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Get ready to update your mnemonics, Bros.
What was once My Very Earnest Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas and is now My Very Earnest Mother Just Served Us Nothing The Kunt Bailed Of Course (The Kuiper Belt, Oort Cloud) could change to something very different.
Nine Tacos, perhaps. Or Nine Bourbons, depending on what we name this newly discovered Super-Earth that is lurking on the edge of the solar system.
Oh and also whether it exists.
That’s because while some astronomers have announced the finding, others are skeptical. From Astronomy.com.
Astronomers working with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have discovered what they claim could be another large planet on the fringes of our solar system.
While examining the Alpha Centauri star system, the nearest to Earth, they noticed a fast-moving object crossing their field of view.
Its speed and brightness allowed them to rule out another star as the culprit, and based on wavelength readings obtained from ALMA, they believe it could be a Trans-Neptunian Object (TNO) orbiting the sun somewhere between 10 billion and 2 trillion miles from our home star. For comparison, Pluto is less than 4 billion miles away from the sun.
So far! But what’s could it be?
The researchers suggest the object could be one of several celestial bodies, including a brown dwarf, a super-Earth (a planet larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune), or a much smaller, icy body orbiting beyond Pluto.
Welcome to the Solar System, Bro. Except, as with most findings in space (remember the super alien megastructure?), skepticism abounds
While the possibility of adding another large planet to our solar neighborhood is exciting, the likelihood that this object, if it exists, is a so-called “super- Earth,” is probably quite small. The ALMA observatory can only look at a tiny fraction of the sky at any given moment. For their study, the researchers could only observe, at maximum, one arcminute, or 1/21,600th, of the heavens. To put that in perspective, the moon is 30 arcminutes across when full and viewed from Earth. Therefore, the odds that researchers happened to catch a large planet in their narrow gaze are pretty small.
As Caltech astronomer Mike Brown pointed out via Twitter, “Fun fact: if it is true that ALMA accidentally discovered a massive outer solar system object in its tiny tiny tiny field of view, … that would suggest that there are something like 200,000 earth sized planets in the outer solar system. Which, um, no.”
That is gonna be one very long mnemonic device.
[Via Astronomy.com]