Australian scientists are recruiting budding or amateur stargazers in the search for the elusive ninth planet believed to orbit the solar system.
Astronomers from the Australian National University recently released thousands of images for the public to help pinpoint the location of Planet Nine, which is speculated to be located beyond Neptune and Pluto.
Planet Discoverers
The thousands of images were captured by the SkyMapper telescope at the university’s observatory in New South Wales. The robotic telescope has been producing a digital map of the southern sky, prompting researchers to share the output to anyone interested in discovering the theorized planet.
“[B]ecause it's produced hundreds of thousands of images we're inviting the public, everyone, to access our images and try and find this planet," said ANU astronomer Dr. Brad Tucker in an ABC News report.
“Planet Nine” is merely a working title, and stargazers have been promised a chance to naming it if they spot it on the website showcasing the digital images. Rules set by the International Astronomical Union, however, will guide the naming.
A similar public search dubbed Backyard Worlds, a search of the northern sky, was launched by NASA last month.
How The Search Works
"If this planet exists, it's already in one of our thousands and thousands of images," Tucker told the BBC, explaining that using the website is much like “spot the difference.”
After clicking a certain object on the images, the site will provide calculations and determine if it lies on an orbit fitting the planet’s proposed position and characteristics. The site will then transmit the information to the scientists, who will track the answers with their telescopes from around the world.
The team is expecting the project will last a few months.
“But the bulk of it we hope to plough through really quick,” Tucker added.
Elusive Ninth Planet
Calculations from January 2016 suggest Planet Nine may be orbiting the sun, despite the fact that it is yet to be eyeballed by scientists. It has been projected to be about 10 times the size of Earth and 800 times more distant from the sun.
According to Tucker, experts concluded that the planet existed after a study of Pluto’s orbit, which could have been affected by another planet’s gravity. Neptune was predicted the actual same way, he revealed.
Recent findings from New Mexico State University researchers showed that Planet Nine could actually be a “rogue planet,” a free-moving object not bound to a specific star in the past, and eventually got snatched into our solar system by the gravitational pull of the sun.
The solar system currently has eight recognized planets, after Pluto was demoted in 2006. But science is still all agog with the prospect of finding so many more, with a group proposing a new way to classify planets and potentially bringing the count to over 100.
Johns Hopkins University’s Kirby Runyon and colleagues, defining a planet as "a sub-stellar mass body that has never undergone nuclear fusion,” proposed that factors defining a celestial object’s planetary qualifications should depend on the body itself, not just things such as location.
And based on this proposed definition, Jupiter moon Europa and our own moon would be classifiable as planets.
