Starts With A Bang podcast #106 — the troublesome hunt for Planet Nine
Out beyond Neptune are some fascinating bodies left over from our Solar System’s formation. Could one of them truly be spectacular?
One of the most swiftly forgotten revolutions in all of science is our understanding of the Solar System out beyond Neptune. Although Pluto was discovered nearly a full century ago, it wasn’t until the early 1990s that we even discovered the next object beyond Neptune that wasn’t also part of the Plutonian system. And yet, in the 30 short years that have passed since then, we’ve learned so much more about the structure of the Kuiper belt and beyond, but we also face tremendous challenges in the quest to learn more thanks to an unwelcome intruder: the rise of satellite megaconstellations.
Although the original team of Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin continue to advocate for a novel, massive, undiscovered world located at hundreds of times the Earth-Sun distance, they’re largely alone, as other scientists have weighed in…
