In a wonderfully punchy, and technically brilliant paper the scientists Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown of Caltech have set the world abuzz with their claim of a giant planet lurking well beyond Pluto and its Kuiper-belt kin.
In brief, the oddly clustered orbital configurations of a bunch of distant Kuiper-belt bodies might be best explained by the gravitational perturbations of a planet of at least 10 Earth masses, orbiting with a semi-major axis of some 700 astronomical units (AU), and an ellipticity of 0.6 (which…
5 Questions and Answers about the Proposed Ninth Planet
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