Tag: gravitational interaction

The How and Why of Planet Nine

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It hasn’t been found yet – let me make that clear.  But with evidence that it should exist, astronomers are looking more closely at the proposed planet nine and how it might have formed, and how it could have ended up in such a distant orbit. When you start to think about how a planet ten times the mass of Earth could have ended up more than ten times as far from the Sun as Neptune, a few scenarios pop into mind: It was formed in the inner solar system, where interactions with gas giants or another star pulled it out It formed...

Lonely Planets in Deep Space

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What do other planetary systems look like? We have seen some where massive Jupiter-sized worlds orbit closer to their star than Mercury does to the Sun, baking them with radiation.  Others have had multiple rocky planets within the Earth’s orbit distance.  Some have planets similar to Earth in a variety of locations.  But what about far away from the star? We never expected to find gas giants like Uranus and Neptune in the far reaches of our solar system.  Are there planetary systems where planets live even farther away? Maybe there are planets that live in the empty darkness between stars,...