Is Our Sun's Mysterious 6-Degree Tilt Linked to A Huge 9th Planet?
© 2016 by Linda Moulton Howe
“It's such a deep-rooted mystery and so difficult to explain
that people just don't talk about it.”
- Michael Brown, Ph.D., Prof. of Planetary Astronomy, Caltech
Our sun is the yellow sphere. Planet orbits are depicted as
gravitationally interacting rings. Orbit 9 depicts the great elliptical path
of what Prof. Michael Brown, Ph.D., Caltech, thinks is a gaseous 9th planet
billions of miles from the sun in the Oort cloud that is 10 times the mass of our Earth.
Why such a huge planet would have such an elliptical orbit is still unknown. Speculation is
that a passing star at the time the solar system formed might have pulled
Planet 9 into the strange orbit. Graphic by Michael Brown & Konstantin Batygin 2016.
October 22, 2016 Pasadena, California - Earlier this year in January 2016, planetary astronomers Michael Brown, Ph.D., at the California Inst. of Technology (Caltech) and his colleagues in Hawaii and Yale University [see Earthfiles report link below] reported they have found gravitational evidence of a gaseous 9th planet far out in this solar system's Oort cloud that is 10 times the mass of Earth. But no one has yet seen it physically, even after infra red searches.
Our yellow sun is at the center of our solar system. The horizontal graph marked in
Astronomical Units (AU) show that from the sun to the Oort Cloud is 1,000 AU. Each
astronomical unit is the distance from the Earth to the sun, or 93 million miles. The Oort cloud
surrounds our solar system like a sphere of cometary nuclei. Prof. Brown's reported discovery
in January 2016 is that a gravity perturbation in the Oort Cloud indicates Something is
there that is 10 times the size of the Earth. Prof. Brown speculates that it could be a gaseous
planet. But so far, he has not reported any physical object discovery from
his infrared studies. Graphic source: SpaceFacts/Laurine Moreau.
Now Prof. Brown in collaboration with Caltech grad student Elizabeth Bailey and Caltech Asst. Prof. Konstantin Batygin, have published in The Astrophysical Journal new data that points further to the existence of the mystery planet.
The Astrophysical Journal, July 20, 2016. See Websites below.
Elizabeth Bailey and Prof. Batygin explained in an October 19, 2016, Caltech press release: “Because Planet Nine is so massive and has an orbit tilted compared to the other planets, the solar system has no choice but to slowly twist out of alignment. ...the sun is staying put in its fixed reference frame, but it's the planetary orbits that are being tilted ...so Planet Nine has tilted the entire disk of the solar system by 6 degrees and because we live on that disk, to us it looks like the sun is tilted. But it's actually the other way around.”
Another mystery is why would such a huge gaseous planet have such a strange, far out elliptical orbit around our sun. Speculation is that a passing star at the time the solar system formed might have pulled Planet 9 into the strange orbit.
Also see: Earthfiles with Prof. Michael Brown about “Gravitational
Evidence of 9th Planet That Is 10 Times the Mass of Earth!”