The Mystery of Planet Nine with Robert Finch

the ongoing search for planet 9 continues to heat up as evidence accumulates that a large planet exists somewhere in the outer solar system but where predictions of what Planet nines orbit is like could very well be the key and actually locating a planet leading to several different approaches in figuring this out my guest today has worked out one such approach that of looking at the question from the perspective of engineering physics taking us one step closer to locating Planet 9 if it indeed lurks out there in the far reaches of the outer solar system prepard Finch received his BS and MS in applied math from Oklahoma State University and a master's of engineering and operations research from Cornell he is a retired senior engineer at IBM federal and then Lockheed Martin and his interests include planet 9 breakthrough energy technologies in the physics behind it welcome to event horizon with John Michael Gaudi a [Music] Robert Finch welcome to the program thank you thank you for having me now Robert for several years now we have been we've had this sort of Specter out in the outer solar system that seems some object seems to be affecting the orbits of asteroids or objects out deep out in the outer solar system now we've accumulated quite a list of these that these objects that seem to have altered orbits by some large gravitational source your work looked into you know trying to figure out attributes of Planet 9 as it's called from those orbits torques and things like that could you explain briefly what what that means what what did you look at that led you to conclude certain things about this potential planet okay let me just start at the beginning what we what we did we had done some reading early on with regard to some of the papers that had come out following the discovery of Sedna and we really didn't have any data to work with in the past the Naval Observatory tried to do some things with the perturbations of Neptune and Uranus but people don't even think that those are her actual perturbations now so when the Braun fatiguing paper came out 2016 we were delighted because there was some additional information so we thought you know this is not a horribly difficult problem to put together a model for if we make a couple of simplifying assumptions so that's what we did we started looking at the system as as a torque driven system if you have a planet that's in orbit around the Sun and you have another large planet that is in sort of a non circular orbit around the Sun then it induces a torque on the first if it's a small body like an asteroid that torque is is obviously pretty substantial and it will move the object in a way that changes its orbit in a in an unusual way what we found and we developed equations of motion for that let me call them asteroids they're trans-neptunian objects but a couple of them are planetoids so I'll just collectively call them all asteroids I'll just be talking using that term from now on so basically what we saw was in them in the model was that the torque tries to drive each asteroid into the orbital plane of Planet 9 in other words it tries to make the to planetary planes coincide the other thing that it tries to do is it tries to move the asteroids and azmuth and even in brown's original data all the asteroids fell within about a 95% angular spread that he saw we opened that up we actually use more objects than Hughes we use 12 but we actually did the analysis for both 6 and 12 the original 6 that Brown used and 12 that we used going back to the the torque again in the azmuth direction torque moves through the asteroids planes to change its orientation in space what we found was that there are two groupings where those angular orientations ended up not necessarily ended up it's still an ongoing process but there were two collections of asmath orientations which were absolutely dominant and what we believe is happening there is that the asteroids are actually aligning with the approach and retreat paths of planet 9 and we have it we have a a lot of analysis as to why we believe that but it's very clear that that's what we saw that's what we're seeing in the data and so what we did is we did an analysis using that gravitational torque model to develop the primarily initially the plane that Planet X or the orbital plane that Planet X should be in for planet nine we use Planet X in the paper so I'm going to be switching those back and forth and also the azimuth orientation the estimate orientation like I say should be right in the middle of those two clusters that we found and that's what the torque model predicts now you mentioned briefly the perturbations that seemed to be evident at least in the past of Uranus and Neptune and this is an old idea people have known that something was a little bit wacky therefore yeah over a century do you think that's real or do you think that's explained and my sense was that it was explained but maybe not so satisfactorily you know that portion of the problem we didn't look at because we assumed that it was it was basically a non-issue and we weren't using that as data anyway I believe the the Astronomy community believes it's explained away I don't know whether that's really true or not I believe that it's it's accepted that it is and so I know I looked at what the Naval Observatory did and Robert Harrington was heading up a study effort a massive study effort to try to find plan attacks at was Planet X was a called Planet X event and he was using the perturbations to create a math model and a simulation to try to find it so back then it was before the Astronomy community had decided that it was basically an error in the mass so I can't really tell you much more than that