm actually really excited about occultations of of of many things including planet nine once we find planet nine what we'll do is we'll carefully track its orbit and we will look ahead and maybe if we're lucky you know in months to years it will go in front of a star and and uh occult that star it's fantastic when it does because when it as it goes in front it lets us probe the atmosphere as it slowly blinks out we get the size across we see it come back we get to see the atmosphere some more super exciting stuff but it's really hard to even find a moment when it happens and so if you imagine like how would you do it if you could if you could watch every star in the entire sky the whole time for a year you might get lucky and at one moment for about you know five seconds it'll blink out because it's planet nine it's a it's a tough way to actually find it but man it's gonna be super once we find planet nine to do some occultations can't wait look if you had one moment would you capture it or would you let it slip uh christopher talking about we don't hear you try it again with the mute button turned off i turn i try to mute myself because i i'm coughing and you know and all that stuff no i'm fine it's just you know something went down the wrong pipe earlier hey you know what we got another uh super chat this is from cullen wright uh this one's for constantine our and as as i'm saying by the way thank you all so much for the super chat tonight guys this is this is super generous i can't tell you i'm like having like a little like a heart attack here this is just amazing you know but uh are you still the belief that a ninth planet could explain the six degree tilt of our sun colin thanks for that question yeah it's a good it's a really good one i think no this is one of the things that was a possibility early on when we didn't know the orbit of planet nine very well and one of the potential orbit and mass combinations that were allowed by the initial kind of you know four or six uh object data set allowed for an up and a planet nine that would over four and a half billion years tilt the rest of the planets just enough to explain that six degree tilt um with the revised planetary orbit and mass we think that effect of course that effect is still there but it only amounts to about one degree so i think that no those two things we've come to realize are disconnected that's okay there's i don't know a hundred different other ways to tilt the sun um in terms of just physical mechanisms that that are plausible but uh this one i think is not connected to planet knight and it's really it's really too bad because i i remember the day we first had this realization we were sitting in your office and we were sitting there with pencils i'm like no look if it's like this and it goes like this and then it'll twist and it'll be like this and you're like no it's not like this i'm like no look at this it's like this it was a it was a fun day [Laughter] that's not true well that's kind of a bummer because that was one of the things that i always liked about the original hypothesis it was looking massive enough to explain that offset but uh not quite uh so okay this is a fun question also another super chat thank you matt johnson uh this is from matt johnson uh it is still for matt johnson wait a minute oh yeah uh when planning is officially located do you have any type of particular celebration plan that you want to do we're not liberty to discuss very good okay first first rule of fight club is steven gold with the five dollar super chat thank you so much stephen what became actually there is there is one answer i can say one answer this is literally true i promised my daughter if once we find it i will i will take her and we'll go live in paris for the summer that's that's my main celebration okay i think that's legit all right planet nine paris and if there's no plan nine don't ever take it from paris uh yeah yeah good there's no planet if there's no planet nine we go to moscow okay there you go very good it's very good you know about that right uh so stephen gold uh what became of robert s harrington's observation of planet x in 1983 that's a really good question i don't know i i think when you were writing the the review article we looked into this right yeah i mean the answer is there there was nothing there um there never was anything there and there's still nothing there um there were i actually i it's it's funny i've sort of put it out of my mind too like what were those observations uh so the important point is and this is a this is even though this sounds like it's not important but it is important there is no planet x planet x planet x was a an actual hypothesis by percival lowell that there was a giant planet just beyond the orbit of neptune that was perturbing the orbits of uranus and neptune that is what planet x is we've sort of forgotten that and have started to use the word planet x to mean anything out there but it's the wrong way to use that that term planet x is percival lowell's planet that perturbs uranus and neptune and we now know um from this very nice paper written in 1989 um by by miles standish that the that there there is no planet x there are no perturbations to uranus and neptune uranus and neptune are