What Did We Find? Strange Discovery Beyond Pluto

 

There's a common misconception that our solar system's boundary lies not so far behind the orbit of Pluto some people also mistake the Kuiper belt the icy ring of small astronomical bodies as the edge of our solar system But the truth is that our solar system extends millions of miles beyond Pluto and the Kuiper belt it is also home to strange and uncanny but fascinating objects that hold many secrets of the universe welcome to Science Reads and today let's take a look at all the mysterious discoveries we have made beyond Pluto in our solar system Secret Sibling of Earth beyond eight planets of our solar system lies the Kuiper belt which is the home of dwarf planets like Pluto and Eris but often astrophysicists have had suspicions that Neptune is not the farthest planet in our solar system but don't be hyped Pluto is not becoming a planet again the theoretical Planet X often called Planet Nine or Nibiru is alleged to be a secret member of our solar system it is hypothesized that this ninth planet is orbiting the sun so far in the shadow that we have not been able to discover it yet interestingly a lot of evidence has popped up in recent years strengthening the possibility of our son's family being a little bigger than we know in 2016 mark brown a member of the scientist team at California Institute of Technology suggested that a planet 10 times the mass of earth is wandering in the outer edges of our solar system according to nasa Cal tech researchers

 mathematical evidence suggests that

 planet nine is twenty times farther from the Sun than Neptune if true then planet nine will need somewhere between ten thousand to twenty thousand earth years to make one full orbit around the sun the glaring evidence in support of the ninth planet is the mysterious source of gravity that exists beyond Neptune in our solar system this gravity is perhaps the reason why the plane in which the other planets orbit is tilted about 6 degrees away from the sun's equator if planet 9 exists and is as big as we have estimated then it will explain why the entire solar system wobbles away from the center it will also explain why numerous objects in the Kuiper belt orbit in the opposite direction of everything else in our solar system based on the behavior of these distant objects the astronomers believe the planet to be a super-earth a massive rocky planet that is extremely common in the universe but which our solar system oddly lacks the planet could have coalesced out in the cold reaches of our system over millions of years formed close to the sun and then been flung outward or even been captured by a star from another system still there is a question facing all these possibilities if the ninth planet exists why haven't we found it yet The Snowman in Kuiper Belt there are millions of miles between Earth and Pluto and billions more to reach the edge of the solar system only three of our spacecraft have been able to travel this far and explore so there's still much to discover what lies on the outskirts of our little solar neighborhood and by the looks of what Voyager 1 Voyager 2 and the New Horizon space missions have revealed expectations are getting wilder and wilder about how bizarre our wonderful system is one of the most peculiar objects New Horizons found in the Kuiper belt was a cosmic snowman Arakoth named after the native American

 term meaning sky in the Pawaton language

 is a cosmic object that has the strangest shape that we have encountered in the solar system 4.1 billion miles away from earth Arakoth is among many icy and not so big objects that form the Kuiper belt what makes Arakoth unique is that it is not one object but a product of two Kuiper belt objects or kbo's merging together to form a particular shape that resembles a flattened snowman moreover Aracoth is also quite red redder than Pluto's poles which adds more flare to its peculiarity scientists are hoping to study this fascinating kbo more in the future to discover its secrets and help understand the formation of our solar system better

 et spaceship or space cucumber recent human history is full of testimonies claiming to witness unearthly spaceships in the sky

 being abducted by them and even some have claimed to create relationships with the

 extraterrestrials however such testimonies always fail to provide conclusive evidence of our planet being visited by interstellar beings but these claims do keep the excitement of finding life elsewhere in the universe alive so when the pen star's telescope at Haleakala observatory Hawaii discovered a spaceship-like object entering our solar system on October 19 2017 the hype was real Astronomer Dr. Robert work spotted an extremely elongated object whizzing through the solar system about a kilometer in length and about 167 meters wide the cucumber-shaped object was moving at an incredible speed seemingly unaffected by the sun's gravitational pull it was named Oumuamua which means scouts in Hawaiian early studies have discerned that it must have entered our solar system in the victorian era but it is still hard to tell where it must have originated and how long it has been venturing into deep space before it reached our solar system in august 2018 a study using data from the European Space Agency's Gaia telescope identified four stars that Oumuamua would have passed in the last one to seven million years perhaps one of these was its home star professor Avi Loeb at Harvard university was among the first to suggest that Oumuamua could be an extraterrestrial probe because of how little its trajectory was affected by the sun He proposed that if it had a solar sail attached pressure from the solar wind could be helping to blow it off course But don't worry you don't need to start prepping for an interstellar assault by space invaders as most of professor Loeb's colleagues don't agree with him In fact the hypothesis of Oumuamua being an interstellar spaceship has been heavily criticized as evidence indicates that the object is more likely to be entirely natural in built Dr Colin Snodgrass an astronomer at The Open University has pointed out that little jets of gas caused when the comet's ice is warmed by the sun could be nudging it off its natural gravitational course however Snodgrass doesn't deny the fact that Oumuamua does have some unusual properties that are not found in the comets that are from our solar system and disturbingly scientists haven't been able to distinguish the reason behind such a peculiar phenomenon and they would never be able to do so anymore Oumuamua has already made its way back to the deep outer solar system and given its trajectory it seems like the conspicuous object has no desire to make a u-turn in a few years it will exit our neighborhood forever do you think we avoided a space invasion or we missed an opportunity to study one of the most mysterious natural objects in space strangest dwarf planet a couple of years before Pluto was demoted to the status of a dwarf planet mike brown who is now known for his hunt of planet x found something quite interesting not so far from Pluto in fact this discovery was so impactful that it caused the chain of events that tipped the scales of the judgment against Pluto when it was tried for its status as a planet what mike brown discovered was an object as big as Pluto but its exceptional shape caused the stir if it could be considered a planet or not nicknamed Santa back then and later named Haumea for Hawaiian goddess of fertility it is shaped like an American football or a big squashed cigar like Pluto this object also has moons revolving around them like Haumea its moons Hi’iaka and Namaka are also oddly shaped and are eerily small to have a planet satellite relationship with Haumea moreover crazily enough haumea also has a ring around it and shares the orbit with Hi’iaka unlike most objects in the kuiper belt Haumea is not an equal mixture of ice and rock but likely has a thin water ice crust covering a rocky interior it is one of the densest kuiper belt objects with a density of 1.885 grams per cubic centimeter the reason for Haumea's odd shape is that the object is spinning so fast that it has been stretched into the shape of an ellipsoid of course because of Haumea's spinning so fast the days of Haumea are quite short want to catch the sunrise you're in luck as you can catch the sunrise every four hours Haumea though once thought unique is not the only object with such amazing features anymore in the kuiper belt many kuiper belt objects have moons some with peculiar shapes and many which defy all sense and logic so do you think our solar system has more wild things yet to discover what should we cover in our next article do tell us in the comments and don't forget to smash that like button  you