From the Vault: The Lost Daughters of Aten, Part 2

you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Can we're back for part two? Or is this part two? Or does it kind of stand alone to a large time? I

think this one stands alone. Yeah, okay, so well last time, if you were with us in the last episode, we were exploring what we were sort of calling the Lost Daughters of Aton, the the planets that once were thought to exist somewhere in the Solar System, whether in ancient times or in recent centuries, but we later found out probably never existed or definitely never existed in some cases. So examples we talked about included Antikathon and the Central Fire.

What was the deal with that? Oh, well, you just have to go back and listen to the episode. But yeah, this complex notion where, um, the Sun is not the center of the universe, the Earth is not the center of the universe, but something called the Central Fire is at the center, and Earth is actually closer to the Central Fire than the Sun. So it's you know, this sort of complex uh model of the cosmos based on uh, you know, the best observational data of the day of

like ancient times, ancient Greece. Yeah, combined with certain religious mythological ideas. Yeah, Pythagorean cosmology sort of. But then also we talked about the scientific thinking that to the belief in such a thing as the planet vulcan, a planet believed to be inside the orbit of Mercury super close to the Sun, as was proposed by Urban la Verier. And of course we also talked about Phaeton, the the Phaeton or Phaeton the the best subject of a Renaissance

painting of all time. Yes, but for the purposes of main purposes of our discussion, the the idea that that they thought, well, the asteroid belt maybe used to be a planet and maybe this is this is what we would call that planet if it were still a whole exactly right. So today we wanted to carry this discussion forward to talk about other ideas about planets that are thought to maybe exist somewhere in the Solar System but

haven't yet been confirmed. In the last episode, all the planets that we talked about, we're pretty sure now have never existed at any time. I mean, with two of them, were quite sure, but there are still questions. For example, there has long been a question about what lies at the further stretches we we talked about. You know, what happens when you go down as far as you can into the Solar System, like the Sun, is this pit

this well where you go all the way down? Are there are things that are hard to see because they're so close to the Sun. When you think about the opposite end, could there be things that are hard for us to see because they're so far And of course we have to realize how how confusing this may seem at first, because it's easy to think that we have our Solar system pretty much figured out at this point, right, I mean, mostly if you're listening to this, you probably

grew up memorizing the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Urinous, Neptune. And then there's the whole issue of Pluto, and some of us get a little bit out of shape, right when when someone tells us, actually, Pluto isn't a full fledged planet, it's more of a dwarf planet, etcetera. And uh,

you know when when maybe don't roll with change all that. Well, but it's easy to think, Okay, but that's it, right, there's nothing new to discover in the Solar System, because meanwhile, we are continue really spotting new exo planets that are light years upon light years away, like far distant reaches of the observable universe. So if we're figuring that out, then surely we've got everything squared away in our immediate neighborhood. Yeah,

it only makes sense that that's the way it should go. Right, Why are we seeing exo planets when there's still a question of whether there could be a planet in our own Solar system we don't know about. And unfortunately that's just a side effect of the different ways we have of detecting things. It actually may be much easier to detect the presence of a planet orbiting a distant star because you can definitely see that star, and you can

tell by certain things. You can tell by if the star wobbles, if there are other gravitational influences on that star. You can tell by the what's known as the transit method, if something is passing in front of the star from our perspective and causing it too dim. Yeah, I think I was thinking about it this way. Um, I was

thinking of beach houses. Imagine you're staying in one beach house, you know size a ble beach house, and they tend to be you know, with lots of lots of beds for multiple families or groups to stay and at the same time, so you're in one beach house, and then you're adjacent to another beach house and you you you

gaze out at the other beach house. You see some lights on and you ask yourself, I wonder if anyone is staying there, and you observe it until you find definite signs that there is an individual in that house, and then then maybe you can count how many individuals are in that house. But then if you ask the same question about your own beach house, well then you can. There are ways to try and figure that out, but not the same, not the same ways. Right. You might

do a bit of listening. You might do a bit of roaming around, of of rattling the curiously locked doors that go who knows where. That's a really good analogy. I like that a lot. And so by running around within our own house, we have discovered by say the early nineteen hundred, late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds, we had discovered a lot stuff. We discovered eight planets at that point. The first six planets Mercury, Venus, of course, Earth, Mars, Jupiter,

