Wunderdog14 Jun 2025

Terry Phan & Tomo Goto: Planet nine - finally detected?

"Extreme trans-Neptunian Objects" - or chunks of rock that orbit the sun on average 250 times further away from the sun than Earth does - are moving in strange ways. They seem to be clustered somewhat, and Brown / Batygin suggested in 2016 that an explanation could be a hidden ninth planet in our solar system, around 5-10 earth masses.

Terry Long Phan, astronomy graduate student at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, has led a study to look for this extremely far away planet in a new way: Using the infrared spectrum.

Terry compared 1983 data from the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) with 2006 data from Japan’s AKARI mission - and found a single object that has potential.

Barring Pluto (found 1930 and disqualified in 2006) the last time anyone found a new planet in our solar system was when Urbain Le Verrier and Johann Gottfried Galle found Neptune in 1846.

So if Terry has found a proper planet - this could be a big moment.

But is it true? In September Phan and Goto will make a third observation to verify the finding, and until then, this podcast gives you the details on how they looked for planet nine, what they found, and what they will look for in September.

You can read more about Terry Phan's paper here,
https://www.astronomy.com/science/have-astronomers-found-planet-nine/

or see the original paper here:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.17288

Wunderdog is sponsored by my patrons at patreon.com/runde, and the music is from Trop1ce aka Charky.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(20)

Robert Revell: Composing for film, craft vs creativity

Robert Revell’s grandfather was a poet who fled Mao’s China - and Robert tells the story of how he went back to find his family’s house, still untouched after fifty years. Robert is a film and TV co...

19 Jul 202551min

Noland Arbaugh, world's first Neuralink human: a pinky in the brain

Noland is an affable Arizonian with an advanced piece of tech in his skull: A Neuralink. With it, Noland can see his own brainwaves and control his computer ... somewhat. Often his powers are not very...

29 Jul 202456min

Astrobiologist Maya D. Yanez: Could acetylene fermentation be an energy source for microbes on Titan?

NASA JPL intern Maya D. Yanez has recently defended her Ph.D. on acetylenotrophy. This is the ability to extract energy from acetylene, and only a few species of bacteria (that we know of here on Eart...

14 Jul 20242h 46min

Vinay Gupta: We must not let the climate refugee situation turn into a global Gaza

Blockchain is a mystery to me, so I don't usually talk about blockchain projects. But Vinay Gupta is awesome. He thinks about climate refugees ALL THE TIME, and many of his projects, from the current ...

6 Jul 20242h 41min

Kevin Fischer, founder and CEO of OpenSouls: Giving AI souls

Note my NEW FORMAT: 10 minutes of quick questions first, then a deeper talk about ideas, motivation and process after. "I don't think it really matters if our profound connection happens with a digi...

27 Mai 202453min

Neil DeGrasse Tyson: "If noone in society is thinking that way, however realistic or unrealistic it is, then ... we're not going anywhere ever."

At 3 in the night at Starmus 2017 I finally managed to get ten minutes with astrophysicist, science communicator, director of the Hayden Planetarium. At it's purest, Wunderdog digs into one or two top...

26 Mar 202413min

Norwegian episode: Ingvild Bræin og ai-trøbbel for barnebokkritikk.no

Ein kommentar på nettsida www.barnebokkritikk.no vart illustrert med bilete genererte av Microsoft Ai Copilot. Eit bortimot samla korps av norske illustratørar og teikneserieskaparar hoppa inn på Barn...

26 Mar 202452min