Planet Nine From Outer Space

well good evening my name is Bruce Campbell I'm the chair of the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies here at the National Air and Space Museum welcome to the third talk in our series for this year of exploring space lectures first of all let me start by thanking our sponsors to companies who have been instrumental in providing the equipment that is both launched and propelled spacecraft many of whose discoveries we see here in these series that would be United Launch Alliance and Aerojet Rocketdyne please join me in thanking them it's my pleasure tonight to introduce Michael Brown he is the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg professor of planetary astronomy at Caltech he is of course famous for discovering numerous Kuyper belt objects and for having authored that book about killing Pluto throughout his career he's received many awards he's received the URI prize he's received a Fineman prize and the Catholic prize in astrophysics and tonight of course he'll be telling us all about the mysterious search for Planet 9 please join me in welcoming Mike Brown [Music] so there's a strange I've never done this where I'd like do questions for half an hour ahead of time and then pretend like I'm being introduced right now for the first time so it's like so it's kind of fun it's like oh I know all you people that's good so as we have been discussing I'm going to talk about the search for this latest planet at the edge of the solar system and and I cannot talk about this without really bringing you back for a couple of hundred years thinking about all of the planets that have been discovered in the solar systems only take you back first to 1780 it's really not that long ago in human history 1780 and 1780 if you if you looked at a map of the outer solar system the map of the outer solar system would show you well let me show you Jupiter and Saturn exploding working okay scary what I can't see what's going on back here so the map of the other soulstone will show you you know Jupiter is out there and Saturn Saturn was the edge of the solar system the last known planet in the solar system it had been that way for all of human history and you know I I don't know I've never been able to find any written record of anybody speculating whether there should or shouldn't be other planets beyond Saturn I don't know so so but maybe people thought that there could be another planet out there maybe they didn't but in 1781 William Herschel was charting stars in the sky and you would you would draw where they were making chart to be scarred using his big telescope that he had developed and he got to this one spot in the sky and there was something that looked like a little bit like a star but his telescope was good he had really good optics in his telescope and he could tell it was a little bit fuzzy fuzzy you know there are fuzzy things in the sky there these things that we call planetary nebulae that are that are fuzzy balls of gas and sky really far away he thought it was probably one of those he came back and took a look at it the next day and it moved and as soon as you see something this guy moved from one night to the next you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this thing is in our own solar system and he was reluctant to call it the planet he didn't he didn't know for sure he thought okay we've seen things move new things in the solar systems have been discovered before comet's comets come in the fuzzy you see them here they move across the sky they get brighter so he kind of thought maybe it's a comet he wasn't sure contracted for a while and other people tracked it for a while it looked like it was really far away beyond Saturn which is pretty amazing to think that there could be something out there again he still remained reluctant to think it was actually a planet out there but but eventually everybody realized was really far away and started discussing the fact that he discovered this new this new planet but people were still not sure so they trying to track it down the way to know if it was really a planet versus a comet was to see if it went a circular orbit around the Sun like planets do or if it was like a comet and they came in and went further out now the problem is to calculate the orbit of a planet of something that far takes you know a couple hundred years you have to watch and go all the way on the Sun and nobody really wanted to wait that long but it turns out Uranus had been observed earlier in 1820 a French astronomer Alexis Bouvard wrote this great book he went back and tracked down all the times in the past when Uranus had accidentally been observed so I love the book for the the name is not very exciting I can see from its astronomical tables Jupiter Saturn and Uranus but the best part is the bar when he write the book look at all these titles order the region Royal Legion of Honor Academy and Sciences and your longitude royal science in Munich London I'm from now on I'm writing all these of all my books come and see so he wouldn't track out every time Uranus had been observed and what he found is that you could find Uranus in the past and discovered in 1781 and he used these formulas he'll be a test later on everybody September I do think he figured out this is his theory where your nurse should be and what he did is he took the observations from 1781 up to 1820 and he then with backwards in time and he realized that if you go backwards in time you could find well here here's what you could find 1781 it was first thing 1771 he found observations were some astronomer somewhere had been doing what what what Herschel did making charts of the sky put a star here but Satta strana mer did two things not as good at Herschel one is that that astronomers telescope was not as good so that you didn't notice that it was a fuzzy dot instead of a star and also he didn't go back a second night and double-check any of these astronomers had gone back a second night and double check would have seen it moved but none of them did 1771 there was a star there where no star had ever been charted before or since Bouvard said hey maybe that was Uranus and went all the way back to 1690 and found observations where an astronomer had catalogued Uranus inadvertently in the right spot but hadn't gone back and checked and realized that it would have moved the next day pretty amazing so he found all these data made this uh this beautiful theory on exactly where yours should be and then he also realized that these are the base these are the errors this is how far away Uranus was and where it was supposed to be so there's pluses there's minuses plusses pluses minuses minuses minus minus is plus and so now sometimes that's a little head miss orbit sometimes it's a little behind and Bouvard is a theoretical astronomer theoretical astrophysicist assumes we're all theoretical astrophysicists do even to this day and he says it right here basically says like well my theory is perfect but the data are profitable and he does say however down here somewhere there is an alternative possibility which is that there might be another planet out there this Huggy Uranus along and so he suggests that starting in 1820 people should look really carefully and it really just that the observations were bad then people would start to look more carefully and