Comments by "H. de Jong" (@h.dejong2531) on "Are We Close to Finding Planet 9?" video.

  1. it's much easier to build a large telescope on Earth, than to launch one to Pluto's orbit. The Vera Rubin telescope is large enough to find Planet X quickly when it comes on line in 2023.
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  2. As far as we know, there's no way to create a black hole that small.
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  3. Astrophysicists. I.e. the people whose field of expertise this is.
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  4. No. The Voyagers don't have the tools to detect faint objects.
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  5. We have found all starlike objects in our vicinity. None of them are close enough to orbit our sun.
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  6. no, the definition of a planet hasn't changed. Alan Stern wants to change it based on the arguments you mention.
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  7. There's an excellent graph (made by Randall Munro of xkcd) called 'possible undiscovered planets'. This shows there's an area of our solar systems where our telescopes, including NEOWISE (the survey you're talking about) don't have enough resolution yet to see a planet.
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  8. Incorrect. In the area where Planet X is thought to be, planets are on the edge of our detection capabilities. New telescopes coming online in the next few years will improve on this. Expect a host of new discoveries in the outer solar system from 2027.
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  9. Calculations gave them an orbit, but not the point along that orbit. So there's a large area to search, and much of that orbital path is against the background of the center of the Milky Way, so they're looking for a faint object against a bright background. The combination means only a few telescopes can be used to search for the planet, and it takes a long time to scan the entire area.
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  10. A planet the size of Nibiru that gets anywhere near Earth and was visible to the Sumerians at some point would have been found by now. A planet that fits those constraints is far too large and too close to not be noticed.
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  11. If you use that definition, Pluto isn't #9, it's #10. And you'd have 20+ additional planets. The discovery of the Kuiper Belt made the old classification impractical. Classification (=dividing things into categories) has always been part of science, because it makes it easier to have a discussion when everybody uses the same classification. When Galileo saw Jupiter and understood that it was a planet like ours, the solar system had two classes: anything in orbit around the Sun is a planet, anything in orbit around a planet is a moon. Then we started to discover asteroids, starting with the largest: Ceres. This was initially considered a planet. Then we discovered hundreds of smaller objects in similar orbits, and astronomers added a new class: asteroids. Ceres was moved from the Planet class to the Asteroid class. Then we discovered Pluto. Seemed to be alone in its region, so it was considered a planet. Then we discovered hundreds of smaller objects in similar orbits, and astronomers added a new class: dwarf planets. Pluto was moved from the Planet class to the Dwarf Planet class. The more objects you have, the more classes it becomes useful to divide them into. This is done everywhere in science. What most people call mosquitoes, biologists divide into several hundred species. Etc. In this case, a scientific classification has entered the public consciousness and people are flipping out because they have an emotional attachment to Pluto.
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  12.  @TheWilkReport  You're redefining words just as much as the IAU is, just in another direction. If "spherical and orbits the sun" is your definition, Pluto isn't the 9th planet. Ceres falls under your definition too, making Jupiter 6, Saturn 7, Uranus 8, Neptune 9 and Pluto 10.
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  13. for Neptune, we had a small area of sky to search: we didn't just have an orbit, we had the most likely location on that orbit. For planet X, we only have the orbit. So we have to take photos along the entire orbit, some of which is in front of the center of the Milky Way, making it difficult to see anything.
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  14. There's an excellent graph (made by Randall Munro of xkcd) called 'possible undiscovered planets'. This shows there's an area of our solar systems where our telescopes don't have enough resolution yet to see a planet. This area is getting smaller as new telescopes come on line, but we're not yet at a point where we can see everything in the solar system.
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  15. In 1976, someone retranslated a Sumerian text and claimed it talks about an unknown planet. Charlatans then claimed this planet (Nibiru) would destroy Earth in 2012 (coinciding with the end of one period in the Mayan calendar). When that didn't happen (and indeed, no new planet was visible in the night sky), charlatans moved on to the next bit of nonsense. We have found actual planets much further out than this hypothetical one. Sedna has a 10,000 year orbit. So we know Nibiru doesn't exist.
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  16. There's an excellent graph (made by Randall Munro of xkcd) called 'possible undiscovered planets'. This shows there's an area of our solar systems where our telescopes, including NEOWISE don't have enough resolution yet to see a planet.
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  17. Carlson is a mysticist, not an astronomer. We'd have found any companion star by now.
