Tuesday, May 3, 2016

Planet Nine Lacks A Good Origin Story

While a variety of investigators have been hot on the trail of determine where Planet Nine might be and what characteristics it might have, all of the origin stories for it are low probability ones.

1 comment:

Ryan said...

Planet formation itself is a messy, stochastic process though. It could well be that there were multiple potential Planet 9s early in the solar system, and only one survived.

Fomalhaut b seems to be a reasonable analogue to Planet 9. Unfortunately, last time I checked we don't have a clue how it formed either.

Still, just because we don't fully understand planet formation isn't really a strike against the plausibility of it existing.