Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Planet 9 From Outer Space!

Episode Date: February 9, 2016

Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin fully expect a new and undemotable ninth planet will be found in the outer reaches of the solar system. The Caltech researchers talk about their findings and much more.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Planet 9 from outer space, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. What a show we have for you this week. Headlined by a conversation with Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin, the guys who have pointed the way to what is likely our solar system's ninth planet, one that won't get demoted. The world has beat a path to Emily Lakdawalla's door

for a look at spectacular images from China's Moon Lander and rover. Bill Nye is making waves, gravity waves, and he'll salute another fallen Apollo hero. Lots of surprises from our What's Up segment, including the first talking answer to the space trivia contest. Here's the Planetary Society's senior editor. Emily, you've, as usual, got lots for us to look at in the blog at planetary.org, but I'm going to stretch back a couple of weeks to a piece you posted about a certain Chinese lunar mission, which has attracted

an enormous amount of attention. Tell us about this. Yeah, well, a Chinese researcher alerted me to the fact that some data had been released from the Chang'e 3 mission. This was the lander mission with the Yutu rover. I had not known of any release of science data before. They'd released lots of photos from the mission, but this was an actual science data release with all of the images from a certain stretch of time, with all the metadata and other header information that you need in order to figure out how to assemble all the images together. It was really awesome. And so I did what I usually do, which is to download a whole lot of data and try to understand it. And then I made a browse page to it. But then I realized that there's a lot of American researchers who are permitted to access Chinese servers for data. And so I thought, what if I provided a

public service by hosting all of the original data on the Planetary Society's data server and allowing people to download it from there? And people seem to like that. This was an enormous amount of work. I mean, it sounds like you worked on this for the better part of a week or maybe an entire week, but it has really paid off. According to our colleagues, you may have reached at least a potential audience of 162 million people online, everywhere from Gizmodo to Huffington Post Japan to Fox News Online. This has really been picked up by everybody. I just think it's kind of amusing because it's, after all, data that was public. It was out there. All I needed was some researcher to point me to it. But nobody had ever done a press release. It wasn't part of the usual rounds of information getting out there. And so it became this huge

surprise to everybody that this data was available. And a lot of people assumed that this was the first release ever of Chinese data. Well, that's not true. It was actually released on a website that I'd written about years before when they released data from their two lunar orbiter missions. So it's something they've been doing for a long time. Before we go, do you have any favorites among these images? There are some beauties here. It's all really beautiful. I, of course, love images of hardware on the moon. Probably my very favorite one is the image taken by the U-2 rover showing the Chang'e 3 lander in the distance against the horizon. I just think it's very evocative, seeing that safe lander off in the distance, and the rover was ready to go off on an adventure.

Unfortunately, two days after taking that photo, the rover's motor controller failed, and it stayed where it was. Well, thanks to Emily, all of this stuff is much more easily available. You can start with her blog entry that she posted on January 29th, fun with a new data set, Chang'e Lander and U-2 rover camera data. While you're there, you'll see her piece also looking back at images

taken of Curiosity from high overhead by the high-rise camera, some spectacular surroundings, terrain that that rover is having to traverse. Emily, thank you very much for all of this. Thank you, Matt. She's our senior editor. Planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope

magazine. Bill Nye is the CEO of the Planetary Society. We'll hear from him now. Big news out of physics this week, Bill. This is such a huge story. I'm glad you want to talk about it. Space physics here on Earth. So Einstein and everybody figured that since light can be thought of as a wave, electricity can be thought of as a wave, energy moves in waves. Doesn't gravity move in waves? Sure. We can't feel it

because these things would be so tiny. But as you may know, people set up the old LIGO, Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory. It's these huge things out in the desert, these long beams of lasers in tunnels. And the idea is if a wave of gravity goes past us, these mirrors at each end of these long tubes will move just a little. And the thing is, if we found these waves, it would verify a lot of enormous ideas in science and physics. And they say, Matt, they're going to make the big announcement at Columbia University during this week. Ooh. Now, we should say, we don't know.

Maybe they'll say they didn't find them, but it sure is looking... Fine, fine, Matt. Have it your way. Yeah, you're right. But it could be a cool thing. It's like when people detected the Higgs boson, you had to look at the data carefully, carefully, carefully, carefully, carefully to convince yourself that you was there.

And I guess these guys will. Before I let you go, I want to get your thoughts, words about the passing of another pioneer, another explorer of space, Edgar Mitchell, the lunar module pilot in Apollo 14, just passed away.