exactly where they're supposed to be um there might be a planet nine there is a planet nine um but there is no planet x on a you know i mean i i realize we don't do science by belief or by gut feeling this is obviously something that you've really done the analysis on wasn't a conclusion that you jumped to uh just because it looked cool you you were you kind of had to really beat the data down a little bit and convince yourselves that there really could be uh really likely is a planet out there if i were to ask on a scale of i don't know like one to ten with like 10 being i mean obviously no one's 100 10 but you know 10's being like 100 confident where would you think you are on the hypothesis right now just that it's there like not what its mass is or its orbit but what would you rate yourself at maybe 499 out of 500. okay 4.995 okay all right adjusting the scale this is i mean look it's this is a hard one to answer because um at the end of the day you know we do we do what we can we do the best uh theoretical work the best observational work that we can and and keep going i think you know uh we don't really spend much time you know sitting around like okay so do you think it's really there you know 9 out of 10 or whatever um because you know you you just take you just go where the modeling where the data takes you and and that's it you know we're not really uh i almost like to think that we're not really even uh there to do it ourselves we're just sort of you know being guided by the flow of of you know the incoming data the data stream and the in the simulation and i'll say um to reiterate uh and i would say with with new discoveries it's probably up to one in a thousand there is there is a 900 999 out of a thousand percent chance that something is affecting the outer solar system the only currently viable hypothesis this this is answering um somebody's question from early on is are there any other viable hypotheses you know it's really interesting because when constantly and i wrote this paper back five years ago one of the things we told ourselves is like we know people are really good at coming up with alternate theories so there will be alternate theories within 10 minutes and we'll have to start looking and see if anybody any of them make sense in in the five years there have been there have been maybe two-ish attempts neither of them have been very successful explaining all the different aspects of what's going on and and i find that uh amazing astronomers are really good at explaining phenomena with many different explanations and the fact that nobody else can come up with a viable explanation the fact that there's a 999 chances out of a thousand that something's happening it gives me a lot of confidence that what's happening is that there's a planet up there now are there things that we're we don't quite understand and so our predictions about its location its size everything else are messed up in some way that is entirely plausible um but is there is there nothing going on or is there some alternative explanation i i think the probability is really really quite small at this point fair enough okay so something's going on out there just gotta figure out i'm trying to get to some more questions uh here uh in the remaining few minutes this may be more of a rapid fire uh session because i don't wanna keep you guys all all night uh but uh eric's asking how are you and i'm going way back into the chats guys so i'm trying to catch up here how are you getting so much telescope time i understand it's pretty hard to get a proof for time uh the quick answer is you get approved by having a really compelling project people find this pretty compelling agreed agreed and this is perhaps more yeah maybe somewhat rhetorical but it took a couple 14 years to finally confirm the existence of the exoplanet nine why do people think finding our planet will take just a few years well i i think maybe the the to start to answer the questions just to kind of qualify a little bit of it is that it wasn't like hubble was looking for 14 years like people were you know there were astronomers who have been studying this particular star and they suspect that there was a planet there and they asked for time on hubble to got to get it um but that also goes to the larger point why do we think it would it's been five years and this is actually something we already talked about so i apologize for recovering it but uh it it's hard it's hard technically all you need is three nights to discover it i mean that's that's what you really need uh but uh it's gotta be the right three nights and you've got to be a little i mean it's it's a needle in a haystack does not begin to cover it right it's needle in a haystack in a dark room uh which is itself embedded within a bunker which is itself embedded within i don't know uh something like that and you have to stay up all night or i think i said in my video something like you're trying to find that one you know not quite as blue colored drop of water in an ocean you know and yeah it's actually kind of like that uh i don't know the plane that crashed and the this is okay seven years ago you know the the airliner right um right you know roughly where it is like you know roughly where it fell but the ocean's a