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  18. In 1976, someone retranslated a Sumerian text and claimed it talks about an unknown planet. Charlatans then claimed this planet (Nibiru) would destroy Earth in 2012 (coinciding with the end of one period in the Mayan calendar). When that didn't happen (and indeed, no new planet was visible in the night sky), charlatans moved on to the next bit of nonsense. We have found actual planets much further out than this hypothetical one. Sedna has a 10,000 year orbit. So we know Nibiru doesn't exist, and any claims about a "planet 9" that will destroy us can be dismissed.
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  19. it all comes down to angular size. We haven't discovered all of the asteroids yet; not even all of the large ones. Similarly, there's a region of the solar system where planets are too far away: their angular size gets smaller than our telescopes can resolve, or their brightness gets too low.
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  20. In 1976, someone retranslated a Sumerian text and claimed it talks about an unknown planet. Charlatans then claimed this planet (Nibiru) would destroy Earth in 2012 (coinciding with the end of one period in the Mayan calendar). When that didn't happen (and indeed, no new planet was visible in the night sky), charlatans moved on to the next bit of nonsense.  The 1976 translation turned out to be full of errors. Data from archaeology and astronomy disproved the Nibiru claims. We have found actual planets much further out than this hypothetical one. Sedna has a 10,000 year orbit. So we know Nibiru doesn't exist, and any claims about a "planet 9" that will destroy us can be dismissed.
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  21. You want a survey instrument to do that, not an instrument like JWST that's optimized to look at very small areas.
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  22. Unfortunately those old records don't match up with any of the thousands of objects we've found. Whatever they saw, it's unlikely to have been a planet.
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  23. In 1976, someone retranslated a Sumerian text and claimed it talks about an unknown planet. Charlatans then claimed this planet (Nibiru) would destroy Earth in 2012 (coinciding with the end of one period in the Mayan calendar). When that didn't happen (and indeed, no new planet was visible in the night sky), charlatans moved on to the next bit of nonsense. We have found actual planets much further out than this hypothetical one. Sedna has a 10,000 year orbit. So we know Nibiru doesn't exist, and any claims about a "planet 9" that will destroy us can be dismissed.
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  24. Eh, no.
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  25.  @huanhoundofthevailinor2374  The current definition isn't great, but there's no definition that makes scientific sense that would leave you with 9 planets. It's either 8 or dozens.
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  26. No, we can't. That's the whole point of this video.
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  27.  @joseywells9616  Whatever you're looking at, it's not a planet.
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  28. There's an excellent graph (made by Randall Munro of xkcd) called 'possible undiscovered planets'. This shows there's an area of our solar systems where our telescopes don't have enough resolution yet to see a planet. Exoplanets are found by looking at a star and detecting changes, not by imaging planets directly.
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  29. Classification (=dividing things into categories) has always been part of science, because it makes it easier to have a discussion when everybody uses the same classification. When Galileo saw Jupiter and understood that it was a planet like ours, the solar system had two classes: anything in orbit around the Sun is a planet, anything in orbit around a planet is a moon. Then we started to discover asteroids, starting with the largest: Ceres. This was initially considered a planet. Then we discovered hundreds of smaller objects in similar orbits, and astronomers added a new class: asteroids. Ceres was moved from the Planet class to the Asteroid class. Then we discovered Pluto. Seemed to be alone in its region, so it was considered a planet. Then we discovered hundreds of smaller objects in similar orbits, and astronomers added a new class: dwarf planets. Pluto was moved from the Planet class to the Dwarf Planet class. The more objects you have, the more classes it becomes useful to divide them into. This is done everywhere in science. What most people call mosquitoes, biologists divide into several hundred species. Etc. In this case, a scientific classification has entered the public consciousness and people are flipping out because they have an emotional attachment to Pluto.
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  30. Dude, did you watch the video at all? The Planet 9 we're looking for is not Pluto; it's a much larger, more distant object.
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  31. No, that's incorrect. We have found about 1000 Kuiper Belt Objects.
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  32.  @iupetre  no, we're seeing objects in stable orbits that are right in the middle of where we predicted the Kuiper Belt to be.