Everybody, our hero, Neil Armstrong, puts the lunar module on the moon's surface, and Apollo 12 is successful. In Apollo 13, almost everybody gets killed. Almost. Ed Mitchell was the pilot on the one after that, and there was a lot of anxiety about, is this going to work? Is he going to be able to pull it off? Is this going to be a disaster or a huge success? And it was a huge success. It's just the end of an era, another step in the end of an era where the't know any better. But NASA is the best brand the United States has. And the accomplishment of putting people on the moon still stands as a great moment in history for humankind. And Ed Mitchell was a big part of it. Let's celebrate his life. Thank you very much, Bill. Thank you, Matt.

He's the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye, the science guy. We are a few moments away from a great conversation with the Planet Nine boys, Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin. It has only been a few weeks since our world, well, actually our solar system, was shaken by two scientists at the California Institute of Technology. The title of their paper says it all, evidence for a distant giant planet in the solar system. Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin have been global celebrities ever since. Mike has been through this before, after all, he's the discoverer of many distant objects, and he wrote How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming. When the media celebrated Constantine in the past,

it was generally for his rock band, not his astrophysics. I recently brought the planetary radio microphones to Mike Brown's office for the conversation you're about to hear. The three of us sat at the desk where Mike and Constantine developed their strong evidence for the still unseen Planet 9, following in the footsteps of earlier astronomers who pointed the way to far closer Neptune and even Pluto. Mike and Constantine believe this big new world is also out there waiting to be imaged, though it may be so far from the sun that a single orbit lasts 20,000

of our earthly years. Mike Constantine, thank you so much and congratulations on this, I think I'll call it a discovery, even though it hasn't been seen yet. Okay with you? Well, thanks, Matt, but I think it'll be a discovery when it gets caught on camera. Okay. Yeah, I agree with that one. Yeah. Our work will turn into a discovery from a prediction. We'll talk about that and how close we're getting to it and the worldwide search that I think you guys have instigated. Have things quieted down? The paper at least came out on January 14th. I know it's been a whirlwind since then, right? It has been. And we still get, I don't know how many emails and letters a day on naming suggestions and how to find it suggestions and everything else. But it's calming down enough that we can actually get back to work, which is actually finding Planet Nine, which is what we're working on hard right now. You want to do science still after this?

We do, actually. Okay. Well, I think you did even after you killed Pluto, so why not stick with what you know? This is newer for you than it is for Mike, this kind of attention, isn't it? Well, yeah. I mean, this has been a bit overwhelming. And, you know, I've actually been sort of humbled a bit by the extent to which this paper has captivated the imagination of the public. I mean, when we were writing this paper, we were just writing a paper. We were

writing the results of our calculations. There was not anything more than that. I mean, we found it to be immensely exciting, but this has been really fantastic. And the number of downloads is huge, which I think means that some people outside of the scientific community are actually reading the paper, which is more than you can ask for. Or at least downloading the paper. I'm not sure they're reading it. I'm sure they're going through the Hamiltonian right now. They're just going through the derivation. Looking for errors in those equations. All right. I've made it through the abstract, I'll admit. But I saw the great video, which we will post a link to, that Caltech put out with you guys, which is pretty impressive,

I think. There are a lot of resources for explaining what we were really saying and being able to visualize, which I think is the important thing, visualize what's actually happening in the outer solar system. So those are really good things to take a look at. The other thing that I want to thank you for is exactly what you've been talking about, the excitement that has been generated, because anything that draws this kind of attention to real science has got to be good, right? I think it's great. I mean, I know that people love planets. People love the solar system, maybe more so than Constantine.

I was pretty convinced that when we put this paper out, people would be pretty excited about the possibility of a real ninth planet out there. So it's always good to see this much attention to actual science and solar system instead of the usual things that are in the news. Well, I'll tell you, it's been good for business at the Planetary Society. We'll be taking kickbacks. I thought that was already in the mail. All right, so let's say that some great astronomer or team in, you know, Europe, somewhere in the world, that they're the first to image Planet 9. And I know that you're working on that too,

and I hope we can talk about the stuff you're doing at Subaru. And I know you you're working on that too. And I hope we can talk about the stuff you're doing at Subaru. And I know you've said that that's fine with you if somebody else finds it. But really, wouldn't it be appropriate for the two of you to share discovery credit? You know, the thing that I think would be most appropriate, and I hope happens if somebody else finds it, they should at least tell us a day before they announce it. We would just like, you know, I don't want to pick up the newspaper and find out that somebody discovered this. I would kind of, you know, would like a little hint ahead of time. The whole idea of discovery versus prediction versus, you know, we always talk about it like the Higgs boson.

Who discovered the Higgs boson? It's the people who spent all that time at the accelerator. But it was predicted ahead of time, so they wouldn't have been looking for it. So it's a big, complicated mess that is, you know, science used to be one person would do something or a small group, but now it's a much larger endeavor. So these days, there's rarely a discoverer of anything. These days, there's rarely a discoverer of anything. I think even with the previous time that planet was calculated in the solar system, right, even in 1846, the story is not so clean, right? It's the story of Neptune. Indeed, indeed.