big place it's hard to find things when you're looking for just that one little thing uh i know we already talked about how much time per year you have to search there's basically a season you know whenever orion is visible um and even then you're not getting like every single night on the telescope you may only be getting a couple of a few nights out of the year or a few weeks out of the year uh depending on the year yeah we are literally so it depends it's a question that depends a lot on that we have we have a whole sort of nested search we have some small telescopes with with uh big surveys that are covering the whole sky that we do every single night they're they're sort of mini versions of the vera rubin telescope uh public data set um planet nine might be in it everybody can go out and download the data look for planet nine so those are nightly we have some bigger telescopes that cover more limited space and then our our biggest our our narrowest search with the biggest telescope is on the subaru telescope um and we really only get uh three to six nights a year on that it's a it's a very limited resource but it covers so we really pinpoint the places where we really think it might be and where we really think it's gonna be the faintest if it is and we try to get it there so that's we're headed off there in about a month to go give it a try and uh unnatural log is asking some say pan stars has ruled out its existence i think we may have covered that very indirectly but do you want to comment on that uh there have been no um published pan stars analysis of i don't know people may say that but no one's demonstrated it might be true i've actually finished my pan star search so it does actually it doesn't rule out the existence it's not in the pan starts data pan stars doesn't go very paint so you wouldn't you wouldn't see it uh actually vegas sims asked uh what magnitude do you think it would be given its incredible distance so again magnitude they don't know it you know it's a number we assigned to describe the brightness of an object the lower the number the hot brighter it is the higher the number the fainter it is plant 9 is going to be pretty faint isn't it yeah 24 maybe magnitude 24. it depends so there's i mean there's a lot we don't know we don't know how reflective it is we don't know exactly how far away it is we don't know how big it is we know how massive it is but not how big it is and so there's a wide range i think 24 is the faint end and 24 we need subaru i think on the bright end it might be 21 and that's in range of pan stars is this survey telescope on haleakala so so it's a range and that's why we use this range of telescopes to try to do the service turn up and i think uh constantine lee asked uh is it this may be best directed to you i don't know but do you think it could have played a role in the drop off in the density of the kuiper belt 44 au it's there's not much there we call it the kuiper belt fault drop-off uh yeah do you think yeah i think uh i think the two things really are are unrelated um the better explanation for the drop-off at 44 au is simply that that's where the solar nebula the proto-solar nebula just ended and there are a ton of there are a bunch of different ways to truncate the uh the nebulae one way to do it is through external photo evaporation and so really i think uh planet nine uh planet nine has nothing to do with what the uh with the 44 au drop off yeah okay fair enough uh and try to get to a couple more of these really quick here i'm we also started late you guys okay for a couple more minutes uh okay we spill over for a few just a few minutes so then thanks um uh let me uh let's see if i can get on to another question that i haven't really we haven't really uh gotten to it um well uh yours truly was asking how's the telescope see the whole sky doesn't really see the whole sky you are choosing a region of the sky to look and based on about if you if you take your hand at about this distance yeah and make a big circle that's about how much we grew at one time okay and that's that's not because that means you you gotta it's a long time to cover the whole sky systematically we should try making a bigger circle with our hands next time because we keep your hands with that so the trick is the trick is to have shorter arms well i mean uh but but the vera ruben telescope though joking aside it's going to have a fairly large field of view i mean it's going to be i can't remember how many degrees it is but it's was it like five degrees across i think uh it's it's huge and it's it's a it's it's scanning the whole sky all night every night so it's gonna be fantastic just fantastic uh this is an interesting question uh i think may know i may only say would you be surprised if it's it's a brown dwarf instead yeah we would be super surprised because uh brown dwarf has been ruled out by the wise survey so there's nothing you know nothing more massive than saturn in the solar system uh in the distant solar system out to some extraordinary number of astronomical units like 9 000 or 30 000 or something uh so so we would be very surprised just to be clear the the y survey that's a that was a wide field infrared survey explorer infrared right so it's looking for looking for things