we didn't use that information in any way shape or form we only used the asteroid information now there was also as I recall to that we've used some of the space probes I think pioneer to try to see if there was any sort of gravitational perturbations but this thing would be so far out that you probably wouldn't see any effect as far as this thing would be right yeah as a matter of fact that was going back to Harrington again he was really the originator of that because he was heading up the effort to try to find Planet X and you're right they did use planet or pioneer 10 and 11 and there was some there was some degree of belief that they had gotten some sort of a funny signal but it was never confirmed and whether they actually detected anything or not I don't think there's enough evidence order to conclude one way or the other now your work shows that Planet 9 is distant at an orbit of all right a a period of 3,500 years which is significantly less than batygin and brown zestimate which i think was like 15,000 years something like that right so what constrained that down what what what what leads you to believe that planet 9 is on a shorter period than that okay that's a very good question because this is really the key you honed right in on it the issue is conservation of momentum we had three assumptions in our model we assume that the mass of the inner planets were concentrated at the Sun in other words all of this activity was happening activity of Planet nine was basically acting as if the inner planets were concentrated at the Sun the asteroids don't interact with one another and then the third one is that the solar system's angular momentum is conserved that means it's constant now let's assume for a minute I think the easiest way to understand this for me is that assume for a minute that planet 9 is in an orbit by itself grounds around the Sun nothing else is there now we want to keep the angular momentum constant when we make a certain certain injection we want to put the all of the asteroids in however they would fit in the in their normal orbits wherever they are instantaneously and and ask the question what has to happen to the angular momentum of planet 9 to keep it constant well it's pretty it's pretty obvious what has to happen is that the perturbation that you introduced into Planet nine plan nine angular momentum has to exactly equal be equal and opposite and sign to the collective angular momentum of the of the asteroids that's 0.1 and once you make that assumption then you say well how does the angular momentum of planet 9 change well what happens is it doesn't change in magnitude because there's not enough mass and those asteroids to change something that's fairly large it changes in orientation that says that the what's known as specific relative angular angular momentum that's the angular momentum per unit mass that value as a magnitude doesn't change what changes is its orientation and with those two facts alone you can show you can compute the relative angular momentum of planetoid and once you do that you're all free because you can get all the other parameters from Kepler's equations as such as the orbital period and even the mass right not the mass not the mass the mass is another question well both I have to back up a little bit you have to compute there's there's a trick you have to use to compute the eccentricity and the mass is a completely separate calculation it it depends on something else which which I can walk you through to because in beti goons one of the Teagan's lectures he said he made a statement that said they'd never actually computed mass they estimated it using the simulation so any rate yeah once you get the the relative angular momentum and eccentricity you can't then you can compute everything else but you do need eccentricity eccentricity actually comes out of the orientation of the two clusters the to angular cluster spreads of the asteroids so when you're looking into space and you see these two clusters then there's a relationship between that angular cluster and the eccentricity of what it is is doing the clustering and we go through that explanation that calculation and then you you can get the eccentricity and once you have the relative angular momentum of planet nine and its eccentricity you can get everything else except mass now you came up with the numbers of 8.5 Earth masses right now what could this planet be like do you favor a model of as I recall the ticket and Brown advanced that this may be a sort of a jupiter core or proto planet that was that was kicked out of the inner solar system early in the solar system's history or do you favor something like a catcher model where this could be an interstellar object that the solar system managed to somehow draw in which does your work give you any insight into that question our work really doesn't I've read a little bit on that and I have to tell you you know not being an astronomer I'm on pretty thin ice here but I've most of what I've read talks against the Captur model in favor of some sort of chaotic sterben s-- in the primordial primordial mass circulating circling circling the Sun and sometimes that comes together not all the way into the Sun actually out but I can't really say anymore more than that I this I really I'm really not not familiar with this level of astronomy now you mentioned and and in fact the title of the paper is using engineering principles rather than but just standard astronomical principles related though they would be what what is the difference in approach here on that thinking thinking about this from the perspective of engineering rather than just straight astrophysics what was the difference well I think the main idea is is the whole torque model