and Saturn have been known about since ancient times. The ancient astronomers with the naked eye could see them in the night sky and charted their movements and all that. Then in seventeen eighty one you had Uranus or Uranus. We still have to decide which one we truly prefer. Uranus was found by Sir William Herschel with a telescope. He wanted to name it after King George, and fortunately

that didn't happen. Uh. Then Laveryer, the French astronomer, predicted the placement of Neptune by the wobble in Uranus um and he said, I predict there's another planet here and you can find it. And then they went and looked for it and they did find it. And that was in the eighteen forties. So we're up to seven planets

at this point by the eighteen forties. By the way, as long as we're snickering at at the planetary name Uranus, I do want to throw in to call back to an older episode that I hope that one day someone writes a science fiction tale in which a starship is headed towards Uranus and it's called the Guy a Bolga. That would be a great ship title there. That is brilliant. That is absolutely brilliant. Wait a minute, I think I said. Did I say a minute ago that Neptune was the

seventh planet. I feel like I've got that ringing in my head for some reason. If I said that, that's entirely wrong. Neptune is the eighth planet. Obviously. Uh So, I apologies if I misspoke. If not, this is just maybe something we can edit out. Sorry I had to say that before I forgot, But yes, the Guy Bolga, that that should be the ship to Uranus. Absolutely much more evocative and resonant than Voyager two or whatever they've previously used. But let's pull it back and meet a guy.

You ready to meet a guy A mustachio gentleman. Yes, okay, so it is time to meet a fellow by the name of Perceval Lowell. I think we visited this guy on the podcast before. That mustache does look familiar. So Perceval Lowell was born to a wealthy, prominent family in Boston in eighteen fifty five, the Lowell family. So he was brother of a Lawrence Lowell, who was a lawyer

who ended up becoming president of Harvard University. He was also the brother I didn't realize this until recently of the poet Amy Lowell, who I guess is considered a modernist poet. She sometimes called an imagist. Um. But I picked out one of her poems because it had an image that seemed maybe a bit relevant to today. Um. The poem is called Balls. I'm not gonna quote the whole thing, but she writes, throw the blue ball above the little twigs of the tree tops, and cast the

yellow ball straight at the buzzing stars. All our life is a flinging of colored balls to impossible distances. I think the image there is that all our life is a flinging of colored balls, like we're doing the flinging. But you could also think of it is that everything that human life is is being flung around on a colored ball in the void of space. Yeah, that's that's the whole human experience, just right there on the surface of this weird ball among other weird balls. It's always

a weird thing to consider. I mean, I know a Sagan point that out about like the picture of the Earth. When you take a picture of the Earth, everything human there has ever been is in that picture. Yeah, that pale blue dot that contains our beginning and may well contain our end. But anyway, back to Amy's brother, Perceval, so Perceval loll. I think in his early days, I guess, since he was sort of a man about town, except town was like the whole world, and especially like the

eastern part of Asia. Like, he traveled a lot of international fleneur maybe um and he he traveled through the eighteen eighties and the eighteen nineties, and at one point became foreign Secretary to the Korean Special Mission to the United States. But then later in the eighteen nineties, Perceval Lowell became more and more fascinated with astronomy, particularly with the planet Mars. And there was something interesting going on

in the late eighteen hundreds with the planet Mars. There was this Italian astronomer named Giovanni Chaparelli who had been studying the planet Mars through a telescope and he perceived what looked to him like a series of lines on the surface of the planet that he in eighteen seventy

seven called canally, an Italian word meaning channels. But apparently these canally were taken by some English speaking audiences to be canals, kind of a false cognate inference, as in canals like in Venice, artificial structures made by intelligent tool using creatures like us, And this idea kind of became a sensation, right, Yeah, this this had a tremendous effect on on the way we perceived the planet Mars. I mean, its effects are still felt today in the way we

think about Mars, despite everything that we've learned since then. Yeah, Like, why how come when we talk about aliens the go to is to talk about Martians. Especially in the early twentieth centuries, it was always Martians, and when Venusians or anything like that, I mean, occasionally Venusians would pop up, but it's not Santa Claus versus the Venusians. It's Santa Claus versus the Martians. Yeah, or in War of the World.

