Astronomers may have found hints of a massive, distant, still unseen
object at the edge of the solar system — perhaps a 10th planet, perhaps
a failed companion star — that appears to be shoving comets toward the
inner solar system from an orbit 3 trillion miles away. Two teams of
scientists — one in England, one at University of Louisiana at Lafayette
— independently report this conclusion based on the highly elliptical
orbits of so-called “long-period comets” that originate from an icy
cloud of debris far, far beyond Pluto. “We were driven to this by
rejecting everything else we could think of,” says University of
Louisiana physicist Daniel Whitmire. ...
A couple years ago, Whitmire, along fellow physicists John Matese and
Patrick Whitman, noticed the farthest points of the comets’ orbits
didn’t appear random but bunched together, tracing a path across the
sky. ... “We accidentally noticed they weren’t uniform,” Whitmire says.
... “We’ve gone through several other models trying to explain this.”
... The most obvious but seemingly unlikely explanation would be a
planet. ... No one has yet directly observed a 10th planet, and there
could still be another cause for the cluster of comets. The University
of Louisiana research will be published in an upcoming issue of the
journal Icarus. Murray’s paper will appear in Oct. 11 issue of the
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
... Whitmire suggests it is a “brown dwarf,” or a failed star, a
companion to the sun that was too small to light up.
