Manyattemptshave been made to find the so - cry " Planet Nine " , but all have – so far – been futile . In a new composition , a squad claims to have their own account : our theory of gravity is wrong .
For a few decades , astronomers have been puzzled by an apparent clustering of target , way out in theKuiper Belt . look at the bunch of objects , astrophysicist have suggested that they are being " shepherded " by the gravitative influence of a large unknown major planet far beyond the orbit of Neptune .
The team of theoretic physicists behind the raw newspaper are concerned inModified Newtonian Dynamics(MOND ) . wandflower go around in an peculiar fashion , as is their right . Our good explanation for the rotation , which would be easily explained if there was topic inside of them that we can not see , is that thereisin fact count inside wandflower that we ca n’t see ; sour matter , which is forecast to outweigh matter by five to one . In MOND , the odd rotary motion of galaxies is explain by modifications to gravity go through by object with very low acceleration , like those at the edge of galaxies . When gravitational acceleration is tiny enough , different gravitational behavior claim place .
Dark matter remains the account favored by the majority of physicist , having the reward that it allows scientists to make prediction about the universe and objects within it , which MOND hasnot yet been able todo .
In the new study , the team wanted to see if grounds for MOND could be get wind in the Solar System itself , searching for the influence of the Milky Way on object in the Kuiper Belt .
" We want to see if the data that patronage the Planet Nine hypothesis would effectively rein out MOND , " Katherine Brown , an associate professor of physics at Hamilton College , say in apress release .
concord to the team , if MOND is correct , over trillion of years , object in the extinct solar scheme would aline with the Milky Way ’s gravitational field . Though they bid to study further objects as the current sample is pocket-size , they say that plotting the Kuiper Belt object ( KBO ) locations against the Milky Way ’s gravitational field showed a " spectacular " alignment .
It ’s a big claim , which ( as the team compose ) requires more evidence . find Planet Nine , for example , would be a humble deal as it does n’t ask modifications to Newtonian sobriety . As such , it ’s deserving bearing in mind thatdark matterhas its own advantage , and that there are other explanation for how these objects move in the Kuiper Belt . There are even suggestions that it could even be the result of statistical unusual person and selection preconception .
Researchcarried out by Kevin Napier of the University of Michigan looked at other objects past the orbit of Neptune . If the six objects are evidence of bunching triggered by a hidden major planet , this would mean that their orbit differs from the orbits of other objects in the same realm . The team did not find grounds to corroborate that this was the case and suggested the evidence for Planet Nine was , in fact , natural selection diagonal .
" Historically , claimed gravitative anomaly in the solar organisation have almost invariably proven to be spurious under closer examination , " the squad concluded in their new paper . " But they have also led to the discovery of Neptune and help set up cosmopolitan Einstein’s theory of relativity . It is possible that the Kuiper Belt anomalies are grounds of Planet Nine , or that they are spurious ; alternatively , they may be grounds for a change of Newtonian gravity . "
The paper is print inThe Astronomical Journal .
