Yerp, gonna go ahead and drop the new cover page for Chapter 2.1: Trojans. I went with 'Trojans' as a title for a number of reasons. First, as the title suggests, there's treachery afoot! Plus, it kinda goes with the whole cyberpunky feel of the series, yunno, like a trojan horse malware type thing. Aaaaand also, for the space geeks, there's trojan asteroids, like the Jupiter trojans. Or it could be just a crude reference to condoms. Whatever works for you!
And, I guess that's it. Gonna go… do… wait, what's this? I think I feel a science blurb coming on here. Wow, it's a big one… no, wait… never mind. False alarm.
*phew!*
Oh shit.
First off, big thanks to Fallopiancrusader for bringing this up, because I never would have thought to blurb on this had he not. It's a bit more speculative than my usual blurbs, but it's timely and, most important, it's really really cool.
So, you may or may not have heard the news about this thing called Planet 9. If you have… well… you can skip this blurb Mister or Miss Know-It-All. For the rest of you, here's what's been going on, in a nutshell:
Do you remember Mike Brown? He's that jerk Caltech astronomer who credits himself with killing Pluto, and never misses an opportunity to remind us about it. Well, he actually does a lot of useful science on the Kuiper Belt, and recently he and his colleague Konstantin Batygin may have made the defining astronomical discovery of this century. They think they've found a new planet – a giant one they've privately named “Phatty” – way on the outer fringes of the solar system. It hasn't been slam-dunk confirmed just yet, but there's a good chance they're right about this one.
The story of Planet Nine's discovery begins with a group of minor planets called sednoids. If you're a Kuiper Belt geek like me, then you're already familiar with planet Sedna, a giant red ice world whose bizarre 11,400 year elongated orbit comes no closer than 76 astronomical units from the sun and as far out as 936 astronomical units (the Earth is 1 astronomical unit from the sun, btw. So that's more than 30 times further away than Neptune).
When Sedna was first discovered, it was a total oddball. There was just no good explanation for something to be out there with a crazy orbit like that. And it got weirder. As time went on, we found more sednoids – bizarre-o planets deep, deep out past the Kuiper Belt with stretched-out Sednalike orbits. But what really baffled astronomers was the way that so many sednoids' orbits seemed to align, in an orderly fashion that just couldn't occur by chance. That kind of thing only happens when something very massive is out there, corralling things with its gravity.
This is where Brown and Batygin come in. Based on their calculations, there is only a .007 percent chance of the sednoids' alignment being purely random. In other words, it's almost 100 percent likely that something is perturbing their orbits. Using advanced computer models, they've found that the most likely explanation is that there's an object about 10 times as massive as the Earth – a mini-Neptune sized gas giant or possibly a super Earth – with an orbit whose nearest approach to the sun is no less than 250 astronomical units (six times further away than Pluto) and the longer leg of its orbit takes it anywhere from 600 to 1200 astronomical units out into the dark.
Based on their model, Brown and Batygin not only found an explanation for the bizarre orbits of the sednoids, but they also made the prediction that Planet Nine's gravitational effects would also produce at-the-time undiscovered families of sednoidlike objects whose orbits would be thrown at right angles to Planet Nine's orbital path, and perpendicular to the solar system's orbital plane. It has since been confirmed by observation that these objects do in fact exist. While astronomers have not yet been able to observe Planet Nine directly, there seems to be enough indirect evidence at this point that it's probably real. It just needs a better name than “Phatty.”
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