that are that are cool that are radiating in the infrared wise would have found a brown dwarf easily yeah easily right okay cool uh so uh let's see uh in fact let me say wise has found many brown dwarves well beyond the solar system so finding one in the solar system is super easy uh so william what william wester asked let's see what the new extreme tnos discovered is the evidence based upon orbital alignment stronger or weaker than your publication thinking of your recent new michigan paper it's stronger yeah i think right yeah yeah i mean it's it's really it's one of those things where you can you can sit around and try to do all the fancy math you want but it's really hard to just look at that plot that constantine showed and not see the pattern that's out there and unless you can come up with some extraordinary reason why all of these objects are clustered the way they are um the real answer is they're just clustered the way it looks sometimes things really are just what they see like it's there was this very nice uh xcd comic right after the first vaccine trials were shown and they just had that beautiful plot that everybody's seen where you have the rates of the people who are unvaccinated going up and up and up and up and as soon as the people got vaccinated it went flat and you're like sometimes the best experiments don't require statistics and i kind of think that we're at that level at this point great let me let's see if i can find just a couple of more questions here i really did want to try to get to everybody's uh questions and comments but there's a lot which is a wonderful problem to have uh we may have to have you guys back on uh at some point uh if that's okay uh and don't let me put you on the spot or anything feel free to say no no way to this to this entire audience feel free to say there's no way we'll ever come back okay good so we'll have you back next week and uh the um uh well let's see i think we are yeah okay so we are we are coming up a little bit toward the end of our of our hour here but what i'll what i'll just uh i'd like to ask you guys a question you know i did a video about this uh i did a video about this topic uh some time ago and um i i got a lot of comments on it and actually we're going back to 2018 it was a long time ago and i and i got a number of comments on it and one of the comments i never really had a good response for and i was wondering if you could help me out with it uh it says uh we we already know uh where all you rocket scientists stand you're all a pack of lying government who sold your soul to satan for breadcrumbs you're going to cause the death of millions of your friends and neighbors and you'll be covered with their blood the day you are standing in yeah i mean i thought the sad thing is um that rand paul 2018 the sad thing is if we did we sold ourselves to the government and it was literally for breadcrumbs i mean really would probably have done better but but all we got was the breadcrumbs in fairness in fairness guys they were they had nice they had a little bit of basil and olive oil in it they were it was they were good bread crumbs they were good they were very good almost like almost like croutons okay so anyway i thought it ended up on on that note uh yeah hey folks this has just been an amazing conversation and once again i hope i was able to get to as many of these questions these wonderful questions as i could uh but i do want to thank again my guests mike brown and constantine bategan uh the the hunter the the astronomer and hunters of planet nine um gents i really hope you find it i mean i think it would be in a remarkable a remarkable discovery i think they're high-fiving each other and as you can see these are the very uh you know um yeah this is the this is this is nobel material right here what you're looking at folks this is what we got here so anyway i do want to just uh close out by saying thank you all once again uh for coming on tonight and i especially want to give a huge thanks to my patreon supporters for their generous support in helping to keep launch pad astronomy plus all those super chats all that helps to keep the lights on around here and i do appreciate that i also want to say a huge thanks to michael dowling stephen j morgan and morris and wild for their cosmological level support and to anna and to travis graham for their intergalactic level support now if you would like to help support launch pad for the price of a cup of coffee every month you know or maybe two cups just check out my patreon page it's right over there and if you'd like to join me on this journey to this amazing universe of ours well please do make sure that you subscribe and ring that notification bell so that you don't miss out on any new videos until next time my friends stay home stay healthy and please always stay curious my friends good night

Channel: Launch Pad Astronomy

Views: 30,029

Keywords: planet 9 with mike brown and konstantin batygin, planet 9, mike brown, planet 9 orbit, konstantin batygin, planet x, solar system, planet nine, kuiper belt and oort cloud, kuiper belt, planet 9 from outer space, christian ready, Launch pad astronomy

Id: QR4guNpcU68

Length: 62min 42sec (3762 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 16 2021