This week a team from Caltech announced results of a study suggesting that there may be a ninth planet – exciting news for solar system enthusiasts. Ironically, one of the team members was, in part, responsible for the decision a few years ago to”demote” Pluto from being a true planet to a dwarf. The proposed new body would definitely be given full planet status, as and when it is actually found, since gravitational analysis indicates it would have a mass around ten times that of earth.
The diagram above shows what led to this possibility – several known Kuiper Belt objects have their orbits lined up in ways that make no real sense in terms of the planetary bodies we already know. A secondary confirming fact came from checking the prediction that there should be another group of objects pushed by Planet 9’s gravity into orbits at right angles to the above. Sure enough, there are five known objects that do just this.
Of course, until there is some more tangible evidence, like a telescope observation, scepticism will remain.
Planet 9 is hugely distant from Earth – something like twenty times the distance of Neptune, taking 10-20,000 years to complete an orbit of the sun. So nobody will be visiting it anytime soon.
Out of interest, I checked out how long it would take a hypothetical spacecraft of the type Mitnash and Slate use in Far from the Spaceports. Bear in mind that their journeys between Earth, Mars, the asteroid belt settlements, and Jupiter, take around 4-6 weeks. Journeys get more efficient the longer they are, since you just keep accelerating to midpoint and achieve higher speeds. (Of course you also need more reaction mass to use as propellant). If Mitnash decided to go to Pluto, it would take him nearly 3 months. But a trip out to our new Planet 9 would be over ten months, and he would have a midpoint speed four times as high. Basically, settlers of such a place are committing themselves to a year’s journey to get out there. A casual visitor would need to know that the time spent interacting with the occupants warranted almost two years’ travel time there and back again.
With present technology, the times are vastly longer, and I cannot imagine we will be in a hurry to send even a robot probe that far.