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  33.  @iupetre  from Wikipedia: After the discovery of Pluto in 1930, many speculated that it might not be alone. The region now called the Kuiper belt was hypothesized in various forms for decades. It was only in 1992 that the first direct evidence for its existence was found. The number and variety of prior speculations on the nature of the Kuiper belt have led to continued uncertainty as to who deserves credit for first proposing it. The Kuiper belt was initially thought to be the main repository for periodic comets, those with orbits lasting less than 200 years. Studies since the mid-1990s have shown that the belt is dynamically stable and that comets' true place of origin is the scattered disc, a dynamically active zone created by the outward motion of Neptune 4.5 billion years ago;] scattered disc objects such as Eris have extremely eccentric orbits that take them as far as 100 AU from the Sun. In 1943, in the Journal of the British Astronomical Association, Kenneth Edgeworth hypothesized that, in the region beyond Neptune, the material within the primordial solar nebula was too widely spaced to condense into planets, and so rather condensed into a myriad smaller bodies. From this he concluded that "the outer region of the solar system, beyond the orbits of the planets, is occupied by a very large number of comparatively small bodies": xii  and that, from time to time, one of their number "wanders from its own sphere and appears as an occasional visitor to the inner solar system",: 2  becoming a comet. So comets were part of early Kuiper Belt hypotheses, but larger objects in stable orbits were too. And we haven't just found the KB, we've also found objects in the scattered disk, which we now think is the source of short-period comets.
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  34.  @wannabecriminalman  yeah, you're right. My knowledge was outdated.
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  35. Just because you don't understand how we can do that, doesn't mean it's impossible.
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  36. That's nonsense.
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  37. There's an excellent graph (made by Randall Munro of xkcd) called 'possible undiscovered planets'. This shows there's an area of our solar systems where our telescopes don't have enough resolution yet to see a planet. The faraway objects we can see are far larger and more luminous than a planet.
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  38. that's a hypothesis with no supporting evidence.
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  39.  @KaosRunes  The largest telescope we ever launched to Pluto's orbit has a mirror diameter of 20 cm. We have telescopes with an 8 m mirror here on Earth. The huge increase in size more than compensates for the extra distance.
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  40. If you insist on making Pluto a planet, Ceres is one too.
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  41. Nemesis is not a scientific theory, it's a conspiracy theory. Not worth anyone's time.
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  42. Classification (=dividing things into categories) has always been part of science, because it makes it easier to have a discussion when everybody uses the same classification. When Galileo saw Jupiter and understood that it was a planet like ours, the solar system had two classes: anything in orbit around the Sun is a planet, anything in orbit around a planet is a moon. Then we started to discover asteroids, starting with the largest: Ceres. This was initially considered a planet. Then we discovered hundreds of smaller objects in similar orbits, and astronomers added a new class: asteroids. Ceres was moved from the Planet class to the Asteroid class. Then we discovered Pluto. Seemed to be alone in its region, so it was considered a planet. Then we discovered hundreds of smaller objects in similar orbits, and astronomers added a new class: dwarf planets. Pluto was moved from the Planet class to the Dwarf Planet class. The more objects you have, the more classes it becomes useful to divide them into. This is done everywhere in science. What most people call mosquitoes, biologists divide into several hundred species. Etc. In this case, a scientific classification has entered the public consciousness and people are flipping out because they have an emotional attachment to Pluto. Lastly, the classification was done by the IAU, not NASA.
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  43.  @generaleerelativity9524  You didn't read what I wrote at all, did you? In 1960, Pluto was the only object we knew off in this area. Now, we have found more than 2000 objects and that number is climbing rapidly. More objects means we can benefit from a finer classification. That's all this is, but concepts that complex will sail right over your tinfoil hat, I suspect.
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  44. Not as simple as that. They have to search a large section of sky, they've done half of that section now.
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  45.  @TheWilkReport  Under the IAU definition, Pluto does not meet the definition of a planet. It hasn't cleared its neighborhood.
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  46. it all comes down to angular size and brightness. There's a region of the solar system where planets are too far away to detect: their angular size gets smaller than our telescopes can resolve, or their brightness gets too low.
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  47. Small, but on a 4 bn year timescale, not insignificant.
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  48. 7:14 there's some information missing here. The perturbations Lowell was using to calculate there had to be another planet, turned out to be measurement errors. The "planet X" he was looking for is unrelated to the current work by Brown et al.
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  49. That's incorrect. Hubble information is not stored on tapes, but on servers with backups. They haven't lost any observations.
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  50. No. In 1976, someone retranslated a Sumerian text and claimed it talks about an unknown planet. Charlatans then claimed this planet (Nibiru) would destroy Earth in 2012 (coinciding with the end of one period in the Mayan calendar). When that didn't happen (and indeed, no new planet was visible in the night sky), charlatans moved on to the next bit of nonsense. We have found actual planets much further out than this hypothetical one. Sedna has a 10,000 year orbit. So we know Nibiru doesn't exist, and any claims about a "planet 9" that will destroy us can be dismissed.
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  51. Maybe, but it won't be used to look for planet X. You want a survey instrument to do that, not an instrument like JWST that's optimized to look at very small areas.