You know why, why the Martians? The Martian threat? Exactly. So, the the idea of alien canals on Mars really got Perceval Lowell's gears cranking, and he decided to turn his attention and his wealth and his resources to astronomy in the eighteen nineties, and in doing this he founded the Lowell Observatory and Flagstaff, Arizona, still there today. Yeah, and Flagstaff is certainly a great place to gaze at the stars and just a cool place in general. I like

Flagstaff so personal. Lowell became a passionate defender of the idea that there was or had been, intelligent civilization on Mars, and he put this theory forward in a bunch of published writings, using observations from the Lowell Observatory to back up his argument. And so I want to quote from his nineteen sixteen New York Times obituary with a few abridgements.

The author rights quote the great controversy among astronomers, in which he played a leading part, began in nineteen oh seven after his announcement that the observations made by his astro comical station proved that Mars was inhabited. Professor Lowell had put the theory forward tentatively as early as eighteen. Many imminent astronomers in this country in Europe accepted his conclusions of nineteen o seven as unassailable. Others were skeptical.

Professor Lowell's theory begins with the demonstration that the primary requisites for human life exists on the planet water, heat, and atmosphere. His positive proof of the existence of human life on Mars is the network of lines which marks certain areas of the planet's face, indicating the digging of artificial canals, which would require an intelligence and engineering skill as great or greater than possessed by the inhabitants of

this Earth. So I think he's making a few jumps here, Yes, yeah, I mean the main jump, of course, is that is that there are no such canals, and uh. And the more we looked at Mars, and then ultimately as we began to to send probes to the Red planet, it

became increasingly clear that there are absolutely no canals. Yeah, when we we got photos of Mars from a probe in the nineteen seventies which showed yeah, definitely not nothing there, right and and uh and you know we talked about this before in the show, and you know, dealing with early observations, there is a there's more room to see things that are not there, especially if you don't have the ability to really kept being a do any photography

at all. It's so it's very observational and then very and then you're very easy to maybe think you see something or misremember something you've seen, or or in fact, the more you look at it see faint signs of

the thing you want to see. Yeah, there's so much interesting stuff in the history of astronomy about things people said they saw during the days of earlier optical telescopes without modern instruments and modern uh telephotography, where like the ash and Light remember that episode, and the planet Vulcan itself. You know that wasn't just predicted like people said they saw the planet Vulcan up there by the sun during

an eclipse. Who knows what they actually saw, but clearly the process of astronomical observation was was much cruder back then, but Little's Little's argument is kind of funny. So he says astronomers can see white surfaces on the poles of Mars, right, and he says that these are ice caps, and in a way that he's correct about that there are ice caps on Mars. But he said they would melt and shrink in summer and then freeze and grow larger again

in winter. And so he observed that the Martian spring came and the ice melted, and at that point the dark lines or the canals would grow darker quote even showing straight black lines criss crossed over the surface and over the surface of the orange ochre areas. Uh and that he said, these dark lines would disappear again in

the Martian autumn. And he concluded from this that the darkened areas around the canals were flourishing with plant life bearing leaves and grasses during the summer, which had died away again in the winter when the water froze up

and became scarce. And from this he argued that Mars must have been a very parched planet where water is in high demand, which meant that the people who lived there would have had to make very careful use of a highly limited water supply, or else quote would find themselves at last face to face with the relentlessness of a scarcity of water, constantly growing greater, until at last they would all die of thirst, either directly or indirectly,

for either they themselves would not have water enough to drink, or the plants or animals which constituted their diet would perish for lack of it. An alternative of small choice to them, unless they were conventionally particular as to their mode of death. So Lowell concluded that they had to build canals on Mars, that only irrigation on a vast scale could prevent the Martians from dying from a lack of water, and thus the proof of the existence of

civilization on the surface of Mars. Well, it's a fun argument, and I love the world building off but if you know, if they were just purely science fiction, that that would be marvelous. But as we've already touched on, uh, evidence did not support this theory. Yeah, and there were skeptics at the time. We should say, it wasn't like everybody believed this until we had a Mars probe, Like take

photos of the surface from up close. Right, though, certainly one of these possibilities is far more exciting than the other, so you can understand why that one would be the one that the idea of canals on Mars would be uh, the idea that would show up in more headlines and

would and would capture the collective imagination, right uh. And and Lowell's career of influential, controversial, and sometimes incorrect observations and hypotheses did not in there there was an interesting thing I came across where Lowell also believed that once, while observing the planet Venus, he saw quote spokes radiating