starting in 1820 everything would be perfect well starting in 1820 people started looking more carefully and the observation still were not where the prediction was what does not go so much different there we go Bouvard realized from 1820 to about 1840 ad the observation started getting progressively further and further from where they were supposed to be boo bard realized as did pretty much everybody at the time that there was another planet out there this is actually something that's not very well known where we'll talk about the discovery of Neptune in 1845 here a minute but it was people knew that there was a planet out there the hard part was not to figure out that there was a planet move argh had figured out that there was a planet the hard part was to figure out where that planet was so Bouvard in Paris handed his data to the very a also there in Paris and said figure out where this planet is man and the various sat down and made these huge equations trying to figure out perturbations of Neptune of Uranus and realized basically is that Uranus is going around the Sun and if there's a planet out here as Uranus is going around the Sun when Uranus is here it gets tugged further ahead in its orbit when it's here it gets pulled backwards in its orbit and that explains the pluses the minuses systematically vary a presented this work at the basically the National Academy in Paris and all of the Parisian astronomers clapped their hands and said nice work the very a live areas like let's go find it and they're like oh no no no because again this is these things you can't quite find written down but I think it's true I think even then people did not really believe that you could do something like predict a planet based on based on math that's just crazy like it was good math they were impressed with his math but didn't actually think you could use it to predict a planet so they just you know wanted to give them a medal for nice math but not looking so instead he you know he sends an email to a buddy in Berlin maybe not email not sure sends an email and says hey I have a prediction I think there's a plan and I think it's right there and the Berlin Observatory opens up the telescope and in that very first night in the very first spot they look there it is Neptune which is to this day you know everybody who's a scientist has their own one thing in their field that they think is the most amazing thing ever this is it for me I think that that moment when the very a said there's a planet and in the unit that the Berlin Observatory opened up the telescope and there was a planet it doesn't get any more amazing that that slammed the door shut on this belief that mass can't be used to actually talk about the universe around us this is a planet discovered as they said at the time at the point of a pencil which is which is a pretty amazing thing so very a not surprisingly and and quite deservedly gets super famous and as happens all the time some dude gets famous for finding the planet everybody else says I'm going to find me a planet get famous too so people even literally within a month people started suggesting that there was another planet out beyond Neptune a ninth planet out beyond Neptune based on perturbations because you can do the same thing with Neptune find Neptune further back you could look at the perturbations of Uranus and find perturbations like that so really was everybody starting in about 1846 went kind of planet crazy I tried once collecting all the different places I can find somebody predicting a planet and they are there's too many to find most of them are on the verge of crazy but some of them were not crazy some of them were based on observations of Uranus and Neptune it did suggest it was something going on and the most famous of these many people know about and those were the the predictions by Percival Lowell that there was this thing that he called Planet X out there perturbing Neptune this is Planet X is this thing that perturbs the orbit of Neptune just like Neptune perturb the orbit of yours he spent a lot of long time looking for Planet X he founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff and he didn't live long enough to see the search for Planet X at Flagstaff really get under way but Clyde Tombaugh starting in 1929 began surveying the sky looking for Planet X just like Lowell had predicted and he took a picture and there it is do you guys see Planet X well you probably don't see it so Tom bout didn't see it either II took pictures like this and he realized that you know he didn't know what Planet X was supposed to look like if it were a big planet to Planet X if it's perturbing neptune it's huge it's the size of Jupiter and if it was the size of Jupiter would actually a pretty big planet here in the middle he would see it just the same way that that Herschel saw Uranus and knew that there was something funny about it everybody thought that you'd do the same thing with Planet X Clyde Tombaugh was was smart enough to know that he didn't know what he was looking for which is actually one of the harder things to know and so he knew that the way to find Planet X was not to look for it this way but to do exactly what Herschel did was to take a picture of the sky come back the next and I take another picture this guy and watch it move two guys say move alright let's try this again on the first night he would see the picture of the sky the second night he would see it with anybody it yeah sure you did he'll try a third time here dad maybe who thinks I see it I don't know why but the fourth time everybody seems to always get here's the fourth time make sure the sky another picture of the sky this is it this is the discovery of Pluto this is a this is a Clyde Tombaugh 1930 systematically scanning the sky but he actually just started I told you started in 1929 he started in late 1929 by early 1930 he had already found it because it was pretty much right where Lowell had predicted it should be just pretty amazing because Lowell was looking for this kind of jupiter-sized planet and so they found it so what does that mean well 1930 headlines of the New York Times a ninth planet discovered on the edge of the solar system lies far beyond Neptune and all true so far so good sighted 25 years after Percival Lowell started searching also true a special photo telescope I'm not sure what that means makes thorough check good nice astronomers here's my favorite part the sphere possibly larger than Jupiter meets predictions those are two deadly statements first one possibly larger than this troopers only wrong by a factor of 250,000 meets predictions is why it was wrong this is the way that science can sometimes go wrong science can correct itself when it goes wrong this way but it can sometimes go wrong if you make a prediction that there's a planet out there you go look and there's something it's got to be what you made the prediction about right it can't just be some coincidental tiny little ice ball that sits right there must be this planet nearly the size of Jupiter so it's not nearly the size of Jupiter and in fact we now know a Uranus and Neptune are not being perturbed at all in their orbits so there is no Planet X that's perturbing them and so so this is what we call well you know this is the New York Times we call it fake news we expect nothing more for the failing