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  52. The "planet nine" those textbooks are talking about is a conspiracy theory. In 1976, someone retranslated a Sumerian text and claimed it talks about an unknown planet. Charlatans then claimed this planet (Nibiru) would destroy Earth in 2012 (coinciding with the end of one period in the Mayan calendar). When that didn't happen (and indeed, no new planet was visible in the night sky), charlatans moved on to the next bit of nonsense. We have found actual planets much further out than this hypothetical one. Sedna has a 10,000 year orbit. So we have proved that Nibiru doesn't exist, and any claims about a "planet 9" that will destroy us can be dismissed. The Oort cloud has the status of hypothesis for now: our solar system formation models predict that it exists, but we have no evidence that confirms or disproves it. Your dismissal of theories shows you don't understand what a theory is. Science starts with observations. Scientists try to find an explanation for those observations, this becomes a model (or hypothesis). The model is tested using more observations or experiments. When the model holds up and makes accurate predictions, it becomes a theory. The word 'theory' has a specific meaning here: it's not the colloquial opposite of 'practice'; a scientific theory is a model that has been shown to be accurate in a wide range of circumstances, and the best way we currently have to explain how things work.
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  53. In 1976, someone retranslated a Sumerian text and claimed it talks about an unknown planet. Charlatans then claimed this planet (Nibiru) would destroy Earth in 2012 (coinciding with the end of one period in the Mayan calendar). When that didn't happen (and indeed, no new planet was visible in the night sky), charlatans moved on to the next bit of nonsense. We have found actual planets much further out than this hypothetical one. Sedna has a 10,000 year orbit. So we know Nibiru doesn't exist, and any claims about a "planet 9" that will destroy us can be dismissed.
    1
  54. In 1976, someone retranslated a Sumerian text and claimed it talks about an unknown planet. Charlatans then claimed this planet (Nibiru) would destroy Earth in 2012 (coinciding with the end of one period in the Mayan calendar). When that didn't happen (and indeed, no new planet was visible in the night sky), charlatans moved on to the next bit of nonsense. We have found actual planets much further out than this hypothetical one. Sedna has a 10,000 year orbit. So we know Nibiru doesn't exist, and any claims about a "planet 9" that will destroy us can be dismissed.
    1
  55. In 1976, someone retranslated a Sumerian text and claimed it talks about an unknown planet. Charlatans then claimed this planet (Nibiru) would destroy Earth in 2012 (coinciding with the end of one period in the Mayan calendar). When that didn't happen (and indeed, no new planet was visible in the night sky), charlatans moved on to the next bit of nonsense. The 1976 translation turned out to be full of errors. Data from archaeology and astronomy disproved the Nibiru claims. We have found actual planets much further out than this hypothetical one. Sedna has a 10,000 year orbit. So we know Nibiru doesn't exist, and any claims about a "planet 9" that will destroy us can be dismissed.
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  56. As far as we know, there's no way to create a black hole that small.
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  57.  @edme8865  the problem is, with the data we have, we can't narrow it down further.
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  58. Yes, but it won't be used to look for planet X. You want a survey instrument to do that, not an instrument like JWST that's optimized to look at very small areas.
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  59. Your assumption is incorrect: we are studying the Milky Way in great detail.
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  60. The point of the IAU definition is not authority, it's having a common language. Science benefits from having everyone in the field use the same definitions. This makes reading someone else's paper a lot easier. The reason for the new classification is obvious: Classification (=dividing things into categories) has always been part of science, because it makes it easier to have a discussion when everybody uses the same classification. When Galileo saw Jupiter and understood that it was a planet like ours, the solar system had two classes: anything in orbit around the Sun is a planet, anything in orbit around a planet is a moon. Then we started to discover asteroids, starting with the largest: Ceres. This was initially considered a planet. Then we discovered hundreds of smaller objects in similar orbits, and astronomers added a new class: asteroids. Ceres was moved from the Planet class to the Asteroid class. Then we discovered Pluto. Seemed to be alone in its region, so it was considered a planet. Then we discovered hundreds of smaller objects in similar orbits, and astronomers added a new class: dwarf planets. Pluto was moved from the Planet class to the Dwarf Planet class. The more objects you have, the more classes it becomes useful to divide them into. This is done everywhere in science. What most people call mosquitoes, biologists divide into several hundred species. Etc. In this case, a scientific classification has entered the public consciousness and people are flipping out because they have an emotional attachment to Pluto.
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  61. As far as we know, there's no way to create a black hole that small.
