A Self-Portrait of Opportunity
I want you to stop and think about something. This is a picture of another planet. Where this robot is. Right now.
As we sit here on Earth in this or any moment, we each have in our heads a flurry of worries and questions and ideas. And most of them pertain to our own lives. That’s okay, it’s human nature. We are each the center of our own universe.
I often think about this in crowded places, like while in traffic, as the place I’m going is far more important than the place all of these other people are going. I’m convinced that they feel the same way. And so we sit.
But that means that there are seven billion mental universes walking around on this planet. We are staring into them through little digital windows that we carry in our hands, and certain that this decision is the most important decision. Everything that is happening is happening to us.
Yet for the past eight years, there has been a dusty, six-wheeled rover crawling around the surface of Mars, completely alone. Incidentally, that rover has exceeded its expected mission of 90 days by thirty-two times over. That’s admirable, and I can’t help but personify the little guy. Like a sort of scrappy, diligent explorer, quietly working hard for the benefit of someone else. “No complaints, boss!” Like Johnny 5 meets Wall-E.
And so we get images like this, reminding us that every day we can look beyond our personal universe. What a thought! Look at how much is out there. Think of what else we could see! Let’s go.
![ikenbot:
Planet X? New Evidence of an Unseen Planet at Solar System’s Edge
Image: This artist’s conception illustrates a giant planet floating freely without a parent star. Astronomers recently uncovered evidence for such lone worlds, thought to have been booted from developing star systems. The sun may have captured such a planet, which new work shows may reside at the edge of the solar system. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Warning: Approach Article With Skepticism
A planet four times the size of Earth may be skirting the edges of the solar system beyond Pluto, according to new research. Too distant to be easily spotted by Earth-based telescopes, the unseen planet could be gravitationally tugging on small icy objects past Neptune, helping explain the mystery of those objects’ peculiar orbits.
The claim comes from Rodney Gomes, a noted astronomer at the National Observatory of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro. Gomes presented his recently completed computer models suggesting the existence of the distant planet at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Timberline Lodge, Ore., earlier this month.
Astronomers who attended the talk find Gomes’ arguments compelling, but they say much more evidence is needed before the hypothetical planet can be crowned as real.
For several years, astronomers have observed that a handful of the small icy bodies that lie in the so-called “scattered disc” beyond the orbit of the planet Neptune, including the dwarf planet Sedna, deviate from the paths around the sun that would be expected based on the gravitational pulls of all the known objects in the solar system.
Sedna, for example, swings around the sun in an extremely elongated orbit — tracing out a very long oval. “Sedna’s orbit is truly peculiar,” said Mike Brown, an astronomer at Caltech who led the team that discovered Sedna in 2003.
However, when Gomes ran the same calculations with the addition of the gravitational pull of a massive planet at the outskirts of the solar system, Sedna and the other anomalous objects’ expected orbits fell in line with observations. The unseen planet would be too far away to perceptibly perturb the motions of Earth and the other inner planets, but close enough to the scattered disc objects to sway them.
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