real time even in 1930 it's really not their fault it's really astronomers thought this is what was bid with what was going on out there so I want to show this to you again even at the time so Clyde Tombaugh actually was not did not buy into the hype that it was possibly larger than Jupiter and he actually was pretty concerned about how small was so small that I've lost it is it that one that one D'Argo's I can find the second one the second one it there it is down there that no I don't know I don't know where it is so he was so concerned it was so small so he continued looking for another 20 years and found found nothing else out there was always a little bit suspicious about this thing that they had called Planet X although he was quite the admit that it was actually Planet it was called a planet because well people thought it was possibly the size of Jupiter and well you know it was nothing else out there and so what else you're going to call it so so planet it well you know this whole debate about what whether Pluto should be a planet or not one of the things is lost often is just how small Pluto really is compared to the planets in the solar systems I like to show this one just for fun you're the actual sizes you never see things in their actual sizes my daughter had this lunchbox when she was a kid that that had all the planets on it including Pluto because my friends thought it was funny to give my daughter and things with food of the planet that's true and all of the planets are about the same size Jupiter's a little bigger than Pluto but not much you know so you get this really wrong impression of the planets in most popular things but you rarely see them at their real size until they are Jupiter Saturn Europe Mary Kate it's Earth Mars you had the asteroid they're Siri because spacecraft in orbit around Ceres like this very minute you're the other asteroids there Jupiter huge here in the background and yellow Saturn plenty and all these on the lunch boxes Saturn is always too small because they want to show its rings to sytem is actually quite big there Saturn Uranus Neptune out here and Pluto you have to look really carefully don't don't blink because you might listen there it is so so Pluto's kind of a good bit smaller than our moon it really is this tiny little thing out there but you know it's a tiny little thing that was the only thing that was out there so people called the planet in good safe and people kept looking for Planet X so at the time they didn't know that that Uranus and Neptune were where they were supposed to be so I kept looking astronomers from 1930 onward until about 1990 thought that they were just on the verge of discovering this Planet X and they never did they never did because of course there no perturbation to community but what is discovery instead were things in the same vicinity speedo I'm going to show you we're doing Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune and remind you what's up is crazy orbit the other reason it was kind of weird got this crazy orbit that comes way far away dips inside the orbit of Neptune for a minute and the strangest thing about Pluto of all for the orbit is that when you look at it on the side it's tilted it's tilted by almost 20 degrees compared to the planets you'll be quite knew what to make of that at the time but again nobody knew what else to call it so so planned it was and a planet of stay so I'm going to show you this is the picture that was around 1990 of what within the outer solar system starting in 1992 new objects were found in the outer solar system this region that we now call the Kuiper belt there are more than 2000 of these objects that are known out there now and their orbits now Pluto's was weird bears are just as weird to tilt to display that tilted that way they're elongated one way they're elongated the other way so is is there's no question at this point in time you know even if you are crazy enough to still or debate whether Pluto is a planet or not and I'll throw things at you if you do but there's no question including a chart of this population it's just one of the larger objects it's part of this population out there let's make this bird nest of material that's out there it's one of the most I think astounding discoveries in the outer solar system of the past thirty years all these objects and we've gone from having just those small numbers of objects to if you have to look down here again so there's Pluto since most of them are smaller there's one that's the same size as Pluto more massive tiny bit smaller that's Eris that that I found a decade ago but many many objects that are out there that are that are approaching the size of Pluto it's just one of those many objects that are out there the interesting thing to me about this Kuiper belt region is that the discovery of the Kuiper belt gave us a new window into what else was going on in the outer part of the solar system so before people had spent a hundred and fifty years trying to figure out if there was another planet by looking at Uranus and Neptune now we have thousands of objects we can look at to see what might be going on at the edge of the solar system the very first thing that we found that really struck us as strange in this region of the Kuiper belt for this object called Sedna Sedna we found this back in 2002 is one of our sort of our first sort of really interesting discoveries back in 2002 and the strange thing about said that if you can really look at it look at the difference between all the orbits here in the Kuiper belt and here's the orbit of said no one it goes really far away so that's weird to begin with but but more importantly that gets very close to nothing is like it it looks like in fact something has pulled it away from where the rest of the Kuiper belt is I was really strange back in 2002 we wondered about this we had a bunch of crazy ideas because astronomers for the past 170 years at that point had been saying oh gee you might be a planet we of course also said oh gee you might be a planet but we didn't even take that very seriously well seemed a bit crazy we started looking for other objects like that now because there's clear that something was causing this thing could be pulled away we didn't know what and he actually didn't we find decade looking for these things and didn't find it but one of my one of my former postdocs along with a collaborative hint found one like Sedna called 2012 VP 113 today they called it Biden's that's not my name similar goes really far away pull the wedding from the from the rest of the Kuiper belt very mysterious way just like we said might be planet but this was about the the umpteenth million person to say it might be a planet and they'll be nobody took any of it very seriously because you know people been filled with whoever interesting thing happens at this point is that is that inspired by by by these guys having found that object I think started looking more carefully the most distant objects in the solar system in this kind of outrage and realized that if you if you looked at the six most distant objects in the solar system all of them look like they were kind of pulled away in one direction and it's a little bit stranger to they're not just pull off in one direction if you look at them decide they're also tilted it's all a little bit this direction compared