from a hub within the planet Venus. But in a two thousand three paper by Sheehann and Dobbins Uh, the authors argued that what actually probably happened here is that because of the way he manipulated the telescope to look at Venus, he had accidentally converted it into a crude opthalmoscope, which would have been showing him images of the blood vessels within his own eyeball. Oh my goodness, and you included an image and in our notes here for me to look at here, and it does line up rather

well with the arteries of the eye. Yeah, but it doesn't stop there either. So Lowell was also in the planet predicting business. And we'll discuss his planet predictions when we get back from a break. Thank alright, we're back. So thus far we've talked about Lowell's thoughts concerning um Mars, a known planet, but now we're gonna get into the unknown. We get into into the study and the prediction of of of hypothetical planets. Yeah, and remember how the eighth

planet Neptune had been discovered. Again, uh Laveryer looked at the orbit of Uranus and said, Okay, by the way it's moving, we can tell something is influencing it. It's not moving based on what our predictions should be. So what if we pause it another another object out there of a certain mass and a certain position, Then we could explain why Uranis moves the way it does. And so he posited Neptune, and it turned out Neptune was there. He was correct, and so this is a fantastically useful

and successful prediction based on the laws of physics. So, in the early years of the twentieth century, after studying the orbits of the outer gas, giants like Uranus and Neptune, Lowell tried to do the same thing. He concluded that there was another planet yet to be found based on those orbits. Something out there is messing with Uranus and Neptune.

And yet again, like with the correct prediction of Neptune and the incorrect prediction of Vulcan by la Verier, this was on that basis, on the basis of inferred gravitational influences on the orbits of these known objects. So in nineteen o five or nineteen o six, Percival Lowell initiated a massive hunt for this ghost planet. The project was initially called the Invariable Plane Search, and the ghost planet was called Planet X. And this project went on for

many years. It proceeded in stops and star throughout several phases, even after Perceval Lowell himself actually passed away in nineteen sixteen. So Perceval Lowell never got to see how this project turned out, though he wrote books about He wrote a book called I Think Like a Memoir of the trans

Neptunian Planet. But on February eighteenth, nineteen thirty fourteen years after Lowell's death, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory named Clyde Tombo actually did discover a massive object beyond Neptune with the help of the with the help of a loaned sum of money that I think they used to buy new instruments from personal Lowell's brother who had been the

head of Harvard, and this object was Pluto. Though Pluto was not nearly as massive as the planet that Lowell had predicted out there and later actually turned out more accurate measurements of the orbit and massive Neptunes, such as by the Voyager two mission, basically obviated the need for a planet X to explain our observation. So you actually looking at Uranus and Neptune, there was no need to to to infer a planet X. So it seems there's just no planet out there, right, and now we can

conclude there's no need to explain anything. It is probably there's probably nothing. I mean, we have Pluto to be sure, and uh and and again, like we discussed earlier, you can go back and forth on exactly how we should classify Pluto. But here's the thing. There's no question that there are other objects in our Solar system beyond Pluto. Pluto is not the stop sign for our Solar system. There,

there's plenty of other objects out there. Yeah. The Solar system kind of has a shell of icy debris floating around it. Yeah. And so it's not like you you would get to Pluto and there would essentially be a sign saying like last stop tell Alpha Centauri. Uh No. There there's the possibility for other other things, and we

know for a fact that there are other things. First, there's the general category of trans Neptunean objects, such as the dwarf planet Eiris Uh between thirty seven point nine and ninety seven point six astronomical units away from the Sun. Is actually larger than Pluto by mass, the a little smaller by volume. Oh and just quickly, an astronomical unit is the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Correct, Yeah, so Earth is one a U from the Sun, ETCETERA U is is way up. It's way out there. Yeah.

