Author notes

162 - Eavesdrop

El Cid

on June 16, 2017

There is no perfect crime! Looks like our pervy friend Asram should have been watching his back instead of spying on his crewmates. We'll find out what happens next on Monday.

I may slow down the updates after next week, as I'll have burned through most of the exposition stuff by then and I don't want to eat through too much buffer. So enjoy it while it lasts! I'll also probably cut down on the blurbs; they should really be at most a one-per-week type of thing.




Remember Planet Nine? That mysterious giant planet that might be hiding out there in our solar system, well beyond the distant Kuiper Belt? Well, it may not be a real thing, after all.

It's been a roller coaster ride keeping track of the Sasquatch-like search for this elusive so-called ninth planet. In April, a massive crowdsourced search turned up four new Kuiper Belt objects, any of which potentially could turn out to be Planet Nine. But also in April, revelations about an already-discovered planetoid cast doubt on whether Planet Nine even exists. That planetoid is a small reddish world 250 kilometers across known by the catchy name of 2013 SY99. Its discovery is inconvenient for Planet Nine enthusiasts because computer models suggest it should not be possible for 2013 SY99 to maintain a stable orbit at its current inclination if there were a massive planet where Planet Nine is supposed to be.



A big part of what led us to believe Planet Nine was a real thing, was the otherwise inexplicable orbits of a weird class of minor planets called sednoids. It has been thought that their distant and wildly elongated orbits could only be explained by the influence of a very massive object somewhere beyond the Kuiper Belt. However, a more recent model shows that these orbits can be explained by gradual orbital diffusion over billions of years. So we may no longer need an hypothetical Planet Nine in order to explain them.

Neither the Planet Nine model nor the diffusion model is completely perfect, it should be pointed out. The extreme orbit of planet Sedna (after which the sednoids are named) cannot be explained through diffusion alone. It's still a big mystery. And the existence of 2013 SY99 is not necessarily incompatible with Planet Nine's existence, within certain parameters. So, as is often the case, we won't know anything for sure until more observations are made.