Related papers: Has Kronos devoured Planet Nine and its epigones?
Evidence suggests the existence of a large planet in the outer Solar System, Planet Nine, with a predicted mass of 6.6 +2.6 / -1.7 Earth masses (Brown et al., 2024). Based on mass radius composition models, planet formation theory, and…
Planet Nine is a hypothetical planet located well beyond Pluto that has been proposed in an attempt to explain the observed clustering in physical space of the perihelia of six extreme trans-Neptunian objects or ETNOs. The predicted…
The existence of a giant planet beyond Neptune -- referred to as Planet Nine (P9) -- has been inferred from the clustering of longitude of perihelion and pole position of distant eccentric Kuiper belt objects (KBOs). After updating…
Several papers have recently suggested the possible presence of a ninth planet (Planet X) that might explain the gravitational perturbations of a number of detached Trans-Neptunian objects. To analyze the possibility further, we have…
We use an extensive suite of numerical simulations to constrain the mass and orbit of Planet Nine, the recently proposed perturber in a distant eccentric orbit in the outer solar system. We compare our simulations to the observed population…
A group of newly observed extreme trans-Neptunian objects exhibit unexpected orbital confinement, characterized by the alignment of orbital angular momentum vectors and apsidal lines. It is proposed that an undiscovered giant planet, named…
Over the course of the past two decades, observational surveys have unveiled the intricate orbital structure of the Kuiper Belt, a field of icy bodies orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune. In addition to a host of readily-predictable orbital…
The Planet Nine hypothesis has now enough constraints to deserve further attention in the form of detailed numerical experiments. The results of such studies can help us improve our understanding of the dynamical effects of such a…
Correlations in the orbits of several minor planets in the outer solar system suggest the presence of a remote, massive Planet Nine. With at least ten times the mass of the Earth and a perihelion well beyond 100 AU, Planet Nine poses a…
The hypothesis of an additional planet in the outer Solar System has gained new support as a result of the confinement noted in the angular orbital elements of distant trans-Neptunian objects. Orbital parameters proposed for the external…
The longitudes of perihelia and orbital poles of the solar system's dozen or so most remote detected objects are clustered in a manner inconsistent with that of a random sample of uniformly distributed orbits. While small number statistics…
We use astrometry of Pluto and other TNOs to constrain the sky location, distance, and mass of the possible additional planet (Planet Nine) hypothesized by Batygin and Brown (2016). We find that over broad regions of the sky, the inclusion…
We investigate the prospects for the capture of the proposed Planet 9 from other stars in the Sun's birth cluster. Any capture scenario must satisfy three conditions: the encounter must be more distant than ~150 au to avoid perturbing the…
The distribution of the orbital elements of the known extreme trans-Neptunian objects or ETNOs has been found to be statistically incompatible with that of an unperturbed asteroid population following heliocentric or, better, barycentric…
We analytically work out the long-term variations caused on the motion of a planet orbiting a star by a very distant, pointlike massive object X. Apart from the semi-major axis a, all the other Keplerian osculating orbital elements…
Uranus' startlingly large obliquity of 98 degrees has yet to admit a satisfactory explanation. The most widely accepted hypothesis involving a giant impactor that tipped Uranus onto its side encounters several difficulties with regards to…
We explore the distant giant planet hypothesis by integrating the large semi-major axis, large pericenter Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) in the presence of the giant planets and an external perturber whose orbit is consistent with the…
Cosmology experiments at mm-wavelengths can detect Planet Nine if it is the size of Neptune, has an effective temperature of 40 K, and is 700 AU from the Sun. It would appear as a ~30 mJy source at 1 mm with an annual parallax of ~5 arcmin.…
Batygin and Brown (2016) have suggested the existence of a new Solar System planet supposed to be responsible for the perturbation of eccentric orbits of small outer bodies. The main challenge is now to detect and characterize this putative…
The anomalous orbits of Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) can be explained by the Planet 9 hypothesis. We propose that the Planet 9 can be an axion star. Axion stars are gravitational bound clusters condensed by QCD axions or axion-like…