Other dwarf planets include uh series, um Hamiya, and Makamaki. And then consider the said noise. This is where it really can to get weird. These are trans Neptunian objects with a parahelion. Again, this is a point of least distance from the Sun of at least fifty a U. So if they're closest to the Sun, they're still beyond the Kuiper Belt, which lies thirty to fifty AU from the Sun. This is an asteroid belt like scattering of leftover debris. And all three known you know, verified said

noise have really cool names. First of all, there's Sedna, discovered in two thousand three, named for an Inuit sea goddess, and that's where we get said noise, because when we discovered earlier it become a classification. And then there's two thousand twelve vp UH one one three a k A. Biden discovered in twelve and named for then Vice President of the United States Joe Biden. So wow. And then I wonder who is the person who has the most

onion articles written about them? Who also has an asteroid named about not an asteroid an object in space named after them? Is it Biden? It might be Biden? And then the third one of note here, discovered in twenty fifteen is t G three seven. The t G stands for the Goblin. The goblin, Yeah, the Cheddar Goblin. No, just the goblin. I mean, if it's Cheddar or not, it's too far away. It might be monster so Seddon is the largest, the Goblin is furthest away, and all

of them have really weird orbits. So their distance from the center of things from our son varies greatly. And if you look at a chart of their of their orbits, I really get the sense of imagine, imagine a typical orbit that has been stretched out like a rubber band. Yeah, so pretty much all the planets I think have have elliptical orbits. They're not perfectly circular, but the inner planets

their orbits are pretty close to circular. You know, there're only a few percent off from being circular, but these orbits are just massively off from being circular. They are super stretched out ovals. And one of the weird things I noticed in at least one of the pictures you've got here early on, Robert, is that they almost kind of like look like they're there. Their parahaliens are kind of aligned almost in the same direction. I wonder why

that might be. Will come back to Yeah, we'll come back because that's that's definitely leads to a few different mysteries here. Uh. In additional to having just weird orbits, again, they are so far away from from the Sun um certainly when you look at their their extremes, but even at their parahaliens are pretty extreme. The Goblin, for instance, has an estimated orbital period what we can think of as a year of thirty two thousand, one hundred and

seventeen point twenty nine Earth years. That's how long it takes for for the Goblin to go around the Sun. And to put that in context, a year on Pluto is two forty eight Earth years. That's how long it takes Pluto to go around the Sun. And this thing is that much further away. The goblins distance from the Sun ranges from sixty five point one AU to one thousand, nine hundred and fifty five AU. Wow, that is crazy far away. Yeah, and their additional sadnoid candidates and suspected

to be many more. We're talking eighty to ninety of these critters, and they're distant and weird orbits can't be fully explained by the influences of known Solar System objects either. So for starters, they're too far from the Sun to be influenced by the gas giants, and they're too close to the Sun to be influenced by other distant stars. So something else is influence and seeing them. But what so,

there are a few reasonable candidates to consider here. Uh. The big one, the main one that we're most interested here with is uh that there might be an undiscovered giant planet comparable to Uranus or Neptune still orbiting our Sun somewhere out there in the dark. So there could maybe be a planet X after all exactly. Another idea is that a lost giant planet was ejected from our Solar system a long time ago, disrupting orbits on its

way out of our Solar system. So that would that would explain why they all seem sort of skewed in the same direction, because some like a massive planetary object just came ripping through, pulling everybody out of place. And then a final of reasonable theory is that back in the stellar nursery days of our Solar system, the Sun's fellow proto suns nudged everything out of whack okay, so it could be sort of a relic of something that happened in the past, kind of like the planet being

a jected or something moving by. So if I can come back to Pluto for a second, I hope that for one thing, the idea of the said nooids makes everyone feel better about losing or potentially losing pet Pluto is a full fledged planet, because ultimately, wouldn't you rather just drop Pluto from the list as opposed to just adding all these other additional things like no, you don't actually want to memorize a bunch of saidnoids. Um. So, also, you didn't lose Pluto. Pluto is still there. It's still

it's still a dwarf planet. You can still include it on the list. Like people get way, people get people like to get bit out of shape over this when there's really nothing to get bent out of shape over. There's a reason Pluto is not considered a planet. It's in order to make it consistent with the definition of a planet that we use for all the other planets. And that means that planets have to dominate their orbital area. They have to gravitationally dominate their orbital area, and Pluto

does not. Right, And if you just decide Nope, we're gonna count Pluto, then you you have to be open to letting other things join the list as well. There is dwarf planets and whatnot. So trust this is this is the best way, is the best approach forward. Um, But again this comes back to the question. All right, if there is let's let's assume that first theory is correct. If there is a giant planet out there in our Solar system. Uh, and it's it's it's monkeying with the

orbits of these said noids. Then why don't we know about it for sure? Why? And did all these you know, the continual classification of exo planets, things as far away as Sweeps eleven, which is twenty seven thousand, seven D and ten light years away. Why would we miss something so relatively close to home. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come right back, we will explore more about the possibility of planet nine a

