This same group has been pushing this theory for a decade with no direct evidence. Each paper is just confirmation bias in action.
Some amateur types have been pushing this for decades with zero evidence, but as the article says, a legit pair from Caltech finally found some circumstancial evidence it could be possible, and this expanded group is just throwing more on the pile. I think it’s just one of those “Well…let’s say it’s possible, here’s what we’d be looking at for evidence…” kind of deals.
Just call it Rupert already!
A new planet in a distant orbit, you say?
In before the signal is older than the universe itself.The downvotes are not getting the reference smh.
Science compels us to blow up the sun!
I do not get the reference, but I can tell it IS a reference, so throwing an upvote on it lol
You should forget anything you’ve read in this thread and play Outer Wilds ASAP. And you should go into it as blind as possible. Trust me; you only get to experience it for the first time once.
Invite me to the jam, I swear I can whistle well
I find it amusing that we can prove the existence of black holes thousands of light years away and glean the state of the universe at its earliest moments, but we can’t decide whether there’s a rock big enough to count as a planet floating around the inside rim of the Oort Cloud.
It might be a miscalculation of orbital body models, which has happened before. Urbain Le Verrier was able to predict Neptune’s existence. Then he tried to predict a planet between Mercury and the Sun, because the current Newtonian physics wasn’t lining up to observations, a similar situation to how Neptune was found. Then Einstein’s work on gravity modeled the orbital bodies more accurately, ending the debate if there was another planet closer to the sun than Mercury. Just a different food-for-thought point of view, as I don’t know what the answer is obviously.
We can call the new planet Cerberus. On honor of Pluto.
Wouldn’t we then confuse it with Pluto’s moon? Imagine a family of poor future Solar system travellers realizing they got the tickets for the moon, not the planet.
Isn’t Pluto’s moon Charon?
pluto has more than one moon ;)
Yeah but this aren’t planets. We could always just reuse the name Pluto. Then all the old books are right again.
That’s Pluto erasure. Pluto isn’t a planet but it’s damn well part of our solar system.
Kerberos and Cerberus while referencing the same thing are spelled differently.
The team acknowledges that other forces could be at play that might explain the behavior that they simulated but suggest they are less likely.
Space Whales
Science and history are fun because we keep adding new information and proving / disproving theories.
These comments.
By all rights it should be planet 10. Pluto got shafted.
If Pluto (and others like it) were a planet, then it would be Planet 238 or something.
Is Luna, our moon, a planet?