from once you you assume the torque model you can actually generate the equations of motion of an asteroid and we've never seen that anywhere so it would be really nice if the community can take a look at it and see if we're if we're on target here but we believe that the torque model is what allowed us to to generate the equations of motion for the asteroids so that's that's a primary thing but of course a lot of this is classical once you've gotten a certain number of parameters estimated then you can use Kepler's equations to essentially figure out everything else everything else out you've got to have the the rolls of angular momentum and the eccentricity and once you do that then you you're essentially in the world of astronomy but the main thing I think we brought to the table was the fact that we could show how the angular momentum has to change over time and from that we could figure out what the relative angular momentum is and then go into the world of astronomy to get the rest of the parameters does the sampling of asteroids that you guys looked at does this give us any clues on where we might point the telescope to try to find Planet 9 yes but we used the six reference asteroids that Grandpa Tegan used and we also found that that there was a very severe data bias Sedna is in that collection the Sedna is huge relatives everything else so it's driving the model askew it did for us in fact it drove our model askew in the same way that it drove Browns model because we compared numbers with them with regard to the orbital planes we're very close we're very close then we put in six others and we opened up the Sprint set of 95 degrees which Braun had in his azmuth for asteroids that he would consider we went out 225 degrees and we were able to find six more asteroids so we had a sum total of 12 and that that defeated Sedna's data by a sum rot quite a bit actually and it changed the numbers more so than the difference between our original numbers and Browns numbers so we were pretty excited about that but the numbers were still not drastically different this is sort of all part of a growing body of evidence that planet 9 in whatever form you know we find it seems to exist and the the the meter seems to be going further and further towards this object existing gut feeling is it really out there or is there still a possibility that there may be a misinterpretation I think it's out there and the reason why I think it is is because not because of one indication because of several we have it we have strong agreement in the plains all 12 all 12 of those asteroids that we picked all fell within a standard deviation from the plane that we assumed being the average of those it was standard deviation was only 14 degrees 14 and a half degrees the asmath difference was only 15 and 1/2 degrees now that couples well with the fact that we we had to Vangel momentum which I think I mentioned this earlier but the relative angular momentum of all of the asteroids is very close to the same number it's very close this was very surprising because nobody's noticed this and that's that's not just with the six it's with all 12 so we have very strong correlation between the dynamic motion of all of these asteroids they're being they're being herded together in angular momentum so it's that's it's pretty interesting and it's hard to explain any other way that you would have this wide collection of of objects that are in so close agreement the other thing we found was that of the twelve objects we chose four of those twelve and we didn't know this we didn't know this at the time four of those objects are in mean motion resonance with our planet nine orbit that means that that some integer multiple of the period of one is equal to another integer multiple of the second for instance three times the period that we that we estimated for planet nine is about equal to the period of Sedna we also found four other objects and believe it is four for other objects that are also in resonance so the fact that you have so many of these these these parameters that are pointing pointing in the same direction in the estimate that we chose the way we the way we calculated the relative angular momentum we also found that that value of relative angular momentum compared with the same value the same parameter for all of the asteroids was also very close and it was 12% of the mean value we're getting very close agreement with a number of parameters that's I guess what convinces me is that it's just too big a coincidence for all of this to agree it's just it's just too big it does not seem likely that it would agree without a giant planet causing it it's the simplest explanation we also did confidence intervals for a lot of these parameters where we could so 95% confidence intervals with classic statistical processes we also don't forget we did a simulation - we actually simulated all this we only used four bodies we use the Sun and planet nine in Sedna and the other planetoid which everybody calls biden sort of informally those are the two largest of the asteroids and we got pretty good agreement in the way that they converge although we only ran it for forty million years and we needed to run it longer when we just we were running out of time so but we did get good agreement with the way it loose and inclination and the way it starts to oscillate as it converges the plane in astronomy is really defined the the orbital plane is really defined by two parameters one is inclination the other was is something they call the language longitude of the ascending node well the azimuth is also determined by two parameters one of them is the same is the same one so it appears twice but for all of those planes to exist all twelve planes to be within 