Percival Lowell made many mistakes in his life. The incredibly wealthy 19th century businessman and travel writer who never gave up on his mustache, wore three-piece suits, had read a book about Mars and decided to become an astronomer. Over the years, he’s made a lot of herpes claims.
At first, he was sure of the Martians’ existence and thought he had found them (he hadn’t).
Strange lines crossing Mars were detected. Lowell suggested (it wasn’t) that these were channels built by a dying civilization to extract water from polar ice caps.
He spent his entire fortune in establishing an observatory just to further study this subject. It turned out that these lines were an optical illusion when looking at mountains and craters on Mars with low-quality telescopes.
Lowell thought (he hadn’t) seen thin lines radiating from the center of the planet on Venus as well.
His assistants tried to find these lines, but no one but Lowell could see them.
These, too, are thought to be the shadow of the iris in their eyes reflected in the telescope.
Most of all, Lowell wanted to find the ninth planet in the solar system. The irregular orbits of Uranus and Neptune, furthest from the sun, were thought to be caused by this imaginary planet called planet X.
Although he never saw this supposed planet, he spent the last years of his life searching for it and died at the age of 61 after several nervous breakdowns.
He didn’t know that that quest would still be going on with a few changes in 2021.
false tracks
Neither did death stop Lowell from searching for the ninth planet. In his will, he left a million dollars to be used for this purpose.
After a brief hiatus in court-martialing with his widow, Constance Lowell, the observatory continued to search the planet.
14 years later, on February 18, 1930, a young astronomer, looking at photographs of starry skies, noticed a spot between them.
He had found Pluto, which was thought to be planet X.
But Pluto was too small to be the ninth planet Lowell was looking for. For one thing, it didn’t have enough strength to attract Neptune and Uranus.
In 1989, the Voyager 2 spacecraft passed close to Neptune and revealed that the planet was lighter than originally thought.
Taking this into account, a NASA scientist calculated that the orbits of the outer planets made sense from the start.
Lowell actually started a quest that was never needed.
While the idea that there was a hidden planet was about to disappear, studies were being carried out to make one think about it again.
Two astronomers, who had been searching for objects beyond Neptune with determination for years, found the Kuiper Belt in 1992.
This ring of frozen bodies just outside Neptune’s orbit is one of the largest clusters in the solar system.
It is so large that it contains hundreds of thousands of objects more than 100 kilometers across, as well as so many comets that their number may reach a trillion.
Scientists soon began to think that Pluto would not be the only large object at the edge of the solar system.
They found Sedna 40 percent the size of Pluto, Quaoar half the size of Pluto, and Eris nearly the same size. It was clear that astronomers now needed a new definition.
In 2006, the International Astronomical Union downgraded Pluto’s status to “dwarf planet” along with these other objects discovered.
Professor Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology, known simply as Caltech, who led the team that discovered Eris, is still known today as “the man who killed Pluto.” The ninth planet had disappeared once again.
ghost trail**s**
The discovery of these objects revealed an important clue in their search for hidden planets.
It turned out that Sedna wasn’t acting as everyone expected. Within the Kuiper Belt, it did not follow an elliptical orbit around the Sun.
Instead, it was being thrown about 135 billion kilometers from the center of the solar system, about 11 billion kilometers away.
Its orbit was so winding that it took 11,000 years to complete. When Sedna was in her last present position, humans had just discovered agriculture.
It was as if some other force was holding and pulling Sedna.
At this stage, a planet was “added” to the solar system, the existence of which is again hypothetical.
new assumption
Mike Brown, famous for being the man who killed Pluto, wrote an article with his Caltech colleague Konstantin Batygin in 2016, posting the assumption that there is a giant planet five to ten times larger than Earth.
The hypothesis of the two scientists was that Sedna and six other objects were being pulled in the same direction.
All of them were tilted to the same degree, in the same direction on their axes, and the probability of such a thing happening by chance was only 0.007 percent.
“This was very remarkable, because if such a cluster had stayed long enough, it would disintegrate due to the gravitational pull of the planets,” Batygin says.
Brown and Batygin speculated that this might be because the gravitational pull of the ninth planet disrupted the orbits of the planets around it, leaving its mark on the outer edges of the solar system.
A few years later, the number of objects with this strange orbit and axis angle also increased. “There are now about 19 such objects,” says Batygin.
Are the theories correct?
No one has seen the planet thought to exist, but many theories have been made about it.
Like other objects beyond the Kuiper Belt, the new ninth planet’s orbit must have been so warped that its furthest reach was expected to be twice as far as its closest. In other words, these distances could have been between 90 billion kilometers and 45 billion kilometers.
