![]() ![]() He is the principal scientist for NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which buzzed Pluto last summer in the first-ever visit from Planet Earth. Pluto is a gravitational slave to Neptune, they pointed out.Īnother scientist, Alan Stern, said he's withholding judgment on the planet prediction. "THIS is what we mean when we say the word 'planet,' " Brown said.īrown and Batygin believe it's big - 10 times more massive than Earth - and unlike Pluto, dominates its cosmic neighborhood. (Once Planet 9, Pluto is now officially considered a dwarf planet.) Brown ought to know he's the so-called Pluto killer who helped lead the charge against Pluto's planetary status in 2006. Once it's detected, Brown insists there will be no Pluto-style planetary debate. In the future we might even be able to confirm their existence,” says Rosanne.ĮSA’s quest to finding exoplanets continues with Cheops, Gaia, and future missions Webb, Plato and Ariel."For the first time in more than 150 years, there's good evidence that the planetary census of the solar system is incomplete," Batygin said, referring to Neptune's discovery as Planet 8. “Now that we have this new method for finding possible planet candidates in other galaxies, our hope is that by looking at all the available X-ray data in the archives, we find many more of those. I am excited that X-rays now also play important step in the search for planets beyond the border of our galaxy,” says Norbert Schartel, XMM-Newton Project Scientist for ESA. “The first confirmed planet outside of our Solar System was found around a pulsar, an object typically observed in X-rays. The existence of those planets is consistent with the fact that planets are found around pulsars (rapidly rotating neutron stars), and some of these pulsars have been part of an X-ray binary in the past. This would also be the first time that a planet is found orbiting an X-ray binary. This is the first planet candidate that would orbit a known host system, as compared to candidates found with gravitational lenses. Still, this is an exciting step forward in the quest to find a planet outside of the Milky Way. “We can only say with confidence that it doesn’t fit any of our other explanations,” Rosanne clarifies. That’s why the team remains careful to say that they found a possible planet candidate, for which the broader community might find other explanations, although they have not been found after careful research by the team. This long orbit of the planet candidate is also a limitation for the study, because the event can’t be repeated any time soon. It would make one full orbit roughly every 70 years, and be bombarded with extreme amounts of radiation, making it uninhabitable by life as we know it on Earth. The team also speculates about the characteristics of the planet based on their observations: it would be the size of Saturn, orbiting the binary star system from tens of times the Earth-Sun distance. We are pretty confident that this is not anything else and that we have found our first planet candidate outside of the Milky Way,” adds Rosanne. “We did computer simulations to see whether the dip has the characteristics of a planet transiting, and we find that it fits perfectly. X-ray binary transit by a possible planet This was partly observed by XMM-Newton and caused a much longer black-out, which was different from the dip caused by a possible planet. ![]() Lastly, the team also compared the dip to another blockage of the light caused by the ‘donor’ star passing in front of the compact star. Even if the planet had an atmosphere, it would still have a more well-defined surface than a cloud.Ĭould the dip be explained by variations in brightness of the source itself? The paper authors are confident that this is not the case, because although the light from the source completely disappeared for a few hours before it came back, the temperature and light colours stayed the same. Could the X-ray dip be caused by small stars like a brown or red dwarf? No, they argue, the system is too young for that, and the transiting object too large.Ĭould it be a cloud of gas and dust? Not likely, the team says, because the dip indicates a transiting object with a well-defined surface, which would not be the same for a passing cloud. ![]()
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