The prediction of a planet beyond Pluto is triggering a lot of scientific study and some wildly inaccurate media reports that it could unleash a swarm of comets toward Earth by the end of the month.
Mike Brown, the Caltech astronomer whose Twitter handle is “Pluto killer,” was moved to debunk that notion this week:
He tweeted: “Hey, so, fun fact? Planet Nine is not going to cause the earth’s destruction. If you read that it will, you have discovered idiotic writing!”
Brown resurrected the notion of a Neptune-sized object orbiting beyond Pluto in a recent paper that inferred its presence based on its orbital influence on six recently found objects in the Kuiper Belt.
Brown and fellow Caltech planetary scientist Konstantin Batygin reported the results of their mathematical and computer modeling in The Astronomical Journal in January.
The claims this week, on a variety of websites, were based on an article in the January Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, written by former University of Louisiana astrophysicist Daniel P. Whitmire, who now teaches math at the University of Arkansas.
Whitmire hypothesizes a planet beyond Pluto whose orbit rotates to send it through the Kuiper Belt, unleashing extinction-causing comets into the inner solar system at 27 million-year intervals.
Interpretations of the article that appeared on media websites this week are “unmitigated fabrications,” Whitmire said in an email Friday.
If his hypothesis were correct, the next comet bombardment would come in about 16 million years, he wrote. “End of April is pretty safe.”
Planetary scientist Mark Sykes said he’s never surprised by occasional misinterpretations of science.
“One thing people have yet to learn is a greater sense of critical thinking,” said Sykes, president and CEO of Tucson-based Planetary Science Institute.
For one thing, said Sykes, if a swarm of comets were a month from Earth impact, we would have noticed them by now.
Sykes said the notion of a large object in the Kuiper Belt is “a fun hypothesis” that may or may not be true.
The notion that it can send swarms of comets toward the inner solar system after “billions of years in a steady state” is far-fetched, he said.
Meanwhile, in a paper accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, two Swiss planetary scientists used their knowledge of orbital dynamics and solar system formation to further characterize Brown’s Planet 9.
According to a press release from the University of Bern, Christoph Mordasini, of the University of Bern, and researcher Esther Linder calculate Planet 9’s radius to be equal to 3.7 Earth radii and its temperature to be minus 226 degrees Celsius.
If, that is, it actually exists.