to the plane of the solar system it's only six objects and so a lot of people might look at that and thinking at six small number and here's a small number but you can try to calculate the probability that these things would be all pulled off in the same direction instead of they should be it just pulled off somewhere they should be randomly there's no reason they should staying in one direction the calculated probability we came up with something like one in a million that they would all be pointing in that direction and tilted down like that you can quibble with how you do those numbers but it's a strange thing and at this point I I walked four doors down my hallway tour newest assistant professor that we had there Caltech konstantin batygin who is actually was my grad student for a couple years before that but turns out it was pretty obvious he was smarter than me so we had to make him a professor instead of a grad student and I'm like Konstantin but what the heck is going on he's like well you know anybody else's users they're going to say must be planet because everybody must be a planet so we decided we were going to prove it was in the planet because only crazy people talk about planets so we tried for about for about six months we tried everything we could to prove that is not caused by a planet and we couldn't do it which is different from what everybody else in the past is the first in the past it was kind of like well maybe a planet maybe the planet we're like okay this can't be a planet but it had to be a planet turns out that if you have a planet that we thought a planet on let's see I need to go maybe well pointing off in this direction people here that the way to make a plan and make all these things stay pulling it off in this direction was we like to think of it as the mother planet the planet had to kind of hug all of these objects and keep them enclosed and not let them escape otherwise they'd want to escape around so we envisioned I'll show you we envision that this one planet doing a very specific thing and we thought okay let's let's do some computer simulations we'll take a hundred thousand random objects that we throw out there that are like Kuiper belt objects in our computer and we'll take one big planet and we'll see what the planet does and computer simulations look something like this here's here's the planet orbiting the planet stays right here each one of these things is one of these objects in the Kuiper belt that's moving around orbits move around one of the reasons why I say nothing should be stuck in place as you can see the orbits circulate the time to move all over the place we thought we would capture objects right here they should say right here so let's say em to capture here's one to go remember that you know so the green ones are closed the closed ones nothing happens to them so the different ones are supposed to capture the oh no no no no no yeah just let's go yeah and keep getting ejected there aren't very many plan of Kuiper belt objects left because most have been injected and look what happen they're all over here mostly a planet over here completely contrary to our intuition captures objects in the opposite direction of where that planet is and this simulation is now run for four billion years this is you just saw four billion years of solar system history and after four billion years when it stops it will be four billion years after four billion years all of the objects that are left are spewed off in this direction and the planet is off in this direction and again totally counterintuitive but now once we realized once we thought about it it was obvious once we were shown by the computer is obvious it's that the only only way to keep these things off in this direction is because you know how planets work they spend a lot of time out here and then they come here and they go fast like this and slow and fast like this and slow the planets doing the same thing slower than fast the only way that you can stick around is if you spend as little time as possible close to each other if you ever get close to this planet you're in bad shape you get the injected so these guys stick around because they never get close to the planet she's sort of astounding thing we didn't realize though means that these six objects that we had suggest the planet is off like this and the fact that these six are all tilted in one direction also shows us that the planet is tilted in the same way too so we know the direction that the planet is pulled often you also know the tilts of the planet relative to the Sun which is critical for helping us figure out where it really is so at this stage I'd say that we we considered this acute idea you know astronomers as I said astronomers have been saying must be a planet must be a planet for 170 years by this point and pretty much anyone who stands up and says must be planet everybody else dismisses them and says they're crazy and really not feel comfortable standing up and saying lost a planet either this is I would call this compelling or interesting interesting but not compelling provocative but not convincing so we're really looking for something to convince us so we look really carefully at our computer simulation then we found we were looking for predictions we could make and we found this interesting prediction which is that if you have these objects off in this direction like this than a planet off like this every time our computer simulations showed us that you should also have orbits of objects to get twisted by 90 degrees compared to the to the plane of the solar system in both directions these these are all the objects that are all aligned in one way you get objects that go like this that almost look like wings or something on the side of the solar system and that was pretty weird because we had never seen things like that before in the solar system and we actually worried about this for a couple months because well making a prediction and then realize that our prediction did not exist pretty much killed the theory so we were we were back to the drawing board trying to figure I was going on until one day when we realized we've been looking at only a limited set of data of objects in the outer solar system this was entirely my fault and I it seems stupid now and I think about it is that we are only looking at the most distant things it also never came closer than Neptune because we figured once it gets too close too many bad things happen but if you're perpendicular to the solar system you don't really care where Neptune is because you come into the solar system so quickly so when we look to see if there were any objects that are perpendicular but also come in closer than that time we realize there are five objects perpendicular solar system and they come in closer than Neptune and they go out really far away and so I remember this moment Constantine and I were sitting in my office at the moment we realized these objects existed and I was like okay I've been a plot exactly where they are and if they are here it's going to blow my mind we plotted where they were and I'm going to just show you on this scale where we are they are exactly where we predicted that they should be exactly these wings coming off to the side but perpendicular they go off perpendicular to the direct Nimbus this is to me exactly what you do as a