PLANET 9 AND GRAVITY WAVES

       Astronomy always crops up in the general news media, and lately the buzz has been about “Planet 9” and “gravity waves.”

       The news crawl on the bottom of your TV news says something like: “Astronomers suspect “Planet 9” in Kuiper Belt beyond Pluto” and “Astronomers’ discovery of Gravity Waves Creates New Branch of Physics.”

       Which can be confusing, particular to dwarf planet and former ninth planet Pluto.  Not to mention any beach surfers out there wondering if they might “catch” a gravity wave.

       Well after decades of “surfing” the cosmos, astronomers finally did after decades of trying—they “caught” some gravity waves rippling along space, intercepting Earth and altering space and time.

       (…and maybe not far behind is Marvel Comic’s Silver Surfer—searching for planets that might energize his captor, Galactus. Huh? Space nerds understand).

       Even though it was just a movement of one-ten-thousandths the width of the smallest atom, the detection of gravity waves on Sept. 14, 2015 has shaken the foundation of physics.

       Released in a scientific journal and a press conference in February 2016, the direct evidence of gravity waves has a profound effect on the future of astrophysics and our comprehension of the Universe.  

       In a nutshell, Albert Einstein predicted 100 years ago that gravity bends light (proven in 1909) and can also warp space and time. Along with that is all the exotic concepts of time travel, warped space and even multiple Universes!

       There a plenty of visuals on the Internet to help you wrap your head around the bending of time and space. Think of this one:  a trampoline with a bowling ball in the middle.  The trampoline is outer space and the bowling ball is a huge object with lots of gravity, like a Black Hole. The stretching of the trampoline towards the bowling ball is like gravity bending space.  And if something is orbiting the Black Hole, it can create waves in that gravity force. 

       And those gravity waves can alter the space around it and the time it takes light and other cosmic matter to travel. The bottom line: time travel, as predicted in science fiction, is possible!

       Just how astronomers discovered this is quite complex and the brainy stuff of astrophysics.  But here goes how the discovery happened:

       A team of astronomers have been using two identical, special scientific instruments to detect minute changed in Earth’s gravity caused by waves of altered space/time.  Looking like a “Y” shaped pipe a half-mile long above the ground in Richland, Washington and Livingston, Louisiana, a precise laser records any disruption. The scientific tools are formally called the Laster Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO).

LIGO in Livingston, Washington

What happened is this: Watching the rare occurrence of two super Black Holes actually colliding, one 30 time the size of our Sun and the other 40 times more massive, the astronomers detected the warping of space and time as gravity waves from the event thousands of Light Years away flowed past Earth.

The actual evidence is in the form of simple graphs like an electrocardiogram of outer space, and astronomers turned that into an audio track.  The sound bite rises to a middle C before abruptly stopping, the first direct evidence of ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted a century ago.

The discovery is ground breaking because this reveals a new factor of the Universe that is not part of the electromagnetic spectrum—of which visible light is just a small part.  You have light, radio, infrared, gamma and x-rays in that spectrum, but gravity waves are something different. Like ripples in the water, the very fabric of outer space has waves created by the mass, or weight of objects, tugging on it. Yes, it’s a hard concept to grasp, but very real.

       What will happen next, after a possible trip to Sweden for a Nobel Prize in physics? For sure, more scientific funding will become available to build bigger and better detectors of gravity waves.

        And around the world, universities of nerdy scientists will play with their experiments, build some now unknown contraptions, and possibly, quite possibly, 50 years from now create the “time machine” first written about by HG Wells in 1895. 

While the excitement of gravity waves has people thinking about time travel and Einstein’s weird Universe, another recent astronomy item in the news has two astronomers saying they have evidence for a 9^th planet in the far reaches of our Solar System. 

       Ironically, one of the astronomers, Mike Brown, is the culprit behind the demotion of Pluto from planet to dwarf planet.  Brown discovered an object, now called Eris, that is the same size as Pluto (2,370 miles) but farther away from the Sun. Than another half-dozen objects about the same size were found in this region called the Kuiper Belt. The dilemma was adding more planets or clumping these objects in their own classification.  Brown wrote about it in his book “How I Killed Pluto.”

       Now Brown and his science partner Konstantin Batygin are convincing colleagues they have found a huge planet at the edge of the Kuiper Belt, maybe tens of billions of miles from the Sun.

Astronomers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin

The astronomers have been studying a cluster of six objects each around 1,000 miles wide and orbiting deep in the Kuiper Belt. Their behavior has led them to a new “Planet 9.” studied the clustering of six objects way beyond Pluto and how they have been tugged about in a similar direction.  That direction, they say, is a large, Neptune-sized planet that is gravitationally effecting the cluster of much smaller bodies.

       The “Planet 9” may be no closer to the Sun than 18 billion miles and might be in an extreme elliptical orbit that takes it 65 billion miles from our star. That would mean one orbit every 10,000 years or so.   Pluto is in an elliptical orbit that takes it from 2 to 4 billion miles from the Sun.  It take 243 years to orbit the Sun.   

  
       That is the key to the prediction that Planet 9 exists, that these six dwarf planets are being tugged in the same direction out of the normal orbital plane where the rest of the planets dwell.  The eight planets and asteroids orbit the Sun in a flat, saucer-shaped plane that varies only up to 3 degrees from horizontal.  But Pluto and the other Dwarf Planets are orbiting at extreme angles to the planetary plane, just like comets that can come from any direction around the Solar System.

       The inference of unseen objects has plenty of precedence as that’s how Neptune was discovered.  After the discovery of Uranus through the eyes of astronomy giant William Herschel in 1781, it was realized something was pulling at it.  The math was done by two independent researchers and Neptune was discovered in 1846 at a Berlin Observatory.

       Pluto was also found in 1930 when searching for gravitational tugs on Neptune, though the gravity calculations were for something larger. 

       How could an 80,000-mile-wide object, 10-times the size of Earth, be so so far away from the Sun? 

       Astronomers have worked supercomputers overtime to determine that the early Solar System was filled with hundreds of large objects crashing into each other, some getting larger, some getting flung deeper into space.  One giant impact severed the Moon from the Earth in that first 500 million years of our 5-billion-year lifetime of the Solar System.

       Assuming the math is correct and there is giant Planet 9 out there, how will we find it? The “geek squad” has several earth-based telescopes looking for it, and the prediction is within 5 years Planet 9 will be found.

       Give time some time and we may just have a new member of our Solar System. And that will create a wave of excitement for all of us.