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  62. Classification (=dividing things into categories) has always been part of science, because it makes it easier to have a discussion when everybody uses the same classification. When Galileo saw Jupiter and understood that it was a planet like ours, the solar system had two classes: anything in orbit around the Sun is a planet, anything in orbit around a planet is a moon. Then we started to discover asteroids, starting with the largest: Ceres. This was initially considered a planet. Then we discovered hundreds of smaller objects in similar orbits, and astronomers added a new class: asteroids. Ceres was moved from the Planet class to the Asteroid class. Then we discovered Pluto. Seemed to be alone in its region, so it was considered a planet. Then we discovered hundreds of smaller objects in similar orbits, and astronomers added a new class: dwarf planets. Pluto was moved from the Planet class to the Dwarf Planet class. The more objects you have, the more classes it becomes useful to divide them into. This is done everywhere in science. What most people call mosquitoes, biologists divide into several hundred species. Etc. In this case, a scientific classification has entered the public consciousness and people are flipping out because they have an emotional attachment to Pluto.
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  63. In 1976, someone retranslated a Sumerian text and claimed it talks about an unknown planet. Charlatans then claimed this planet (Nibiru) would destroy Earth in 2012 (coinciding with the end of one period in the Mayan calendar). When that didn't happen (and indeed, no new planet was visible in the night sky), charlatans moved on to the next bit of nonsense. We have found actual planets much further out than this hypothetical one. Sedna has a 10,000 year orbit. So we know Nibiru doesn't exist, and any claims about a "planet 9" that will destroy us can be dismissed.
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  64. ​ @ziiziizii3838  That's not a belief, that's knowledge. A planet the size of Nibiru that gets anywhere near Earth and was visible to the Sumerians at some point would have been found by now. It's far too large and too close to not be noticed.
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  65. The Vatican has been funding astronomy research for a long time. Nothing nefarious about that. NASA has not replaced the SLS yet.
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  66. It'll be really faint. That's part of the problem: it's at the edge of our detection capability.
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  67. So does Titan. On the other hand, Mercury doesn't. Using "does it have an atmosphere" to separate planets from non-planets introduces new problems.
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  68. In 1976, someone retranslated a Sumerian text and claimed it talks about an unknown planet. Charlatans then claimed this planet (Nibiru) would destroy Earth in 2012 (coinciding with the end of one period in the Mayan calendar). When that didn't happen (and indeed, no new planet was visible in the night sky), charlatans moved on to the next bit of nonsense. We have found actual planets much further out than this hypothetical one. Sedna has a 10,000 year orbit. So we know Nibiru doesn't exist, and any claims about a "planet 9" that will destroy us can be dismissed. There is no "second sun" either.
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  69. In 1976, someone retranslated a Sumerian text and claimed it talks about an unknown planet. Charlatans then claimed this planet (Nibiru) would destroy Earth in 2012 (coinciding with the end of one period in the Mayan calendar). When that didn't happen (and indeed, no new planet was visible in the night sky), charlatans moved on to the next bit of nonsense. We have found actual planets much further out than this hypothetical one. Sedna has a 10,000 year orbit. So we know Nibiru doesn't exist, and any claims about a "planet 9" that will destroy us can be dismissed.
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  70. nobody outside Europe with enough disposable income to build large telescopes, maybe?
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  71. None of this is correct. There is no way for any object to remain "hidden behind the sun" for more than a few days. Any star (dead or not) in a 26 ky orbit would have been seen by lots of amateur astronomers by now.
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  72. The Voyagers were not used to map the sky. Their cameras are not well-suited for observation of such faint objects. We have much better telescopes here on Earth.
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  73. No, he's pronouncing it correctly. The original name is Ou-ranos.
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  74. The reclassification of Pluto has nothing to do with NASA. The IAU decided that.
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  75. Activity beneath the surface is not a great way to distinguish planets. We have moons with subsurface activity (Io, Enceladus), and even smaller objects (comets) with subsurface activity.
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  76. No. The border between planet and dwarf planet is not based on mass, but on observations of its orbital region: is this clear of other bodies?
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  77. It isn't. Planet 9 would have to be larger than the Sun to do that, i.e. it would have to be a star, not a planet, and we'd have found it by now.
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  78.  @treesapien5762  Yes. An object that large has so much gravity that its core will be compressed to the point where fusion starts, i.e. it will inevitably be a star.
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  79. Orbits don't work like that. Planet X has a long orbit, but we complete an orbit every year. So for half of our year, we inevitably are on the same side of the Sun as Planet X.
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  80. That's a pointless metric by which to decide its usefulness to us.
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