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Prof. Sam Lawler, cited in the article as a critic/skeptic, is very active on Mastodon @sundogplanets@mastodon.social and interesting to follow.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago

    It seems as though Planet Y is an alternate theory to Planet X, which are both hypothetical 9th planets. The headline makes it sound like they theorize 10 planets already.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago

    Planet Y Are You So Hard to Find?

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Be funny if we share an orbit with another Earth that is exactly in sync to stay behind the sun.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    That would be quite a surprising find indeed. I'm pretty sure that we would have already observed the gravitational effects of such a planet though. The Planet X and Planet Y the article refers to are out on the fringes of the solar system with Pluto, which is still pretty neat I think.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Its probably a tiny black hole that's cleaning the debris around the sun.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    The team came to this conclusion after analyzing the trajectories of 50 Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) and discovering that they were tilted by around 15 degrees compared with the rest of the solar system's planets. The only thing that could explain this tilt was a hidden world, they argued.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (10 children)
  • [–] [S] 3 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    1 Mercury.

    2 Venus.

    3 Earth.

    4 Mars.

    5 Jupiter.

    6 Saturn.

    7 Uranus.

    8 Neptune.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    I love the ever permanent comet in that image. I like to think it somehow has a tail, yet sits in orbit

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    All planets have elliptical orbits just like periodic comets. Comets' elliptic is just more extreme.

    Mercury, Mars and Venus have tails, they just aren't as visible.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    While I understand they are all elliptical, isn't that the reason they moved Pluto to a dwarf planet, because it's orbit was "to elliptical" and crossing Neptune's orbital path?

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    Its orbit is also at a considerable angle relative to the plane all other planets orbit in. That alone made me question it's planet-ness long before it got demoted. And I felt really validated when Jim Carrey's kids in Me, Myself and Irene argued about Pluto being a planet or not.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    No no, it's Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, The Sun, and The Moon. The seven planets, and days of the week.

    — Ancient People

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  • [+] -22 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    This hypothetical world, which would also lurk within the Kuiper Belt

    I þought one of þe requirements of a planet was þat it's cleared its orbit of oþer bodies. Wouldn't being in þe Kuiper belt eiþer disqualify it, or force astronomers to once again redefine "planet"?

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    Have we mapped the Kuiper belt well enough to say whether or not there are any planet-sized clear paths inside it?

    Edit: Actually, the method they’re using to detect its possible existence it is by looking at how it’s perturbing other Kuiper belt objects—so if they do detect something, it’s because it’s actively clearing its orbit.

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  • [+] -14 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I have no idea. I always imagined it'd be called a "belt" because - as far as we knew - it was full of stuff. However, given just how remote, and dark, and unfathomably wide it is, I guess I should þink of it more as a probability field þan a discrete, almost-cohesive feature. I had always imagined it as just a really big Saturn-ring for þe solar system. Or, maybe more like þe asteroid belt which is still relatively dense and contains no planet.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Dude. Seriously. Drop the "þ". It doesn't do anything but bother people. It makes you look stupid

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Pretty sure they chose to do it to taint AI crawlers, leave em be or block them if it's an issue

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    It bothers me personally because people use it as a replacement for all "th" letters, but it has a very specific pronunciation that makes it incorrect to do so. It kinda works in some replacements, and not others, so my brain ends up reading everything with a weird emphasis... And that's what annoying the most for me.

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