scientist you make a theory you make a prediction an explanation of something that you've already seen is easy we could explain the six objects that were lined that's easy making a prediction and having it come true who would turn something into an interesting idea into now a real viable hypothesis in the moment when my my jaw it's more I I think Constantine and I sat in my office for a second staring at each other and both of us suddenly realized that you know our cute idea there's a planet out there this is no longer a cute idea there's there sure enough planet out there this is this is a stage we're in a year ago when we first published our paper talking about the existence of this planet and we made we made predictions we predicted that there that new objects discovered we fit the same pattern we find more objects off in this direction you find more of these and we also realized after some additional computer simulation there's not to be a few a small number that go off in this direction exactly the same with the planet it turns out these are the hardest to find - no no new ones of these without but of the one two three i'ma show you so in the last year for new distant objects have been discovered it's slow-going they're only six before in the preceding 15 years so four and one year is pretty good and let me show you where they are first year the sixth so we had just one two three four five six to three new ones that were first discovered blew my mind here they are one was really far away those are perfectly lining here's the one it's aligned in the same way here's a set of the fourth exactly there this year I like to think of this as the scorecard we made another prediction we have the prediction of the perpendicular things we made a prediction that there would be new ones discovered we left them off in the same direction and one Discoverer here and that's a pic exactly where they went I did a calculation in my head last night what's the probability of those four being discovered just by chance and these things are little hard but I came up with something like 1 and 300 and so that they were all lined up exactly where they happen to line up you can again we can argue about this number but it's it's pretty good it is very difficult for me to imagine a solar system these days that actually does not have a planet nine in it everything that we keep finding continues to point to this planet so far no one has really come up with any viable objections to that there so I'm going to stand here and tell you it's there there is a ninth planet out there and now I'm going to switch from trying to convince you that it's there and tell you how we found out it's there to tell you what it what it's like here's what it's like well we don't know it's like ok so that was short here's what we know in those computer simulations that we did we had to put in a planet to make that thing happen and if we could put in different plants we can put in planets that went out really far longer than quite go out as far ones it was tilted more tilted less that were bigger smaller and only a limited number of planets actually worked to reproduce what we are looking for and so that gives us very good constraints on how big this planet has to be how big is not exactly fair its how massive all we know is its gravitational effect so it could be small but really dense and have exactly the same effect as big but but not very dense but we know how massive it is here's what we know it is just about ten times the mass of the earth so to think about this for a second I every once in a while people ask me like oh so we can have a debate about it just a planners not a planet this is 5000 times more massive than Pluto this is not like we could get a bigger than Hugo so it's again this is like a real actual planet out there at the edge of the solar system 10 times the mass here ten times about the earth is pretty exciting for a couple reasons one as we talked about planets around other stars and we talked about what we have to think about differently and on our own solar system now that we know about planets around other stars one of the things that we know about planets around other stars is that planets that are about ten times the mass of the Earth are about the most common thing in the galaxy we don't have any you didn't think we had any in our solar system we have earth which is precisely one x massive years we have we have uranus and neptune which are sixteen and seventeen times the mass of the earth we didn't have anything in between and so I used to teach I still teach this class but I would say in this class I teach about about introduction planetary science so talk about planets around other stars and I would say wow isn't it interesting you know we we are missing this most common type of planet in the galaxy turns out I think we're not ten times math the earth is exactly what we have what's it like it's an interesting thing between so it is it is a big earth is it a solid object it's ten times the mass of the earth or is it a little Neptune is it is it a gas giant like Neptune we don't know the answer for sure but I think it is safe to assume that we can use planets around other stars to answer that question for you I told you that it's the most common type of planet in the galaxy in almost every case that we can figure out something is ten times the mass of the Earth is a gas giant and so it's a miniature in Neptune rather than a giant so when you look at it it probably looks something like it first here at one earth there's nothing and your kness and 15 is anything Metsu is probably a little smaller I'm sorry planned I'm probably a little bit smaller Neptune but made out of the same sort of gaseous stuff good Neptune it absolutely exciting to me just for the fact that when we find it you will get to study the thing that's like this common planet in the galaxy and we'll get to study it right up here close sort of course in our own solar system the fact that it's ten times map of the earth also gives us I think a huge hint as to where it came from you can't form planets that far out as far as we know and yet around other stars we often see planets that are that far away we think one way that they get formed is that they form in closer like where Jupiter and Saturn and urine is a methane form and sometimes it's scattered outward if they swerved in that region by Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune and they got scattered early on we would predict without even knowing this we predict that there would be something like 10 times the mass of the earth that's a natural mass scale out there so I think this is pointing to making some - it's just part of our own solar system got ejected out there and it's been working at the edge ever since then okay so where is it we've got to go find this thing let's go find it so how are we going to find it well a lot of people now that we've announced us the existence of this thing a lot of people are looking we've tried we tried really hard to make it as easy for everybody to find as possible really we continue to I'm serious about this we continue to publish all of our predictions on exactly where to look because I want something to find I would love to find it myself but I would rather that somebody else find it tomorrow than that I find it in five years I want this thing