Adler Planetarium's Next Sky Show To Explore Potential Ninth Planet
CHICAGO (CBS) -- Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have revealed evidence there might be a ninth planet on the fringes of the solar system, and an Adler Planetarium astronomer has been busy for months designing a sky show based on those findings.
It wasn't easy for Adler space visualization laboratory director Mark SubbaRao to keep the Caltech findings secret until researchers published them on Wednesday.
SubbaRao has been working with Mike Brown, the Caltech astronomer responsible for reclassifying Pluto as a dwarf planet, and was sworn to secrecy for months as Brown researched evidence of a potential new ninth planet, which researchers believe is a gas giant thousands of times the size of Pluto.
Researchers have not yet seen the planet, but have found evidence that leads them to believe it's out there. They discovered six objects in the Kuiper Belt – a massive region beyond Neptune made up of remnants from the formation of the Solar system – clustered together on elliptical orbits tilted off the plane of the Solar system.
"What came out from the team at Caltech was the best explanation for why those things are there, and that explanation is what would truly be a new ninth planet. Not a little small thing, like Pluto, but something much larger; about 5,000 times bigger than Pluto," SubbaRao said.
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Caltech researchers said there's minimal chance the clustering could be a coincidence, and instead is the result of a massive planet exerting the gravity needed to cause the objects' unusual orbit.
If Brown's theory is correct, SubbaRao said the planet, nicknamed Planet X or Planet 9, would be enormous – 10 times the mass of Earth.
It also would be far beyond previous conceptions of the solar system's outer limits.
"We're talking on the order of 20,000 years to go one time around the sun," SubbaRao said. "An interesting thing about its orbit, its orbit is quite elliptical. So it goes much further out at one end, and is a lot closer to the sun at the other end, which is quite different."
Right now, it would be 10 times farther out from the sun right now than Pluto, and at its greatest distance from the sun, would be 24 times farther out than Pluto.
The new sky show at the Adler Planetarium, opening May 28, will include information not only about the potential new ninth planet, but hundreds of other objects discovered over the past couple decades in the Kuiper Belt.
"We're also going to cover some of the weird worlds that have been discovered out there. There's like a whole new region of our solar system that we're just starting to learn about. Some of them are pretty crazy. There's one that is incredibly bright. There's another that's shaped like a football – it's spinning very fast; every four hours. Some fascinating things out there," SubbaRao said.
