This is an old article. It references the Batygin and Brown paper from 2016. As of 2024, it is still considered possible, but no direct evidence has been observed, and alternative explanations have been proposed, according to Wikipedia.
Things are looking pretty grim for planet nine, it’s running out of places to hide. It was a cool hypothesis and a gutsy prediction, but I’m afraid that it’s not going to work out.
Won’t the Vera Rubin Telescope (formerly LSST) settle this? It’s going to observe the entire night sky every few nights and provide enough data to find nearby moving objects.
This paper seems to be dated 18 April, 2024. Wouldn’t surprise me if its some sort of re-print, but otherwise would explain why this topic popped up in the media over the last few days. arxiv.org/pdf/2404.11594.pdf
Is this the one they’ve decided exists and then narrow down the parameters as what it must look like every time a survey rules out another patch of sky?
In this case, the carbon and oxygen are coming from a much more mundane source: the solar wind.
When high-energy particles from the solar wind collide with molecules in Venus’ upper atmosphere, they carry enough energy to break some of those molecules into their constituent atoms. Since the Venusian atmosphere is almost entirely CO2, you should expect this process to generate C and O ions — which is exactly what we’ve now observed!
If life is proven to exist on Venus, it would be really exciting. Besides the obvious reason to be excited there’s also my thought: If in this planetary system two planets out of 98 have life on them, then that would mean that life isn’t as rare as we conceived it to be.
Edit: Had the tab open for a while without refreshing before posting, so I didn’t see the comment that says it’s just solar wind. :(
The new flexible polymer and carbon composite boom is coupled with a twelve-unit (12U) CubeSat built by NanoAvionics. After the mission launches atop a Rocket Lab Electron rocket from the company’s Launch Complex 1 in Māhia, New Zealand, the spacecraft will go into a Sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of about 600 miles (~1,000 km) and the sail will deploy in about 25 minutes to cover an area of 860 ft² (80 m²) with the boom unfolding from the size of a hand to 23 ft (7 m) long. Once deployed, the sail will adjust the vehicle’s orbit by angling itself in relation to the solar wind.
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