to get down so we keep on publishing our predictions I know that these come dozen teams were looking to find it a lot of people are doing very clever things that we wouldn't have thought this is also another good reason for us publishing our predictions because people have some really smart ideas we are doing it and what I have to say is boring old school boring old tool if you go off the telescope context effects to the sky come back the next night take a picture sky and look to see what looks it's it's Hershel all over again you would think that since 1781 we could have gotten a little better than Herschel and I and I kind of hope so I hope actually somebody finds it one of these clever ways but in the meantime we're off to Herschel here's Monica I'm like my favorite telescope they talked about earlier Kath telescope on Mauna Kea our Caltech is one of the partial as one of the partners and the Keck telescopes so I'm on those telescopes a lot turns out totally useless for looking for planetoid best telescopes in the world for many many things twenty-nine not one of them but Hubert health nope right next door best telescope in the world for looking a plan nine Subaru is the Japanese national telescope and conveniently tech and Subaru each have specialized in different things in astronomy and they switch they are willing to trade time back and forth and so I've been using the super telescope through trade with kept the reason the Subaru is so good is because what you want you need a big telescope because it's pretty far away pretty faint but you need a big telescope that can look at big swath of sky at once so the Keck telescope the biggest swath of sky it can look at any one picture is about this big literally put your fingers together and look at the light and it's as much as you can see tiny tiny bits Subaru telescope has this huge camera huge camera this is a camera there's enough tell so if the camera is so big that it's as big as an anime character it include this this is a lens this is I believe that still true this is the largest lens ever built a large like scientific application high quality lenses the lens is actually built by Canon and this lens the light go to the lens and goes up the actual detector that's up here the telescope is you know ten stories down down here and this camera covers so much sky well I'll show you here they covered this much sky and from if that's the full moon which which means so Keck was this and Subaru is about that okay so that doesn't seem like a lot but you can imagine if you have a pretty big swath of sky to cover you can kind of go one two three four five six seven you've calculated that it's going to take us about 20 nights on the Subaru telescope to cover the area where we think planet 9 is 20 nights is a great number 20 nights some people spend twenty nine how coming out done already and the answer is even though this is without a question the most important astronomical search currently undertaken right now other astronomers have not seen the light always and some of them think that the thing they're doing is the most important thing I don't know what so we have to share the telescope all sorts of Japanese telescope I don't work in Japan so I have to do these roundabout lanes going time so it's going to take us two three years to get those 20 nights on the tubu telescope totally will we'll cover the star in the sky in the meantime somebody else might find it I just want to show you a picture with my favorite picture are about this is me and I was talking about Constantine our smartest guy in the world who's down the street from the hall to me he's a terrible terrible astronomer you've never been to a telescope before his life you can't tell because having to breathe oxygen that he can't breathe in 14,000 feet what kind of astronomer can't believe at 40,000 and good thing he's wearing a hard hat because we ran into the telescope a couple times the super telescope it's beautiful the camera the thing they did and it much further away than it looks even in this picture it's way way way the heck up there but we've been out there okay and I just want to I just want to well end this for you by telling you where to go look because okay you can't see it you can actually there there are some some of these projects as I said the very clever ones some of them are these citizen science projects where you can go onto a website and start to look for things there's one called backyard planets dot-com if you go there you can start to look at images and start to look look for things are moving I mean wouldn't it be the best story in the world if the ninth planet is found not by you know dorky astronomers at a big telescope like this to fight by some school kid in Africa on backyard plans calm who then discoveries planet I think that's why I am rooting for these guys I would love to find it don't get me wrong but I'm rooting for all these citizen science that engagement gotta be the coolest possible thing in the world so go check these out but if you find it you know tell some school kid in some other country in the meantime okay you can't necessarily go look but I want you to go look out tonight it might be a little bit light the sun's already set this part of the sky above a seventh but it's sunset even right now if you go quickly go look out at the western horizon and what do you see you see something looks about like this you see I would say the most recognizable horizon a constellation in the sky anybody it's a Ryan thank you if you could put an astronomical object anywhere in the sky where you can tell people go look you put it on so you could say hi it's over an eye and good luck didn't quite work out that was close so Ryan's right here Taurus your tourists right here plating demoed the pleiades the pleiades in Japanese is Subaru which is the name of telco which is why your car has done a symbol on it your cards I have a super high I had to write way stuff if you buy a Subaru you get one night on the Subaru telescope special deal do you think so we can all pool if anybody else has to do so so our calculations suggest that planet 9 is in this very small swath of sky like it actually the calculations building little bit further this way I need to move this I pick up the spin see the right of it but it goes it goes right through Taurus right um right next to Orion okay so this you know you guys have sat here very nicely for 45 minutes listening looking to what I had to say and looking at computer simulations and listening to I say but I want you to stop for a second and I want you to think about this there I'm telling you there is I'm not saying probably there is an ice giant planet out in our solar system and it right now it's right about here in the stock if you go out right more done and you don't go to the observatory but you should go to the desert or because you can actually it looks like a clinic here you go out here you find a Ryan fine Taurus and it's right there I just want you can't see it what if you like me which would lock you're not you think you can feel it you can just look there and think wow there is this you know so in 1780 we didn't know there were any planets going tendency we found two more July ones we can see there's a third one is just on the verge of being discovered that you can see so so don't still prevent to do this go