Yeah, I mean, Le Verrier had calculated it, but actually Adams apparently calculated it a couple weeks before. Gall actually found it. So even then, with only a few people involved, it was a much smaller, it was a much more, a much dirtier picture than just a moment where someone says, ooh, I figured it out, and there it is, right? And even then, there was, you know,

as early as 1781, when Uranus was discovered. Uranus was discovered and its orbit, its full orbit was observed because you could find it in old data. And it was realized as early as 1781 that there was probably a planet out there. This is the part that people rarely hear about. So it wasn't even that Le Verrier was the first person to think, oh, there's a planet and I'm going to calculate it. Everybody knew that there was a planet out there. It's just nobody knew how to calculate it. So the sort of historical parallels are all sort of interesting in all those ways.

Indeed. It's actually really incredible to see. I mean, and Wikipedia, surprisingly, has a really good article documenting this. Just the number of people that simply proclaimed that Neptune must exist before it was actually calculated. It was not just one person. It was a whole slew of scientists. But nobody had the machinery to figure out where it was. So that's what took Le Verrier and maybe Adams too.

I respect this, and I think it's very generous of you, but it still feels to me a little bit like, you know, I'm a parent at an Easter egg hunt, and there's a frustrated child, and I say, you know what? There's an egg over there somewhere near that tree. And then they go over, and they're thrilled to find another Easter egg. No? Too simplistic? I don't think that it's a frustrated child. I mean, we are the frustrated children here. We really want to find the Easter egg.

And what we have done thus far is we have theoretically licked it. So whoever finds this Easter egg will – well, that is provided that the planet actually physically does what we predicted it would do. Mike and I have thought a little bit about this. But if there is a Planet 9 and it gets discovered tomorrow – And it is if. Yeah. And suppose it's doing from a physics – from a dynamics point of view, something completely different. It's not keeping the orbits together like we're saying.

It's not where we think it is or the mass that we think it is. Then it's not our planet. Yeah, we didn't predict it. We predicted something that was wrong and we got close to something that happened to be right, but we had no insight into what was right. And if that's the case, then we deserve nothing. Okay, that's fair. And I certainly shouldn't have classified all of your colleagues as frustrated children when I said this. But we say that sometimes too. Yeah, but I have a radio show and they might not want to talk to me anymore. If it's not there, what else might have

generated the data and the analysis that you guys have done? Nothing. Well, you know, I mean, realistically. I'm pretty serious about that. The outer solar system would have, I mean, we'd have to put it on trial. It would have some serious explaining to do if Planet Nine's not there. some serious explaining to do if planet nine's not there i mean look in the end we have the sort of theoretical evidence for its existence is threefold it's the alignment of the orbits right the physical kind of clustering of them in the same overall perihelion direction and plane it

is the fact that orbits like sedna you know these orbits of KBOs that are detached from Neptune. Sedna. I've heard of it. I've heard of it. Yeah. Somebody, someone. There's this character who. It was, I mean, it's kind of fun that Sedna was the first clue that something is out there. And it's finally part of the story.

I have been trying to understand what caused Sedna's odd orbit ever since its discovery back in 2003. And I think we're finally there. I mean, Sedna makes no sense within the state of the current solar system, right? It could not be emplaced by the current solar system. And then there's what we think is the strongest line of evidence, which are the orbits that are tilted on their sides. And this was an interesting kind of, in the end, it's not a prediction. It was an internal prediction that was made.

I think that counts as a prediction. We predicted it to ourselves without knowing that it was true. It might be a retrodiction. No, no, I count as a prediction. We saw a prediction in our data for an effect, and we would have made it a prediction publicly, but we first checked to see if it was true, and it was true. Sounds like a hypothesis that went further to me. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't matter to me whether or not we predicted it in some paper ahead of time or we predicted it sitting here at this desk, which is actually where we predicted it, and verified it while sitting here at this desk about five minutes later. But it was something that we had no, we weren't looking for at all. We had no idea that a Planet 9 would make these perpendicular orbits. We had no idea that they were there.

