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How long would it take to send a probe to Planet 9?
It wouldn’t take 20,000 years to reach Planet 9. If it actually exists, it would be about 1,200 times as far from the Sun as Earth. Using a flyby at Jupiter, a spacecraft should be able to reach it within a few hundred years.
How far away is planet 9 in AU?
They estimate Planet Nine to be about 6.2 Earth masses, with an orbit that takes it from 300 astronomical units (AU, with 1 AU being the distance from Earth to the sun) out to 380 AU from the sun. Planet Nine’s orbital inclination, or how much it tilts away from the plane of the solar system, is around 16 degrees.
How long would it take to reach Planet Nine?
Brown thinks that if Planet Nine is confirmed to exist, a probe could reach it in as little as 20 years by using a powered slingshot trajectory around the Sun. The planet is estimated to have 5 to 10 times the mass of Earth and a radius of 2 to 4 times Earth’s.
What are the odds of the sun capturing Planet Nine?
Amir Siraj and Avi Loeb found that the odds of the Sun capturing Planet Nine increases by a factor of 20 if the Sun once had a distant, equal-mass binary companion.
What is Planet Nine’s orbit around the Sun?
Planet Nine is hypothesized to follow an elliptical orbit around the Sun with an eccentricity of 0.2 to 0.5. The planet’s semi-major axis is estimated to be 400 AU to 800 AU, roughly 13 to 26 times the distance from Neptune to the Sun. It would take the planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make one full orbit around the Sun.
Can planet Nine be detected by the sky?
While sky surveys such as Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and Pan-STARRS did not detect Planet Nine, they have not ruled out the existence of a Neptune-diameter object in the outer Solar System. The ability of these past sky surveys to detect Planet Nine was dependent on its location and characteristics.