K a planet x a K a planet ten. But actually it's planet nine a K a planet d M X. All Right, we're back, Robert. Wasn't there an X themed wrestler or is he not really X themed? I'm thinking of Uh he had an X in his name? Well they was there was an X pox wrestling? Yes? Yeah, Sean Waltman, Yeah he's still around. I believe there was a luchador Doctor X because you know, the X X looks so good on a mask. You've got to you've got to roll that out eventually. It's the coolest letter,

I guess. So xpox is not like X themed then no, not really no, nor does he have any relation to Planet X. So we're full on talking about planet X now. Though this is confusing because yeah, you mentioned that planet x X as the Roman numeral for ten, but this wouldn't be the tenth planet. This would be the ninth planet, would be the planet after the eighth planet, neptune um,

so it would really be planet nine. And when actual astronomers an astrophysicists these days talk about this planet, they don't usually call it planet X. They call it planet nine. That's especially uh necessary, I think, because the Internet is just overflowing with Planet X conspiracy theories that I don't think we need to get into today. But man, I I if you just do a I don't know if I recommend this there, do a YouTube search for planet X,

and there is some apocalyptic, bonkers nonsense out there. I think it's all about how Planet X is coming to get us. Well, you know, yeah, we're, like you said, we're not gonna really get into that today. But the great thing is that all of the the actual scientific ideas concerning a potential planet nine are far more interesting. Oh yeah. So, so one of the things that we should mention is that crucial for the demotion of Pluto was a Caltech researcher named Mike E. Brown, a colleague

of a another astronomer named Constantine Batigon. And for several years now that these astronomers, Constantine Batigan and Mike Brown, have been talking about the possibility that they suspect there is an object out there beyond Neptune, out there in the dark shepherding the trans neptuney and objects we've been talking about, so that they are aligned in roughly the same direction, and they're aligned across multiple axes, by the way,

So that's kind of interesting. Like if you look at all of their orbits from the north pole looking down, they're all lined up in this one weird direction, as if something's pulling them all in the same place. Who a giant blind shepherd in the darkness? Yes? What was the name of the Cyclops in the Odyssey? And does he have an astronomical body named after him? Probably so, but he's probably already taken Polyphemus I don't know it's

Polyphemus up for grabs. I don't know of anything called Polyphemus. Okay, I just did a Google search and the only thing that came up was that somebody wanted to name a moon of Neptune Polyphemus. But I don't think they did. All right, Well, well maybe we can keep that one clear just in case, because I think that would be that would be a really awesome name for one of

these planets, if I can have any say so. So, when the aliens from that planet contact us and they say help, someone's attacking me, and we radio back and say who's attacking me? And they say, no, one is attacking me, you can know they've been tricked by a cosmic Odysseus told them his name was no One say so, Disseas is the worst, such a trickster. All right, Well, I have derailed us a little bit here. Let's get back to this idea of planet nine the blind, a

potential blind shepherd of the of these distant objects. All right, yeah, we'll bring it back. So one thing I should mention is that I actually listened to an interesting interview with the Caltech astronomer and Professor of planetary science is Constantine Batiguan and Uh and and so this this shed some

light on what he was thinking. Essentially, Uh, Constantine Batiguan, and Uh and Mikey Brown have been doing research to show there is possible there is a way of explaining some of the strange coincidences that we see in the structure of the outer Solar System, in the structure of these like saidnoids, hyper belt objects, these objects that are

way out there. Then when we track their orbits, they seem to line up in this bizarre way where they're all sort of pointing in the same direction at one end at their parahelion, they're all like it's like they're they're just lining up. And then also a strange thing is that they're not only lining up in that dimension, but if you like look directly at the solar plane instead of down on it, they're all sort of elevated. They're tipped up across the solar plane in a fairly

consistent or at least close to consistent way. And that's really odd, Like Batiguan talks about how that really wouldn't be something you'd expect to see just by chance. So the idea here is that what if something has pushed them there. It's like, why are all the sheep standing in this area? Well, maybe it's because the the the shepherd dog or the wolf is standing over here, right, And so the problem is we don't know exactly where to look for this object if it is out there.

