EVIDENCE FOR A DISTANT GIANT PLANET IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM

By K. Batygin, M. Brown. 2016

382 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent analyses have shown that distant orbits within the scattered disk population of the Kuiper Belt exhibit an unexpected clustering in their respective arguments of perihelion. While several hypotheses have been put forward to explain this alignment, to date, a theoretical model that can successfully account for the observations remains elusive. In this work we show that the orbits of distant Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) cluster not only in argument of perihelion, but also in physical space. We demonstrate that the perihelion positions and orbital planes of the objects are tightly confined and that such a clustering has only a probability of 0.007% to be due to chance, thus requiring a dynamical origin. We find that the observed orbital alignment can be maintained by a distant eccentric planet with mass ≳10 m⊕ whose orbit lies in approximately the same plane as those of the distant KBOs, but whose perihelion is 180° away from the perihelia of the minor bodies. In addition to accounting for the observed orbital alignment, the existence of such a planet naturally explains the presence of high-perihelion Sedna-like objects, as well as the known collection of high semimajor axis objects with inclinations between 60° and 150° whose origin was previously unclear. Continued analysis of both distant and highly inclined outer solar system objects provides the opportunity for testing our hypothesis as well as further constraining the orbital elements and mass of the distant planet.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/42d2744232a039e8bc2b9a963c612ca8d0e1643e

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

Origin and Evolution of Short-period Comets (2017, methodology): “P9 is hypothesized, via its gravitational shepherding effects, to produce the non-uniform distribution of orbital angles of known extreme KBOs (a > 150 au, q > 35 au; Trujillo & Sheppard 2014, Batygin & Brown 2016a).”
The planet nine hypothesis (2019, methodology): “…radically excited distribution of Centaur inclinations is a natural outcome of Planet Nine induced evolution, and constitutes a tantalizing line of evidence that points to Planet Nine’s existence (Batygin and Brown 2016b; Batygin and Morbidelli 2017; Becker et al. 2018; see also Gomes et al. 2015).”
The astrophysics of nanohertz gravitational waves (2018, background): “Though some of the early efforts may have been affected by severe selection effects (Henrichs and Staller 1978), the existence of distant members of the solar system is a question that has recently attracted considerably more attention, given the suggestion of a previously unknown “Planet Nine” (Bat”
CMB-S4 Science Case, Reference Design, and Project Plan (2019, background): “The recent excitement about a possible Planet Nine [486] (nominally 5–15 M⊕ at several hundred AU) has made it clear that there is substantial discovery space for new planets in the outer Solar System.”