And we looked at the data and said, oh, look, you know, Planet 9 does these very strange things. Wow, wouldn't that be interesting if we ever found something like that? And then, oh, they're there. That counts, if you ask me. Fair enough. Fair enough. No, I mean, I have to say, to me, initially, my initial reaction was that this might be evidence against the existence of a planet. reaction was that this might be evidence against the existence of a planet because the model was clearly showing them to be not only perpendicular but also visible you say oh if it predicts some

some weird orbits that are nearly circular and way way far away yeah you'll never see it you say okay whatever this is not this is not uncomfortable. But these were perpendicular orbits that should be visible to surveys. And it turns out they are. They are. Yeah. You know, my first reaction when you said, what else could be going on? And I said, nothing. All of this is predicated on the fact, the assumption that what we think we see is really what's going on. So the one thing that keeps me up at night is whether or

not we just saw something that's not even really a real pattern in the sky. We see this pattern of objects in the sky and we make a theory based on it. If that pattern is correct, I am willing to say our theory is correct because it explains it perfectly. But if that pattern is just one of those things that the human mind sees when it's looking for patterns like faces on Mars and all those other crazy things, then that's where we could go wrong. Now, I don't actually think we're wrong. And I think the reason that I think we're not wrong is exactly what Constantine said. I think we saw the first pattern where we could have fooled ourselves.

But that first pattern predicted the existence of Sedna, which was nice, but then it also predicted the existence of these perpendicular objects. So it predicted two other patterns that it didn't necessarily have to predict. And that's a pretty good coincidence if it's all just your mind making things up.

That's a pretty good piece of science. I mean, it made a prediction. Is there somebody out there that you know who's trying to, you know, reproduce that pattern as well? You know, as of right now, I don't know of anybody actually running the simulations,

reproducing our results. I hope somebody does. Yeah, there must be. Actually, you know, I think my understanding, it could be that I think Greg Laughlin is teaching a computational physics class. and I think that they are redoing some of these calculations as kind of like a class exercise. Good for them. Yeah, so I think that might be sort of the crowdsourced effort.

That goes right where I wanted to go next. effort. That goes right where I wanted to go next. Can you, and I assume this is, you know, slightly more of a question for you, Konstantin, can you talk about the math behind this? What, are you implying that I can't talk about the math? Is that what you're suggesting? No, I'm only saying I can't, because you'd have to do it. You'd be right. I was just wondering if that's what you were suggesting. What kind of math went into this without me having to understand the math? Well, we'll start at the type 2 generating function, which we used to – no, I'm kidding. So there's a whole kind of hierarchy of models that we used essentially to motivate the existence of Planet Nine is basically pencil and paper or chalk and board.

You can surprisingly get relatively far if you marginally know what you're doing without ever going to a computer. Really? Okay. I just assumed that you were cranking out minutes on one of the supercomputers here at Caltech, but no? We were in the end. But I think that it's always now the kind of temptation to just jump to the computational resources because they're there. You end up having a lot more intuition for what's going on in your calculations if you begin kind of in the Le Verrier tradition, if you will. So we actually started out with sort of similar calculations as that which was done by Le Verrier

and built up our model from there. So we said, okay, let's kind of do perturbation theory on paper. Then we take the next step and kind of confirm our perturbation theory. And actually we ended up finding that there are new features that are not captured by perturbation theory. And then we kind of build up on that. So, you know, by the end, when we have a realistic synthetic solar system, we don't, we're not swarmed with information. We're able to distinguish which part of the synthetic solar system is governed by what dynamics and so on.

And you look to see if that synthetic solar system looks an awful lot like our real one. That's right. So that's the goal, right? The goal is to understand enough of what's going on in the solar system, to construct a synthetic one, to understand how you go about constructing a synthetic one that matches the real one. Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin have much more to tell us about their evidence for Planet Nine and possibly other distant worlds. This is Planetary Radio. This is Robert Picardo. I've been a member of the Planetary Society since my Star Trek Voyager days. You may have even heard me on several episodes of Planetary Radio. Now I'm proud to be the newest

member of the board of directors. I'll be able to do even more to help the Society achieve its goals for space exploration across our solar system and beyond. You can join me in this exciting quest. The journey starts at planetary.org. I'll see you there. Do you know what your favorite presidential candidate thinks about space exploration? Hi, I'm Casey Dreyer, the Planetary Society's Director of Space Policy. You can learn that answer, and what all the other candidates think, at planetary.org slash election2016. You know what? We could use your help. If you find anything we've missed, you can let us know.

It's all at planetary.org slash election2016. Thank you. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin are researchers and faculty members at Caltech in Pasadena, California. Together, over the course of at least a year, they assembled strong evidence for a ninth planet circling the sun, one that is probably 10 times as massive as Earth, and that influences the orbits of many other objects in distant reaches of our solar system. Konstantin is the theorist, Mike is the observational astronomer, but the line between them is far less distinct than those titles may indicate.

