The Best Christmas Gift Ever

Yes, it's Christmas Day, and just because I'm generous, I found a website that I'm sure you'll all love. Feel like giving yourself a reminder that we're incredibly insignificant, compared with the entirety of the universe? Well, here's a nifty little place that's scaled the solar system to such a scale that the moon takes up one pixel. As such, it takes a very long time to scroll through the entirety of the solar system. And remember, our corner of the universe is but a infinitesimally tiny portion of an infinite whole. Just what you needed, right?

Is It Planet X ... Or A Black Hole?

Okay, so we're dealing with a theory stacked on top of another theory here today. Astronomers have been looking for an object far out in the solar system because, according to what they've observed of current Kuiper Belt objects, something is disrupting their orbits. That something could possibly be a ninth planet, similar to Uranus or Neptune. It might not even be there, the data is sparse.

But let's say there is something out there causing gravitational mischief. The only requirement for this object is that it weighs something like 10 Earth masses. It doesn't HAVE to be a planet.

So a pair of physicists have suggested that a tiny black hole, similar in physical size to a grapefruit, is causing those trans-Neptunian objects to go off course. Their evidence? A series of brief microlensing events observed by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment. Planets don't cause microlensing events like the ones the experiment observed, but a small black hole would. And the mass causing the events was consistent with the mass of the theoretical ninth planet.

The physicists noted that their theory is a wild one, and that it probably isn't a black hole. Like I said, we don't even know if there is something in the outer solar system causing gravity problems. But it would definitely be cool if our solar system had picked up a little black hole over the years. Rest assured, it would be no threat. You'd have to be really close to get sucked in by a black hole that weighed only a few times more than the Earth. Just remember, if the sun was replaced by a black hole of equal mass, Earth's orbit wouldn't change. We'd freeze, but we wouldn't get sucked in. That's not how gravity works.

We Have a New Record For Furthest-Away Solar System Object

What do you call a dwarf planet that's further away than a dwarf planet you've already dubbed "FarOut?"

If you guessed "FarFarOut" then congrats! You think just like the scientists that discovered the object way out at the outer edges of the solar system. The object, which we know nothing about other then that it exists, is currently 140 AU from the sun and probably has an orbit lasting a thousand years or so. While objects we have discovered have orbits that will take them past that (the dwarf planet Sedna will get thousands of AU away), this beats the current record for furthest object from the sun currently by about 20 AU.

The discovery is also helpful for scientists looking for a potential ninth planet hanging around in the far-flung corners of the solar system. If we can find little dwarf planets billions of miles away, then we can find something that may be 10 times the size of Earth if we look in the right place.

Theoretical Planets Are Starting To Stack Up In The Outer Solar System

You may remember that about a year and a half ago, I wrote about a theoretical ninth planet way out in the outer solar system. It's thought to be an ice giant, just like Uranus and Neptune, and to orbit hundreds of AU away. If anything, that theory has gained evidence over the past 17 months. This is not about that planet. This is about a new theoretical planet orbiting in the outer solar system. Yes, if it turns out that both these planets actually exist, we'll have ten planets.

Credit: Heather Roper/Lunar and Planetary Laboratory

So, what's the story with Planet Ten? Why do we need it? Simple, it all comes down to those pesky Kuiper Belt objects again. They're not behaving the way they should be, their orbits are not in alignment with the plane of the solar system. Something is moving them, and it isn't Planet Nine, which is too far away to have the observed effect. So now we have Planet Ten, thought to be much smaller than its theoretical sibling, weighing in somewhere between Earth and Mars and looking essentially like a giant Pluto. Also, Planet Ten orbits much closer to the sun than Planet Nine, to the tune of several dozen AU rather than several hundred. So actually, Planet Ten would be the ninth planet, and Planet Nine would be the tenth planet, and that's not going to be confusing at all.

I wouldn't worry too much about having to memorize two new planet names any time soon though. It's easier to find planets around other stars than to find them around our own at this point. These planets, if they do exist, will move incredibly slowly, and give off almost no light at all. As the article says, we'll see what happens when the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope is finished and starts searching for KPOs. Until then, there's still only eight planets.