On Wednesday, March 26, researchers announced they had discovered a dwarf planet orbiting the sun in a distant, largely unexplored region known as the inner Oort Cloud. For more than a century, astronomers have considered the possibility that another massive body exists in the outer solar system.Percival Lowell coined the term Planet X at the turn of the 20th century to refer to an undiscovered large planet that could be responsible for perturbing the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. More recently, the idea grew to incorporate a possible dwarf-star companion to the sun, nicknamed Nemesis. In the 1980s, scientists suggested that a solar companion could be responsible for causing mass extinctions on Earth every 26 million years. They theorized that a small, dim star or a large brown dwarf -a body larger than a planet but too small to ignite the fusion reactions that power stars -could periodically pass through the Oort Cloud, the faraway comet repository that surrounds the solar system. I think people are amazed by the fact that we can detect galaxies billions of light-years away, and yet there are parts of our own solar system that remain uncharted and unexplored,
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 17:35:26 +0000
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