The whole thing was an interesting interplay between the observations and math and the computer simulations and everything else. So it started out, our first hint that something interesting was going on was a paper by Chad Trujillo and Scott Shepard. was a paper by Chad Trujillo and Scott Shepard. And Chad, in fact, used to be a postdoc. He actually was one of the other people who discovered Sedna and all that many years ago. Your postdoc. He was my postdoc. So they actually discovered the first object that was like Sedna since the discovery of Sedna. And that was an interesting discovery to see that there are more things like Sedna out there.

discovery to see that there are more things like Sedna out there. And they also noted that there were some strange alignments in the outer solar system. Specifically, it was the argument of perihelion, which is this obscure orbital parameter that's sufficiently obscure that if you asked 100 astronomers what it was, 99 of them would look at Wikipedia first to remind themselves what it was. But they found this strange clustering, and they proposed that there was a planet out there. And their proposal, it didn't work. Their idea of where a planet could be and how it could work didn't reproduce the things that they were doing. In fact, I sort of think of that as the 1781 phase. They could tell that there was something going on, but they just couldn't quite figure out what it was. But because it didn't work, I think most people tended to ignore them. But I know these guys, and I know that they do

good stuff and should not be ignored. So we looked at their, took a look at the orbits that they were looking at, and realized that there was more to it going on than they had initially seen. And that was the stage at which I think I made Constantine come over into my office. You know, we're three doors down from each other, so there was a lot of running back and forth down the hallway. And I was like, look, now there really is something going on here. Let's figure out what it is. And so then it was this combination of he would often do the simulations

and then we would look at the results together. I'm like, no, no, if you look at it this way, which is the way you would look at it if they were objects in the sky, then you really see what is going on is this and this, and we would argue about what longitudes of perihelion mean. And if you were to listen over the last two years in this hallway, you would probably hear a lot of arguing and good-natured screaming at each other about crazy parameters. And it really was. It was this very interesting back and forth between observations and theory. And I think it took both to figure out the story. Yeah. And Mike will never say this himself, but Mike actually has an incredibly good physical intuition. So it's not

like, as Mike said, this was really a true joint effort. It's not like Mike said, oh, look, there's something going on in the data. Don't know what it is. And I went away and buried myself into a hole with a computer for a year and came back and said, well, computer says this, and then, you know, we compared answers. It's not like that. You know, we really, every step of the way, it's fair to say that, I mean, at least I felt challenged at some points to translate, you know, what I usually do into observable reality. It's not something that you do very often as a theorist. So I think it was, in this sense, a very growing exercise. I always like it when the line gets fuzzed between the theorists and the observational experimental types.

I would say this has been the most fun project I've ever worked on. I mean, hard to say that it's more fun than, you know, going off and discovering things like erases and sednos that, as a contained project where you just sit down, and it's also one where I have not worked as closely and as hard with someone else until now either. It's actually just been really super fun. Nice teamwork, guys. Now everybody else is involved. How much have you narrowed down where you and others are looking for this world? We've done, I'd say, a remarkably good job of narrowing down where it should be. So we know the orbit.

We know the orbit moderately well. We can tell that it's tilted by about 30 degrees to the plane of the solar system. We can tell where its perihelion is, where it comes closest. We know how close that perihelion distance is. We don't know as well where its furthest distance from the sun is because it doesn't do much at its furthest distance, but we have some constraints on it there. And from all of that, we can make a plot of the sky,

of where in the sky it would be, how bright it would be, and who's already looked and would have found it if it were in that area of the sky. And we can rule out much of the sky and see where to look. There's a little patch in the southern hemisphere that still needs to be looked at where it could be quite bright. But most of the patches that we need to look at are up in the north, sort of in the region of Orion and Taurus, actually. I could even find those.

Yeah, it's a good place to be. Well, I can find Orion. It's right next door. I'll show it to you. Although I suspect my little 8-inch Celestron is not going to be much help. Are you now actively using that big system, the Subaru? Yeah, so the Subaru telescope really will be the right telescope to use for this

because for two reasons. One is it's in the northern hemisphere. And Subaru is the biggest telescope in the world that has a very wide field of view camera on it. So if you want to cover large areas of the sky, Subaru is where you want to be. If you want to cover large areas of the sky and see faint objects, which is where we think it is, is at its furthest from the sky, Subaru is where you want to be. You want to cover large areas of the sky and see faint objects, which is where we think it is,

is at its furthest from the sun, and it's pretty faint. So we need that big telescope. So what do you say? Just go, Mike, go. Find it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's right.

