It ’s understandably difficult to try and prognosticate what a planet ’s made of when you ca n’t even be sure it ’s there . That ’s the confounding challenge facing astronomers right now when it comes to the hypotheticalPlanet Nine , perhaps the Modern member of our Solar System ; nevertheless , a squad from the University of Bern in Switzerland have sacrifice it their good injection .
As revealed in their study , write in the journalAstronomy & Astrophysics , Planet Nine would be a decidedly cold , frigid billet at the surface , but peculiarly hot and rocky the further down you go . The research worker think that its core isstill cooling down , and excess heat is still escape up to the open .
“ With our field candidate Planet Nine is now more than a simple distributor point peck , ” said Christoph Mordasini , a prof of astrophysics at the University of Bern and the subject field ’s cobalt - source , in astatement . “ It takes shape , [ it has ] physical holding . "
The potential ice giant , which could even be an exoplanet captured by our Sun in an act ofcelestial - scale kleptomania , was first proposed in January by Caltech Astronomer Mike “ Pluto killer ” Brown and his colleagues . By track the foreign movements of object in the distant Kuiper Belt , a immense area of comet far beyond Pluto , Brown reason out that something must beperturbing their pathsthrough the cosmos .
This could only be due to an object with a mass of 10 dry land , orb the Sun on an ovoid path , at a length of 200 to 700 clock time the Earth - Sun space . For this new field , the research worker submit this orbital and mass data and extend computing machine simulations designed to explain the evolution and composition of this mysterious , remote world .
An artist ’s belief of Planet Nine . Neptune ’s compass is shown as a small oval around the Sun , top right . Tomruen , nagualdesign / Wikimedia Commons ; CC BY - SA 4.0
The most likely pretending , according to the study , pointed to a planet like Uranus or Neptune , but not quite as massive .
If you slice through this frigid earth , you ’d cut first through an atmosphere of hydrogen and atomic number 2 , before get to a far thicker gas pedal level made of the same elements . At this point , it ’s literally freezing , with open temperatures clocking in at -226 ° C ( -375 ° F ) . That ’s just 47 degrees above sheer zero , the frigid possible temperature in the universe .
Next arrive a water methamphetamine level at a toasty temperature of 1,827 ° C ( 3,320 ° atomic number 9 ) . It may seem at odds that water methamphetamine hydrochloride could be so red-hot , but the gaseous air – or “ gasbag ” – on Planet Nine is likely to be around 1.4 meter the peck of the Earth . This would maintain an tremendous pressure on the water ice beneath it , which would allow it to keep on its solid icing physique .
Just below the ice lies a mantle region composed of silicates , more or less similar to that of several other rocky planets , let in our own . Beneath the pallium consist the substance , thought to be iron – again , just like our own – at a temperature of around 3,427 ° vitamin C ( 6,200 ° F ) . Overall , the solid part of the planet come in at around 8.6 Earth heap , mean that the entire creation is about 10 Earth mass , with a radius 3.7 time greater than our own world ’s .
Planet Nine , then , is Neptune - like in its upper layers and Earth - the like in its deeper layer . “ In its whole appearance , I would rather say it is a smaller reading of Uranus and Neptune , ” Esther Linder , a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Bern and co - author of the written report , secernate IFLScience .
Of naturally , only sentence will narrate if this estranged planetary first cousin is in reality there at all .