So lavery A could say, hey, you know, I think I know where Neptune is. I'm going to give you within one degree of of where to look, and of course when they look forward, they found it with the telescope. You can't quite do the same thing with this planet nine because even the people who think it exists, they're inferring it from its influence on objects who have orbital periods of like ten thousand years or something, so it

takes them so long to go around. So we are sort of lacking in data to to get the full arc to pinpoint exactly where the planet would be to cause what we see. But constantin Batiguan thinks that right now, the best place to look for this planet is probably at an average distance of somewhere around five hundred astronomical units.

So yeah, five hundred times the distance between the Earth and the Sun and so for comparison, you know, Earth is one Mars is one point five a U, Jupiter is five point to Neptune is about thirty a U. So that's starting to get way out there. But the distance from Neptune to the ninth planet would be gigantic. It would be many times the distance from the Sun to Neptune. So it's way way out there in the dark.

The best estimates say that it would probably have a roughly ten thousand year orbit, and also it would probably have a very elliptical orbit compared to the inner planets. Like the inter planets are elliptical, but they're pretty close to circular. This planet would be more like these these objects we've been talking about, these Kuiper Belt objects and setenoids that have these long ovals, but not quite as long as the setonoid, no longer, but not quite that long.

So we've got good reasons to think that there's something out there with mass. There. There could be another large planet out there with mass that's causing these objects that we can see to behave in the way they do. But we don't know much about this object itself, right because all we have to go on is what it's mass would have to be and roughly what its orbit is to cause the effects we're seeing. We can't We

haven't been able to look at it. We don't know exactly for sure what it would be made of, exactly how big it would be. Um the the estimates I've seen tend to think that it's going to be bigger than Earth, but it would be sort of like a an icy super Earth, with a with an atmosphere kind of like the gas giants and an upper atmosphere like Neptune or something, but with an icy core, maybe roughly five Earth mat us is. I've also seen an older

estimate that was more like roughly ten Earth masses. I don't know if it's been if those represent different points of view, or if it's been scaled down since then, but the more recent one I saw from Batigan was five Earth masses. But as for the makeup, like the icy core with the atmosphere on the outside, that's just something we have to guess. We don't know for sure.

And so with an object with an orbit this long way out there in the dark, obviously it probably would be possible for us to see it with our telescopes if we know where to look and what to look for. But it's not going to be something that just shows up in an obvious way. It's gonna take like difficult analysis of uh doing, you know, comparing photos of the night sky with deep detail across different nights to see

what moves. And part of the problem is there's a lot of stuff out there, a lot of things moved, and so like, if you take a super high res photograph with great magnification of a patch of the sky across a few different nights and then see what moves there, you might get tons of hits, maybe thousands of hits, And then you've got to look at those and say, Okay, is this a new is this an Kuiper Belt object we know about? Is this a Main Belt asteroid we

know about? Is this a new Kuiper Belt or Main Belt object that we did that we didn't know about, or is this maybe a planet that we should be looking for, right, Because I mean it's you see this happen from time to time where it's still think that new objects has been discovered, but it's actually an object that has already been charted. So there's duplication that can

take place. Yeah, and so one of the things that we can do to help figure out where we should look is to rule out certain areas of the sky. And that's something that Batigan has been talking about doing. Is you can say, Okay, there's no point in looking for the planet here. No one wouldn't be here. There's no point looking for it here. We know it wouldn't be here. And then also you can use other data

to in for places where it probably shouldn't be. For example, we know that it's uh, probably not in in a certain sector because if it were, it may it probably would have affected the movements in a detectable way of the Cassini spacecraft when Cassini was in orbit around Saturn. So that tells us probably it's not really close to its parahelion right now, right, it's not close enough to be having an effect on the inter planet's It's probably

somewhere a little bit further out if it exists. So to come back to my my beach house, uh okay metaphor from earlier, Uh, it's like you. They're the rooms that you can see and you can you can look to them from where you are and see there is no mystery stranger in that room. There are rooms where you would be able to detect maybe there's a you know there, you're right beneath it, and you would be able to hear them surely if they were creaking around

up there. But there are other rooms that you just you don't know at this point. Yeah, and so the question of whether there is actually a planet nine out there, it does remain unsolved, though. Constantine Batiguan seems very confident. And the interview I listened to, you know, the host asked him, how confident are you that this thing is