14 degrees one Sigma of each other and the the asteroid the azimuth figures as well and the angular momentum and all those resonances we think we think something is really driving something in a very consistent way and we just don't believe that you would find all this either went there yeah it doesn't doesn't seem that you would if you've sort of consistency always points towards you know the natural and and is it really that is it really that surprising that there would be another planet out there you know or multiple planets for all we know I mean look at sudden a sudden there's a minor planet so why wouldn't there be something even larger that's right now in your in your simulations and the work that you did does it tell you anything about what the orbit might look like because it is this thing out like a highly elliptical orbit or is it more circular like a normal solar system planet yes is there any indication of that oh yeah that that's actually embedded in something called eccentricity the eccentricity of the orbit it's it is eccentric it is the closest it comes to the earth to the Sun is about eighty to a use that's astronomical units one astronomical unit is the distance from the Sun to the earth and so it's quite a ways it comes even though it's it's an elliptical orbit nowhere near as elliptical as the asteroids even though it is elliptical it doesn't come very close so but it is a long it'll have a long long thin fairly thin Courbet although through a planet for planet although nowhere near as thin as the asteroids so it's not circular can this object perturb objects out there and send them into the inner solar system could this be I believe it was dr. Richard molar back in the 80s came up with an idea that there was a brown dwarf or a small star out there that would periodically disrupt comets and things and send them raining into the inner solar system and killing dinosaurs could there's is this thing anything close to that ability or is it just in the wrong place no it just doesn't have a mass it doesn't have a mass to do that the angular momentum of Planet nine has we calculated from all of our numbers it seems to be it seems to add about only eight percent of angular momentum to the planets the reason is is because the mass is fairly small it's got about the same angular momentum actually rotational angular orbital angular has Neptune it's very close so it doesn't have enough mass to do much now I will say this we did talk about this very briefly in the paper we made the assumption that there is no there's really no strong connection between let's say no close connection between any of the asteroids but on the other hand some of those asteroids have very small perihelion and so it can't happen but there is a there is a effect called the Cozine mechanism it's a very subtle effect and it's very unusual but it it's it's accepted this is accepted by by astronomy what it says is that if you have an asteroid in orbit and there's a lot a small small asteroid small mass and it's within a circular orbit of something truly large then it's very strange but if these two things when these two things come together they're perturbed in a systematic way it's not random but they can but it can drastically change the orbit but not the angular momentum in the vertical to the plane it's very strange but so it sort of mitigates the fact of something being ejected not to say it can't happen of course but it under a lot of these Close Encounters since the close to the Sun planet 9 has somewhat of a circular orbit where at least where it meets the the asteroid specific because they're on opposite sides of the Sun so the cosine mechanism semi works it helps to keep this whole system stable but that's again that's not to say that something can't be ejected my last question for you is related to actually finding it now you guys give an estimate in your paper above the what the magnitude visual magnitude of this thing should be yeah yeah and it looks like it's gonna need we're gonna need a big telescope do you anticipate that there is an instrument in service right now that could find this thing yeah I believe it because Brown believes it the one thing the one thing that is is challenging is we don't really know exactly where to look right now although we have a way we believe we have a way to to make this calculation the way the orbit lays out right now the perihelion has actually falls in the constellation Libra the aphelion the furthest point away from the from the Sun falls in Taurus so the the two collection points that I talked about earlier the two attractors would fall in the vicinity of Taurus so that would be where you know you would want to look but what we did is when we estimated the mass and by the way mass was shown to be and we have a rigorous calculation that says masses is proportional to the square root of all of the masses of the asteroids we came up with a vector equation that can be transformed using all of the current the instantaneous positions of the asteroids to get a pointing direction we didn't do it it's a lot of work but we think we know how to do it and then we both got it going on to other things but we believe we've laid out a way to do it very very briefly so yes so the data we believe the data does support getting a pointing direction zeroing in on Planet nine I want to mention one other thing to Mahdia believes that this object might have most of its radiation in ultraviolet I mean the infrared and so it's difficult it's more difficult to see infrared objects from the ground so it's his belief that that you need something that's up in the sky to look for it this next-generation telescope that they're going to put up the James Webb Space Telescope just do out in about