Mysterious ninth planet is to blame for wiping out the dinosaurs.
LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas (PNN) - March 30, 2016 - As evidence for a ninth planet in our solar system grows, a 30-year old theory about mass extinctions on Earth is resurfacing.
Evidence was discovered at the beginning of this year for the mysterious “Planet Nine,” and since then scientists have been looking for signs that could confirm its existence.
But the mystery of this planet has now deepened after an astrophysicist in the Fascist Police States of Amerika has claimed this planet could have provoked comet showers that caused mass extinctions on Earth.
Yesterday, astronomer Mike Brown of Caltech, one of the scientists behind the initial announcement of the so-called “Planet Nine,” revealed he had found further evidence to support it.
This giant hidden planet is thought to sit on the edge of our solar system and is 10 times more massive than the Earth, gaseous, and similar to Uranus or Neptune.
Now Dr. Daniel Whitmire, a retired professor of astrophysics working at the University of Arkansas Department of Mathematical Sciences, has suggested the planet triggers comet showers.
These comet showers could be powerful enough to travel towards Earth's orbit and ultimately strike the planet and cause mass extinctions.
Dr. Whitmire and his colleague John Matese first published research on the connection between Planet X and mass extinctions in the journal Nature in 1985 while working at the University of Louisiana.
At the time there were three explanations proposed to explain the regular comet showers.
These included the presence of a mystery planet on the outskirts of our solar system, dubbed Planet X, the existence of a sister star to the sun, and vertical oscillations of the sun as it orbits the galaxy.
In 1985, an additional planet in the solar system would have taken the total number of planets to 10, as Pluto was still classified as a planet until 2006 - X is 10 in Roman numerals.
The last two ideas have subsequently been ruled out as inconsistent with the paleontological record.
Only Planet X remains as a viable theory, and it is now gaining renewed attention, the university explained.
Dr. Whitmire and Matese's theory is that as Planet X orbits the sun, its tilted orbit slowly rotates and Planet X passes through the Kuiper belt of comets every 27 million years. This orbit causes comets to be knocked into the inner solar system.
Professor Mike Brown and the researchers at Caltech recently inferred a mysterious planet's existence based on orbital anomalies seen in objects in the Kuiper Belt, a disc-shaped region of comets and other larger bodies beyond Neptune. They have dubbed this object "Planet Nine”.
But there is a lot of mystery surrounding additional planets in our solar system and whether the two theoretical planets are the same is up for discussion.
“Whitmire has been speculating for decades about a very distant, very massive planet pushing comets around. It has to have an orbital period of something like 27 million years,” said Professor Brown.
“While that idea may or may not make sense, it definitely has nothing to do with Planet Nine, which is much closer to the sun and thus only takes 15,000 years to go around. The evidence for Planet Nine says nothing about whether or not there is a more distant Planet X,” added Prof. Brown.
But Dr. Whitmire said the new findings did not rule out a planet like he described in his original paper.
“I feel very positive about the new evidence though the current estimates are not completely consistent with our Planet X model,” said Dr. Whitmire. “However it may be possible that a smaller closer planet could also explain the anomalies in the orbits of the Kuiper belt objects since there are uncertainties in their estimates.”
Dr. Whitmire added, “The effect of a planet depends on both its mass and distance so a closer, less massive planet can produce similar gravitational effects. The Planet Nine authors acknowledge that other combinations of mass and distance can't yet be ruled out. Two of the properties of Planet Nine - its orbital inclination (tilt) and eccentricity (elongation) - are very consistent with our Planet X model requirements. Alternatively, even assuming their estimates are exactly correct, there could be two trans-Neptunian planets as others have suggested.”
The dislodged comets not only smash into the Earth, they also disintegrate in the inner solar system as they get nearer to the sun, reducing the amount of sunlight that reaches the Earth.
Scientists have been looking for Planet X for 100 years.
While no conclusive evidence of its existence has emerged so far, a number of researchers have undertaken their own studies on the possible planet.