actually look at Orion look at Taurus and think about this planet out there because it's going to be discovered in a couple of years and you won't remember what it's like to have not known exactly where it is but I want you to have this moment very good so please and bye-bye where I started here with the souls like I couldn't talk about the planet line from outer space even though that was not the question apparently but as as you mentioned this is a course plan plan 9 from outer space widely known as the worst movie ever made right because you can look it up on Google worst movie ever made and let's go plan 9 from outer space literally true Ed Wood movie bit so and it was a the plot is I try to watch it you can watch the whole things on YouTube you can watch it anybody can get through it pretty mean you think oh it can be funny it's not even it's like terrible there are there are there are aliens and zombies and all these and vampiro you stuff like that but the most amazing thing about Ed Wood in addition to having made this terrible terrible movie which is his he was prescient in 1968 or something and I should know know exactly the air delivered thanks but 50 20 I don't know but at the time so there's there's these zombies his zombies are like no people digging up gravies up and this whole graveyard scene and there's this poster this was just taken from the poster to plan plan 9 from outer space the thing that mazes me about this poster from the 1950s is the graveyard scene if you look really carefully in a little Bowl thinking it's um Oh Edward knew all along really insulting so anyway I thank you for coming go look that way when you're done I'd be happy thanks a few questions for everybody I'm going to start right here because I can see you so I'm questioning no no no no you can't ask questions about names that is bad Luck's astronomers if as with anybody who I think is affected by things like weather charmers are really superstitious and naming something or even thinking about names ahead of time bad luck I will not entertain I honestly have no names in mind I will not entertain anything about names and I'm throw things that people even mention them so I recommend unless you're in the back row I recommend not talking I'm in next question I'm going to go think in the background like this yeah yeah so how long does it take Planet nine to get to the outer solar system well he presumably had started in a relatively circular orbit like Uranus and Neptune Jupiter and Saturn and then it got too close to Jupiter or too close to Saturn maybe even Uranus or Neptune and when that happened it got ejected it's got scattered so it goes on like this and it just takes half of an orbit to get out there in orbit we think is on the order of fifteen thousand years so seven thousand years it's all the way out there there is one trick though that I tried to finesse which is that it goes out here but then it comes back to where it came from and so the hard thing to figure out is how to make it go or an orbit like this so it doesn't come back into the planets and there are we think we have some schemes but that's really an open question for research but that first ejection is pretty instantaneous how long it then takes to settle into its current orbit we're not too sure about Sakhalin is probably about a thousand a you hylian is the furthest that goes away from the Sun yes yeah given that orbital period people stopped thinking it might be so so speaking of crazy people and planets so there are many other things that you might have heard about a planet through Planet X people will still talk about Planet X there's no Planet X there's no mice's Nemesis was a fun one that people talked about starting in the mid 70s and into the 80s nemesis was supposed to be this masses planet in out of the Oort cloud that when it comes in close it perturbed comas they come in you know there's extinction there's this twenty nine million year periodic extinction turns out that weren't the extinctions are not actually periodic they don't tend to all be from things that are impacting so so particularly if you talk to the to the geologist about extinctions and impacts and stuff they will kind of laugh you out of the room if you if you start talking about nemesis people look pretty hard forget about whether it's nemesis or not they're still it's perfectly plausible that there might be a brown dwarf large Jupiter sized thing out of the Oort cloud these days have been a couple of really nice spacecrafts that have gone searched amongst other things and the best of these of NASA's wives mission which has had a very serious solar system component and they have looked really hard to see if there's anything out there and it really is pretty clear now that commemorates this idea certainly is not true because of the geology but it's pretty clear there's nothing else really big by really big I mean Jupiter size and larger so planet nine is about ten times the mass of the earth Jupiter is is more like three hundred so Jupiter is still huge compared to this time you're looking yes yeah so the question is how close is planet 9 compared to the Oort cloud I didn't show you the Oort cloud on any my slides because the Oort cloud would be only at the next museum over so planet 9 the fully distant gets is probably something like a thousand times maybe 1,500 times a distance from the earth to the Sun the Oort cloud where some of the most distant comets come from the Oort cloud is halfway between us and the nearest star that's it's something like a hundred thousand times the distance from the earth to Sun instead of a thousand times so we still have to go far factor 100 further to get out there so even though planet 9 is so far away still it's still really a tiny tiny part of our solar system neighborhood here here so what happens when it gets that far so yeah the question is Planet nine is something I said before like something like a fifteen thousand year orbit what happens if it's on the far end of its 15,000 year orbit well the answer we will tell you soon because I'm pretty sure it's on the far end of its 15 thousand year orbit when it is closer actually pretty bright and so bright that we should have found it already so one of the reasons that we have this long swath to look at is that we assumed that it would have been found otherwise and so it must be out there it's still well within reach of things like the Subaru telescope the Subaru telescope we have to take a picture the sky and that picture the sky we we expose our cameras for 90 seconds and that's how long it'll take us to be able to detect that nine even if it's as far away as it possibly could be so that's why we need big telescopes but once we have the big telescopes with the big cameras for you're well within range pointing it yes time so the question is what is the protocol for when you discover a planet there is none really because there hasn't been a planet discovered or even claimed to been discovered since 1930 and the official the official announcement would come from the International Astronomical Union they have less interesting that they have something called the Minor Planet Center which is where which keeps track of everything that's discovered course that's because they don't assume that there any major planets left to be discovered hi interesting to know the answer to