That's right. I was just like, you know, we talked about bopping each other with pencils. That's my job now. You know, I'm just like... How come you haven't found it yet? Constantine actually came up to the Subaru telescope last time we were up there, when we first were looking

at it. So, was this the first time to Mauna Kea? It was my first time to the top of Mauna Kea. First time to the top of Mauna Kea. It was an incredible experience. You know, I got euphoric due to the lack of oxygen. It was great. But, you know, realistically, with every new

object, new small object that we discover, not Planet 9, but rather an additional member of the cluster, for example, every object like that is substantial added information. So what we can do as we are conducting a search is continue to refine the theoretical model, continue to sort of make our prediction better. You know, the primary phase of what we're doing now is looking for the planet astronomically, but that also involves continuing to do the theoretical work. And just for clarity, when you mentioned the cluster, you're talking about that group of objects that was acting strangely. That's right. That's right. So these are the most distant orbits in the solar system that are all kind of aligned.

Really, it's immensely useful because there are only a few objects in that cluster now. Every added one is a lot more new information. And the fun part is that the search for Planet 9 is exactly the same as the search for these new objects too. So we do both at the same time. So we'll find a lot of them while we're on our way to searching. Well, that's cool.

Serendipitous. Yeah. Just a couple of more topics. One that was suggested by a piece I read about all of this work, which suggested something interesting. If Planet 9 is out there, is it trying to kill us? The speculation was that it could be throwing rocks at us. Not everyone. It's only after me and Mike. Everybody else is safe. You've ruined its anonymity. I think that idea comes from those earlier ideas of nemesis out in the Oort cloud as sort of the Jupiter-sized or brown dwarf-sized

and perturbing comets in and making comet showers and making dinosaurs go extinct and stuff like that. So Planet 9 is very distinct from all these sort of nemesis slash Planet X ideas. Planet 9 is smaller for one. It's more like Neptune mass instead of Jupiter mass. So it has much less of an effect on its surroundings. But more importantly, it's not in the Oort cloud. Even at its most distant part of its orbit, something like 1,200 times the distance to the Earth to the Sun, that's 10 to 20 times closer than the Oort cloud. So there's really not much there for it to kick around and try to kill us. Although I'm sure it's trying as well as it can. The solar system is a big place. That's right. And, you know, people often ask me about how, you know, does this object

perturb Kuiper Belt objects, which then enter the solar system and then become comets that might hit the Earth or something of that sort? The answer is yes. The answer is absolutely yes. But there's another object which is doing that much more efficiently, and that's Neptune. And Neptune is scattering things inwards that eventually become Jupiter family comets. You know, actually, but because Planet 9 is making these perpendicular ones,

they have an easier time jumping the Jupiter barrier. So maybe Planet 9 really is trying to kill us more than Neptune. But Jupiter is not a barrier, right? It's perturbing things onto cometary lines. Yeah. I don't know. I still think Planet 9 is to blame for most of our ills. I think, yeah, definitely yours and mine.

Our personal ills, yeah. You know that you're also, with a line like that that can be taken out of context, you're feeding the Nibiru conspiracy folks. We try. I like to think that I hold the record in human history for having discovered Nibiru the most times. Because when Sedna was discovered, it, of course, was Nibiru. When Eris was discovered, it too was Nibiru. And now Planet Nine is, of course, Nibiru. Well, there's discovered, it too was Nibiru. And now Planet Nine is, of course, Nibiru. Well, there's a possible name for Planet Nine, I suppose.

That would actually be the best name we could come up with. David, quote, Nibiru, boy. I got just one more, and it's from my colleague, Emily. Emily Lakdawalla, you both know her. Would you be surprised to find even more worlds, big ones out there, in these far reaches of the solar system? Mike, I remember once, this is quite a while ago, you said you didn't think so. But then a few months ago, you said stay tuned. And now here we are. Did I say stay tuned?

I couldn't help myself a couple months ago. I don't blame you. Did you ask me that same question a couple months ago? I might have, yes. I believe I did. On a tuned? I think you did. I couldn't help myself a couple months ago. I don't blame you. Did you ask me that same question a couple months ago? I might have, yes. I believe I did. On a stage, I think. Yep, I know. When we had discovered Eris and Sedna and all these other big guys in the Kuiper Belt,

we'd done a pretty good survey of the outer solar system. It was pretty clear that there's nothing large in the immediate vicinity past the Kuiper Belt. When it got down to only eight planets, many people would ask me, are there any more? And I said, no. I said, I think this is it for planets in the solar system. And it certainly was it for planets in the sort of traditional circular orbits of where everything formed. And I just had not really anticipated that something else could be out there at all. So I'm surprised to be sitting here saying, yes, there is even a ninth one out there. Tenth one? I don't know. What do you think? Think there are more? Well, the answer is there's no evidence for planet number 10 at the moment. Not yet?

But there was also no evidence for planet nine 10 years ago, right? It's only now that... Three years ago. Yeah. It's only now that the observational search revealed, it's sort of only now beginning to unveil this cluster of objects that's for the first time pointing to the existence of Planet 9. So when we talk about scale, you know, we kind of tend to think, okay, 30 AU is really big, right? It's like, makes sense that that's the end of Planet 9. So when we talk about scale, you know, we kind of tend to think, okay, 30 AU is really big, right?

