Thought there were some significant progress…
Comment on You are in this solar system, but we do not grant you the rank of planet
bstix@feddit.dk 6 months agoThey found more evidence for its existence recently, but no. Nobody has ever seen it or even found out in which direction to look. The evidence is that the other planets move in ways that only makes sense if there is some mass somewhere pulling their orbits.
Sort of like having to discover the moon from watching the tides in the sea.
someacnt_@lemmy.world 6 months ago
dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Well we figured out where to look for it, and it is definitely the sky. We tried looking the last place we left it, and then we looked all around the basement from top to bottom. Yup, we can say with confidence folks, Planet X is hiding somewhere above us.
bstix@feddit.dk 6 months ago
Yeah well, not really. Next year maybe, according to the article linked yesterday.
ManniSturgis@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
Have they tried looking up towards the sky? I think they won’t find it underground.
DigitalDruid@lemmy.sdf.org 6 months ago
this method is how we discovered Neptune and Pluto and many exoplanets. Kepler’s laws are extremely specific about orbits, so once you pin down the disturbances the planet makes you significantly narrow down the places it can be.
marcos@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Yes, but that new evidence is way less distinguishable from noise than the one for Neptune.
At this point, the most likely is that there isn’t anything there.
Alexstarfire@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Can we just send someone to check it out? Stop being lazy.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I have a pizza for I. C. Weiner
bstix@feddit.dk 6 months ago
Yes, the difference being that the existence of Neptune and Pluto could be visually confirmed through telescope more easily. They’re also not visible to the naked eye, but they can be found in telescopic images by comparing to a map of the sky at other times. Later on they were visited by probes.
I don’t know what counts as a discovery of a planet. Personally, I’d like to see any kind of real data from the planet before claiming it discovered.
The calculations can be 100% correct, but they’re not verified until there’s some kind of external proof.
The planet X (or 9 or whatever) has yet to be seen in any kind of way.
So far the calculations have been confirmed by other calculations showing the same thing, and they’re most certainly correct, but the “solid” proof is still missing.
(It doesn’t have to be solid or visual, I don’t know the English word for it; it just needs to originate from the actual existence of the planet and not only from the effects of its theoretical existence.)