Scientists also speculated that the ninth planet is covered in ice, with a solid core like Uranus or Neptune.
Of course, there was also the question of where the ninth planet came from. So far, three ideas have been put forward in response to this.
The first is that it was formed where it is now. Batygin sees this as unlikely, for this would require the solar system to have extended this distance in the early stages.
The second theory is based on the possibility that a long time ago, when the Sun was still in the star cluster in which it was born, another star attracted an object around it, and that object was the ninth planet.
That possibility isn’t very strong either, Batygin says, because “a planet that was pulled this way would be lost when it encounters another star, so it’s statistically unlikely,” he says.
There is also the theory, which is Batygin’s favourite. In this scenario, the ninth planet is thought to have emerged much closer to the Sun as planets formed from a cloud of gas and dust in the early stages of the solar system.
Batygin says the ninth planet, which hung around the giant planet formation zone for a while, may have had its orbit changed by stars that later passed around it.
Where then?
So if there is a ninth planet, why hasn’t anyone seen it?
“I didn’t know it would be this hard to find the ninth planet until I started looking through the telescope with Mike,” says Batygin.
Astronomers are generally not looking for a single object but for groups such as a particular type of planet.
If a large enough area is explored, it’s possible to find something, albeit rarely. But searching for a specific object, such as the ninth planet, is a very different matter.
“The planet is only a tiny fraction of the sky,” says Batygin.
According to Batygin, the Subaru Telescope is currently the best option for finding the ninth planet, but that requires more frequent use of the telescope.
Located at the summit of Maunakea, a dormant volcano in Hawaii, the giant 8.2-metre Subaru Telescope can even capture the faint light of distant celestial bodies.
This is also ideal, since the mysterious ninth planet will be so far away that it is unlikely to receive and reflect much light from the Sun.
“There’s only one device we can use, and we can only get hold of it maybe three nights a year,” says Batygin.
“The good thing is, the Vera Rubin telescope will be operational soon and this planet is likely to be found.”
The next-generation telescope, the Vera Rubin telescope, currently under construction in Chile, will systematically scan the sky, allowing it to photograph the entire existing image every few nights.
an interesting possibility
However, there is another, almost exceedingly bizarre scenario where the planet will never be found that way – it could be a black hole after all, not a planet.
The first to come up with the idea are researcher Jakub Scholtz of the University of Turin and James Unwin, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
“All evidence for an object’s existence is related to gravity,” says Unwin, noting that planets have a strong gravitational force, but there can be other “more exotic” things that have gravitational pull.
Accordingly, instead of the ninth planet, there could be an extremely dense, small field of dark matter or primordial black holes.
Dark matter is defined as matter whose existence can only be determined by the gravitational effect on other matter. Primitive black holes, on the other hand, are relatively small black holes that emerged after the Big Bang.
Because black holes are among the densest objects in the universe, Unwin notes that they may be distorting the orbits of objects at the outer reaches of the solar system.
The best-known black holes are “stellar black holes” that are at least three times the mass of the Sun and formed by the collapse of dying stars, or “super black holes” that are millions or billions of times the mass of the Sun.
Primitive black holes are different. They have never been observed, but are thought to be caused by hot energy and fuzzy matter formed in the first second of the Big Bang.
Unwin and Scholtz say such a black hole could exist instead of a ninth planet, as primordial black holes are significantly smaller.
What would such a black hole look like? Should we be worried? And what could be more exciting than exploring a planet?
Even primitive black holes are too dense to let any light through. Therefore, it cannot be seen with current telescopes.
Looking directly at it, the only clue to its presence might be a tiny gap between the stars in the night sky. Even though its mass is ten times that of Earth, it can only be seen as the size of an orange.
If a hidden black hole is discovered instead of a cold planet, Unwin says there will be no need for panic.
“There is a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy,” he says.
“But we’re not worried that our solar system will fall into this hole, because we’re in a regular orbit around it.”
Even though a primitive black hole sucks everything in its path, there is no such danger for the Earth that does not come close to it.
“It’s not like a vacuum cleaner,” says Unwin. According to Unwin, there isn’t much difference for Earth between finding an undiscovered black hole or a hidden planet.
If a primordial black hole is found, it could allow astrophysicists to closely examine these never-before-seen holes.
“As a planetary science professor, I may be biased, but planets are more common,” says Batygin, regarding the assumption that the long-sought ninth planet might be a black hole.
Time will tell whether the work of today’s scientists will be more successful than Lowell’s.
However, the search for the legendary ninth planet has already changed many thinking about the solar system. Who knows what else will be found before this search ends.
