Jan
20
Can anyone tell me why planet X practically does’t exist?
Is it not a planet,Because I already know pluto isn’t so is planet X forgotten or not a planet?I’m lost.
Answer by The Lazy Astronomer
Something exists only when it is found. Since it has not been found it cannot be said to exist.
Note Found does not necessarily mean seen but it’s presence must have been observable by some means.
Give your answer to this question below!
It’s a theoretical planet. It doesn’t exist. If something planet-sized pops up on our scopes within the next couple of years, you’ll hear all the doomsday folks cry “Planet X”.
At one time, Pluto was referred to as “Planet X” when they suspected a planet beyond the orbit of Neptune.
They thought they detected unexplained motion in Neptune’s orbit and suspected another planet was pulling on it, and started looking for another planet out there. Clyde Tombaugh found an object out beyond Neptune in 1930, and decided it was Planet X, later renamed Pluto.
Later, they determined Neptune’s orbit more accurately, and realized that an error in determining the orbit only made it look like another Planet was pulling on Neptune, and they quit looking. But Pluto remained a planet for at least 65 years, until another object was found of slightly larger diameter.
As for the current “Planet X,” it is a Doomsday myth. I have even heard claims that astronomers have not seen it coming yet, because it is invisible! How can a planet be invisible? It’s nonsense.
Not Scientific, Not even credible science fiction.
Pluto is a planet, a dwarf planet, and Planet X exists, since NASA recognizes Eris as a dwarf planet, and it is the tenth planet, Roman Numeral X.
A dwarf planet is a planet. Saying that Pluto is no longer a planet is similar to saying that the sun is no longer a star, because it is a dwarf yellow star. I do not understand why so many people have so many problems with the logic of a dwarf planet still being a planet, especially when the word “planet” is in IAU’s official description of Pluto. Pluto IS A PLANET, along with Ceres, Makemake, Haumea, and Eris, and is recognized as such on NASA websites.
http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=Dwarf&Display=OverviewLong
http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/
“Rex Barker” is right… there are *at* *least* two definitions of “Planet X”. The first one is the object that was inferred to exist beyond the orbit of Neptune, based upon perturbations in the orbits of Neptune and Uranus. Basically this means that the planets were not moving the way that they thought they should. When they started looking for it, they called it “Planet X”. Eventually Pluto was discovered and “Planet X” became Pluto.
However “Planet X” didn’t go away completely. Pluto was thought to be too small to cause the perturbations, so the hunt for “Planet X” continued.
Eventually, however, spacecraft arrived at Uranus and Neptune, and more accurate measurements of their mass were taken, and it was discovered that the ‘perturbations’ disappeared.
So, the first “Planet X” was Pluto, the second “Planet X” never existed.
Along the way other ideas cropped up, including the ‘Nemesis’ hypothesis, which proposed a dim red dwarf or brown dwarf as a distant binary companion to the sun on an elliptical orbit that caused it to periodically disturb the Oort cloud, and send comets inbound to the inner solar system. This was proposed as a way to explain a supposedly cyclical pattern of extinctions.
However, the Nemesis hypothesis is missing one important thing: Supporting evidence. The evidence for this distant binary companion never materialized, even when Hubble went up.
We can find brown dwarfs in distant systems, but we don’t see one near us. Therefore, it probably doesn’t exist.
Then, in the late 90′s, a UFO contactee named Nancy Leider started saying that the aliens talking in her head were warning us about a massive planet that was going to sweep through the solar system leaving death and destruction in its wake. She called this “Planet X”.
Unfortunately for Leider, these aliens had a really bad grasp of astronomy, and kept making bone-headed errors. Like the fact that when it was pointed out that the orbit she claimed it was on was impossible she ‘invented’ a distant companion star to the sun (sound familiar?) and claimed that “Planet X” orbited *both* stars, which is even more impossible. Or the fact that it was supposed to be here in 2003.
When the 2012 stuff started surfacing (thanks to some really wacked-out books by Jose Arguelles and Terrence McKenna and John Major Jenkins, among others) Leider … um… reactivated, I guess is a good word… her predictions for Planet X.
So, that’s the most recent “Planet X”. Nancy Leider’s invisible telepathic aliens’ 9-years late planet impossibly orbiting two stars, one of which doesn’t exist.
Need I go on?
- Ouroboros