a year it's March of 2021 as I understand it hopefully hopefully oh boy yeah it's been delayed several times those people know but he also believes he also believes ma Diaz believes that we got to get something way up there he'd like to see something beyond Neptune but that that seems to me like a pretty big act but any rate I believe this this this James Webb Space Telescope could find it I mean there have been infrared surveys made and it's never shown up in one of those now why would it be so visible and Infrared you would imagine that it'd be pretty cold object out there as opposed to visible light right yeah it would just it would just be reflected reflected light that's I mean it's yeah this way it's very cold there's it's very cold that it probably I mean anything I told you it would just be a guess there have been a number of researchers that have also thought that it would be primarily visible in the infrared pretty dim that far out no matter what you do I suppose of course we don't know how far out it is either you know it's it depends it depends on one of the one of the things that's a shortfall of anybody's estimation Browns and ours as well is the fact that the Poynting has been estimated using asteroids that are close to the Sun what other asteroids are because they're the ones we know about so what asteroids are out there that might be pointing in a slightly different direction or change the dynamics we we don't know we just don't know because these are very long period objects well that seems to be a trend though with the story is that as more objects out there are identified they all seem to point towards Planet nine right you know it seems is that within a certain range there they they seem to find more and more of these objects that seem to be affected by this large planet to me it seemed like at this point it almost has to be there you know as we were talking statistically it just seems like there has to be something that's doing this yeah I agree as a matter of fact when we were looking to add other objects into the analysis basically we only looked at two criteria it was the only thing we looked at because the original data set sort of pointed in that direction we said well what's within an angular spread the same direction and we're looking at and let's go wider than petechiae and brown so we went to 125 degrees angular spread and all of the objects so far have been relatively low inclinations below 30 degrees so we said well we'll open that up too we'll open it up to 40 degrees but we didn't find anything that high so and the other thing too is with our estimation process we use mass pretty heavily in several computations if the mass is too low it just doesn't change the numbers because the mass of Sedna and Biden are so large it just just doesn't change the numbers so in order for an asteroid to be useful in this estimation process it can't be too small it's got to have some heft to it so that's that's another thing we were looking for is it massive enough to make a difference and so we did find six additional s toroids that fell into that that window and we think we have better numbers you think we have considerably better numbers but you know back to your original question though back to your question do we think we've we've got the ammunition to find actual pointing numbers where they are we think we have the outline of a method but we had not done the work and I can't say that we have it and so we've done the work so it's it's a matter of faith at this point whether we really have a methodology or not are you pursuing that are you gonna do the work we've thought about writing another paper and in doing that and we both gotten busy with other things to tell you the truth I think we ought to and we did mention it in the paper we actually pointed there's one equation there's a equation 31 the people have to go to and say can I get the coordinates instantaneous coordinates from that then we believe the answer is yes but we haven't done it we haven't done the work but you've laid the groundwork for somebody if they want to do silver yeah yeah and yeah we yeah exactly so whether we will get back to it I would like to I'd like to because I think we can I think we can help shed some light on that even though the ash for example we have are all near the Sun all right Robert that was the like I said I think the thing is out there and I think it's only a matter of time until it's found but your work definitely puts us in the right direction and thanks for joining us today oh it's my pleasure thank you for having me and if you guys do another paper on it I hope you'll come back with us okay thank you very much I think the enigma of planet 9 is soon to be solved in the coming years new equipment will come online to help in the search and perhaps find it then we'll get to try to figure out what this planet is like but I have to ask myself with all of the mounting evidence that such a planet exists what would happen if in a hundred years or 200 years we still haven't found it John you haven't told the viewers to subscribe for ages like subscribe and share [Music] you [Music]

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Keywords: fermi paradox, enrico fermi (academic), physics (field of study), aliens, ufo, space, alien, planet, science, documentary, universe, interstellar, galaxy, extraterrestrial, exoplanet, kic 8462852, asmr, john michael godier event horizon, event horizon, Where is Planet Nine?, The Mystery of Planet Nine, Planet Nine, The Orbit of Planet Nine Derived from Engineering Physics, Mattia A. Galiazzo, solar system, JWST, Astronomy (field of study)

Id: xrTYhWcfH2o

Length: 37min 38sec (2258 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 05 2020