What, You Thought Our Solar System Wasn’t Street? We May Have Straight Up Stolen A Planet From Another System

What? You thought our solar system wasn’t a straight up mother fucker? You thought it didn’t own some knives? Have you seen the Sun? That fucker has knives out its solar ass.

Oh, it’s fucking gully. So much so that’ll it’ll steal planets from your bitch ass solar system.

Fuck your solar system.

By now, you Bros are probably aware that astronomers are pretty confident there’s a ninth planet lurking way out there in our solar system.

By analyzing the orbits of Kuiper Belt Objects, astronomers concluded that something had to be tugging on them to give them their erratic paths around the Sun. They’re confident it’s another planet, with a mass ten times the size of Earth, and an orbit that takes some 15,000 years to complete. By contrast, Pluto orbits the Sun every 248 years.

Where the dick might that have come from? Because that thing is WAY out in the nether regions.

Could we have swiped it from another solar system as we swung by?

Fuck yea. Researchers from Lund University in Sweden have run computer simulations that suggest no planet would form that far from the Sun, and that we instead ganked it from another star.

From Science Daily:

Through a computer-simulated study, astronomers at Lund University in Sweden show that it is highly likely that the so-called Planet 9 is an exoplanet. This would make it the first exoplanet to be discovered inside our own solar system. The theory is that our sun, in its youth some 4.5 billion years ago, stole Planet 9 from its original star.

According to astronomers in Lund, there is a lot to indicate that Planet 9 was captured by the young sun and has been a part of our solar system completely undetected ever since.

“It is almost ironic that while astronomers often find exoplanets hundreds of light years away in other solar systems, there’s probably one hiding in our own backyard,” says Alexander Mustill, astronomer at Lund University.

“Planet 9 may very well have been ‘shoved’ by other planets, and when it ended up in an orbit that was too wide around its own star, our sun may have taken the opportunity to steal and capture Planet 9 from its original star. When the sun later departed from the stellar cluster in which it was born, Planet 9 was stuck in an orbit around the sun,” says Alexander Mustill.

Neat!

Further research will be needed to determine whether we used a space knife or a space gun to assist in the heist.

[H/T Pop Sci]

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