It's like, makes sense, that's the end of the solar system. Now, what if there's some object at hundreds of AU? It's like, wow, that's really big. But suppose we were creatures living in a solar system hosted by some other sun-like star, and our solar system was Kepler-11, right? Then we would say wow mercury is really really far away uh-huh right and you know talk about you know neptune's i mean the thing is way

way far away and then there are systems like i don't know i forget the license plate but i think it was koi 500 that have like four planets with orbital periods all smaller than a day, right? So these are just totally packed. So when it comes to astrophysical scale, I think, you know, our intuition is set by the solar system that we live in. At the same time, the gravitational influence of the sun extends out to, I don't know, 100,000 AU. There's no a priori reason to say that it's implausible

that there are objects with semi-major axes of 10,000 AU, you know, 20,000 AU. Why not? It's interesting, though, that something with 10 or 20,000 AU would be a very different sort of beast, because those orbits change a lot over time. When you're that far away, you start to be affected by the galactic tide, by passing stars, by moving through giant molecular clouds. All these things can really affect you greatly. So Planet 9 is close to the edge of what you can have as a long-term stable member of our solar system. So you would be surprised but not flabbergasted.

I think there's a... You'd be flabbergasted. I think there's a... You'd be flabbergasted. No, I wouldn't be. There's no good reason why there shouldn't be. You know, and the question is just where it is. If Planet Nine is a core that got ejected from the Uranus-Neptune system, as we think it is, Uranus-Neptune region, there were probably multiple cores that got ejected, and they could be out in the Oort cloud.

They could be somewhere closer in the Oort cloud. It doesn't seem unlikely to me that they're out there somewhere. We also have sort of a human kind of Bayesian bias against the notion of additional planets in the outer solar system, just because there have been so many claims that have ended up, you know, just totally wrong because the data on which they were based on are wrong. But I think it's important to step away sometimes and recall that the solar system does not care what calculations we have done on the Earth and what was wrong and what was right.

The kind of societal part of our expectations of what can and can't be out there sometimes taints our more or less, more pure versions of that as expectations. So I think, yeah, I'd be super excited. I'd be super excited if there was an object at 20,000 AU. I want there to be an object. But right now I have zero

expectation for it to be there. I think it's good that there might be one and that we leave it for our kids to discover. We're not going to get there anytime soon. Well, I don't know. I'm planning to live on as a cyborg forever. Already got a Fitbit.

Good reason to hope for the singularity. And I like that phrase, Bayesian biases. I think I'll remember that. And I'll remember this conversation. Thank you, gentlemen. It has really been a tremendous pleasure. Good luck in the search. Thanks. We're working hard. Mike Brown is the bestselling author of How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming. He is not, I don't think, the Mike Brown who wrote Make Adult Videos for Fun and Profit, which has showed up right next to you in Amazon. I didn't know that. He's also the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, Caltech, where we are right now in his office, the office where Planet Nine was first guest about. He's been on the faculty here for about 20 years and was

recently awarded the Richard P. Feynman Award for Outstanding Teaching. Congratulations on that. Thank you. What a cool bit of legacy. I like that one. He's been in on the discovery of more trans-Neptunian objects than any other human being. Oh, that's not true. Who is? I have discovered a lot of the big, bright ones, but there are surveys that have found a lot of the fainter ones. He has been in on the discovery of more of the big, bright trans-Neptunian objects than any other human being. He blogs now and then at MikeBrownsPlanets.com.

Konstantin Batygin is an assistant professor of planetary science at Caltech, where he does much more than discover new worlds. He's fascinated by the challenges involved with understanding how our and other solar systems formed and by what's going on in planetary atmospheres and deep inside these worlds. Just a month and a half before he became famous for Planet 9, he was a lead author on a paper titled, get this, In-Situ Formation and Dynamical Evolution of Hot Jupiter Systems, which you have

to admit is pretty cool, even though it's hot. Yeah, it's very hot, but yeah, I like that one. His band, The Seventh Season, last recorded an album in 2007, but he told me before the recorder turned on, they're still going. And that's their tune, Liquid Water, playing us into this week's edition of What's Up with Bruce Betts. So rock on. Time for Bruce Betts and another edition of What's Up. He's the director of science and technology for the Planetary Society. Right now at planetary.org and in the RSS feed where some people get this show is a conversation with you and Jason Davis, a light sail update. It's brilliant.