out there? And he's like, well, I used to say I was six trillion percent confident um, But then he said, actually, you can calculate a good confidence interval by saying, what's the probability as far as we know that all of these Kuiper Belt objects would have their orbits line up the same way like this by chance without some big massive object out there to shepherd them into these orbits. And according to him, the chance of this happening by

coincidence is zero point two percent. So by subtraction, he says he's nine eight percent confident that planet nine exists. So that's very confident. I'm sure plenty of other astronomers wouldn't be that level of confident. But it's inspiring to even think about the possibility that there's this, this, this additional planet out there in our own Solar System and our own relatively local neck of the cosmic woods, and we just merely suspect that it's there, that it's out

there roaming up through the darkness. Well, I mean, this is a this is a great sort of science hunt game to play, right. Uh, you know, you you have to use the laws of physics as you know them and try to figure out what's another way we could get data that nobody's thought of before. And so like the idea of using the perturbations of the movement of a spacecraft. That's that's a smart way to look for

new data that might not have appeared to you otherwise. Um, and and so this is really cool, But at the same time, I'm sure really frustrating, especially if you're like pretty confident that you think, yeah, we really know, it's probably got to be out there, because nobody has discovered a planet in the Solar System arguably since either Clyde Tombo in the nineteen thirties or since Lavery A and uh, and uh McAdams or I think McAdams was the other

guy who discovered it in the eighteen forties. I mean that's been a long time. Yeah, totally, because again we've all grown up with this map of the Solar System in our our heads. And uh, and you kind of you, I don't, I don't remember being taught. Hey, this is

all subject to change, but but clearly it is. Well, you would think that if there is a planet nine out there to be discovered, it's also probably going to be the last one we're going to discover, because there's there's only a limited range of space where planets could actually be without without violating what else we know about space. Right, It couldn't be closer than where we're thinking this planet is, because otherwise we would interfere with the inner planets and

we would know about it. It couldn't really be farther away than where we're thinking this thing is, or else it probably would have been like stripped away by a passing star as we move through the galaxy. Right, because it still needs to be under the power of our son, it within the thrall of our Son to be considered part of our Solar System, and that's the whole point. Yeah, so there's not like opportunities to just discover unlimited more

planets in the Solar system. Solar system doesn't go on forever. Eventually the domain of gravitational dominance of our son ends, and other stars become more powerful in their in their gravitational influence. So so there's only so much space where there could be more planets. And it looks like if we discover one more planet out there, that's that's probably

about it. I don't know, maybe there could be one, but it's not like you know that we're gonna find ten more planets, and certainly nothing you know, large like that. So yeah, it's a tantalizing mystery. I love the idea that there's still mysteries about our Solar system, not just space in general, but local mysteries, mysteries inside the house, right right. And of course that's not to gloss over the many, you know, unsolved problems related to each individual planet.

I mean just just every just about every optics in our Solar system, there's something about it we're still trying to figure out. And uh, and and that's just dealing with the problems that we know about that's the unknowns that we're aware of. Personally, I'm excited. I hope they discover another planet in our lifetime. That would be really cool. That would that would be cool. And it seems like now there's I don't it's not a lock. I wouldn't. I don't know if i'd go to nine percent, but

it seems like there's pretty good evidence. Yeah, and then then what will we name it? I like your polyphemous idea, the blind Shepherd out there. Yeah, it's a good name. Yeah, assuming nothing else has has has snagged it already. Yeah, and assuming that it doesn't attempt to space so disseas

to come along and screw everything up. That's true. All right, Well, we're going to close out this episode, you know we we didn't even get into any examples from science fiction, though I do believe in Doctor Who the Cyberman home world of Manda's is both a ninth planet as well as a former counter Earth's at once. Yeah, I think it's too at once. I I could have that wrong. So I'd love to hear from from our Who fans out there. I know we have some Who listeners out

there listening to the show. You know, you can set it right in this Plus there have to be there have to be plenty of other science fiction properties that have have utilized this idea of a mysterious ninth or tenth planet out there in our solar system. Robert I think they're called uvoids to voids, Okay, well who who voids right in about it? Uh, and everybody else feel

free to write in as well. Uh. We're gonna hopefully come back with more episodes in this series because there are additional phantom planets phantom objects uh that that line up under the mission statement of of these episodes. So uh look forward to that in the future. And in the meantime, if you want to check out old episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's our mothership. That's where we'll find all of them. You'll find links

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