that question I suspect so if I refined it tomorrow we would probably pretty much just announce it more or less right away without worrying about what a protocol is because you know we'll figure out the protocols later really ever needs to know just out there and there's no this is not something that there would be question about you know is it really true that there or not be like yes it's there here's the orbit you can calculate it so I think probably we would just just go all out you know as opposed to waiting or trying to get some committee together because then it would leak out and then do this I probably Twitter you can't assume the grand scheme of things yes [Music] so so question is if I minded the online archives for serendipitous discoveries the answer is yes and other people have to I even did it accidentally four years ago before I knew I was doing it so the I'm happy to say the best paper on an all-sky search for distant objects is one that I wrote three years ago it's true I didn't know I was looking for plan at night at a time I just thought you know wouldn't that be cool if I could find something we didn't find something and that's one of the reasons why I know it's not very close that didn't go very deep there a lot of a lot of people have taken a lot of data in a lot of different places and if you can figure out the way to stitch it together like Bouvard did for a yearn asst you could find it we're working it's hard we have our own we have some archives we're looking for other people looking through sums and I want it to be found that way I think that this is the era of big data even in astronomy and I think that if we can't find it in some cool computational archival data waves and then we are real of failures as astronomer which probably our set of CDs yes eating out what other fuels our question is what other fields my am i pulling inspiration from when I'm thinking computationally and the unfortunate answer is I'm not I should be I don't know because maybe why you haven't found it yet this is also why I actually think that some of these other people with clever ideas might find it before us I'm I'm sort of still trying all my old school you know so I said it'd be sort of sad if you have to resort to Herschel but really I'm trying to resort to Bouvard instead and you know just try to go back and go back and try to find it again and again there must be more clever data scientists than me out there that seems obvious it's rich it's out there so yeah I am totally serious about the fact that we have we can continue to update where you should look without to publish an update in the next week or so and all the stuff that means it moves too fast to publish in scientific papers anymore so I just put it on a blog go look on my blog in the next week or so it'll tell you where to look someone figure out how to do it better than me it's it's the data exists the techniques probably exists it takes a smart person to marry those two in ways that haven't happened yet but they're smart people out there go do it okay let's see I'm going to go very top up here [Music] so I can't hear you you have to scream in me well okay when I find planet lying could there be life so the first answer is probably no because like like the other giant planets Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune big gas giants we don't think are capable of supporting life and so so I would say no Department we think oh wait you know earlier I talked about Europa Europa has more liquid water than the earth does hey 30 there could well be life in Europa that has nothing to do with life on the earth has been performed Enceladus so that we know has all this liquid water and it has all the nutrients your life maybe life in it there's no reason why plant 9 could not have an icy moon like these other Tunes that said could well have life on it does it I have no idea one of the very first things I'm excited to do as soon as we find planet 9 is to do swing the Hubble Space Telescope towards it and take a look and see if we can find any moons around it and start to find out what else might be there but it's a it's an exciting question to think about your mortgage so I have one more question so there we go if they're kids I'm going to go to the kids any kids with questions anybody who likes to think their kid yeah I can tell you like to think you a kid okay go ahead yeah [Music] the way we protect my like like star are we learning Oh so the question is about its twofold question one is about discovery of planets around other stars and how most of the ways you find planets around their stars are indirect we don't see a star and see the planet going around it not always sometimes we actually see a star and we see a planet going around it and in those cases those are the planets that are more like planet 9 that far away which is why we can see them so then the question is are there are there new techniques that are developing to try and see them the answer is absolutely yes people are working really hard to try to block out the light of that central star and see things closer and closer around and again I encourage you to come to this June 22nd talk from my friend Heather Knutson who will tell you all about these sorts of things now the third part of the question is can we use a these new techniques to find planet 9 answered no the reason is no is because it's our problem is not finding something faint around something bright or fine our problem is is more than needle in the haystack problem we are looking for something saying we don't know where to look as opposed to we know where to look but there's a headlight in our face so we need you know really we need we need to super tell consumer tell us got the perfect with it cover the big swath of sky it can see faint objects and we just need to systematically sweep the sky back and forth until we find it and I think we will I have been I am I am maybe overconfident but it it would not surprise me if by this time next year it's in the bag maybe it's maybe that's overconfidence it is overconfident confident you know it depends on things like the weather when you're at the telescope that you can't control which is why we're superstitious and will not talk about things but so if it's not this year it's next year or the year after that you know I'm not I'm not worried that we need new techniques the old ones are going to work maybe the new ones can go even faster than the data ones of people can do those would be cool but it it's out there when it's discovered I want you guys to remember this you know you've heard about it before and you try to remember what it was like we weren't quite sure things in there and then you see it and you know about it it can be fun fun day thank you Mike for a great talk and again we'd like to thank our sponsors United Launch Alliance and Aerojet Rocketdyne and I have been told that the observatory outside will be open for viewing right after the talk so please feel free to go out there and see what's up tonight and thank you again for coming and join us in June for our fourth lecture [Applause] you you

Channel: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

Views: 72,236

Rating: 4.6660042 out of 5

Keywords: space, solar system, kuiper belt, planet nine

Id: 7UL88XwkJqE

Length: 64min 38sec (3878 seconds)

Published: Mon May 08 2017