Or at least Jason's part is. I have no argument. I thought you were both great. And it's's really fascinating things are cooking with light sails so people can check that out if they're interested in hearing about the status of that project what's up in the night sky? hey if you go out there quickly you still might catch five naked eye planets in one view in the pre-dawn although Mercury is going to be getting tougher getting lower in the pre-dawn east

but from the pre-dawn, although Mercury is going to be getting tougher, getting lower in the pre-dawn east. But from the pre-dawn east across towards the west, we have Mercury, super bright Venus, yellowish Saturn, reddish Mars, and very bright Jupiter. Jupiter also rising in the 9 to 10 o'clock p.m. time frame. So you can check it out in the east in the evening sky if you want. We move on to this week in space history. It was 15 years ago that an orbiter became a lander when near Shoemaker spacecraft landed on the asteroid Eros designed to orbit and it did and had a successful mission. But then they thought, hey, what the heck, let's see if we can set it down on the surface. And by gosh, it kept working. We're going to make history here, small time planetary radio

history. For the very first time, we are going to have a random space fact, not just introduced by a celebrity, but a celebrity provided random space fact. In fact, two celebrities, and here they are. Hi, Bruce. This is Constantine Batygin. This is Mike Brown. And I have a random space fact. Oh boy. You ready? Yeah. Okay. So I have a random space fact. Oh, boy. You ready? Yeah. Okay. So you know that Eris is more massive than Pluto.

Eris is the large Kuiper Belt object out there more massive. Do you know how much more massive Eris is than Pluto? I'm going to go with somewhere between a factor of one to a few. It is. Maybe three. If you took Pluto and you added the entire asteroid belt, you'd get to the mass of Eris. So basically what you're saying is that not that much

more mass of W. Not a bad random space fact, is it? No, that's very entertaining and also emphasizes that indeed there's not a lot of mass, even though there are a million objects in the asteroid belt, they're awfully small. We can go on to the contest.

We played one of my favorite games, Where in the Solar System? And I asked you, where in the solar system is Anthony Patera? Although I said it Patera, but apparently Patera is a better pronunciation. There were many, many responses. Apparently, patera is a better pronunciation. There were many, many responses. Probably two-thirds of those responses mentioned, in addition to the Anthony Patera or patera that you were looking for, a certain gentleman. Well, let's hear from him. I am Anthony Patera, a professor at MIT.

I am very pleased to serve as a piece of planetary trivia. Now, please ask your listeners to stop Googling me. Thank you so much, Professor Patara, the Ford Professor of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering. He's the co-director of the Center for Computational Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And yes, we're sending him a Planetary Radio t-shirt. I really just meant the feature on Venus. I'm sorry for all that unfortunate Googling that occurred. Let me read you this from Dave Fairchild in Shawnee, Kansas.

You ask, where is Tony Patera? He's not on the French Riviera. I guess I would say he's in Cambridge, M.A. as an MIT engineer chair. I had no idea what I was getting us into. Indeed, our winner, though, who did not tell us about the MIT professor, Andreas Herzig. Andreas Herzig in Cologne, Germany, is this week's winner, I believe. He said Anthony Patera, our Patera, is a crater-like feature on the northern hemisphere of Venus. Even though the name is a male name, it's actually named after a famous woman.

And I bet you know who it is. Susan B. Anthony, American suffragette. As with almost all features on Venus are named after women. And that's why we got the suggestion from Elizabeth Garcia in Ukiah, California, that we should go out of this with David Bowie's Suffragette City. Suffragette Crater. Yeah, Patera. It's a shallow bowl-like feature named after shallow bowl-like saucers of the Romans.

Professor Patero, he thought it was from the Latin, but couldn't figure out whether it was Latin or Greek. But so you've resolved that for us as well. There's your little planetary lesson. Well, congratulations, Andreas. We are going to send you that fabulous prize package, a Planetary Radio t-shirt, a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account for use of that nonprofit network of telescopes all over the world, use of that non-profit network of telescopes all over the world.

And for one of the last times, a set of year in space wall and desk calendars that you can see at yearinspace.com. We will keep that package alive one more time for the question that you're about to give us. What was famous astronomer Herschel? What was Herschel's first and middle names? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Ooh, that could be tricky for reasons I won't go into. You'll need to get that to us by the 16th. That would be Tuesday, February 16th at 8 a.m. Pacific time. Thank you. This has been fun. It has indeed. All right, everybody, go out there,

look up the night sky and think about old oil paintings. Thank you and good night. On Velvet, it's always fun to talk with Bruce Betts. He's the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society and the Project Manager for LightSail. There's that conversation waiting for you to hear about the status of that mission. Bruce Tho joins us every week here for What's Up. Next week, our exclusive interview with the band OK Go. Wait till you see their new video. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its worldly members.

Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle created the theme music. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.