Sunday 24 April 2011

solar system - Could the trajectories of non-periodic comets be used to infer properties of the 'ninth planet'?

Non-periodic comets are comets which have very long orbital periods (>200 years or more), spending most of their time in the outer solar system.



Planet X, recently revived by researchers at Caltech, is a proposed planet orbiting in the farthest reaches of the outer solar system. The Caltech researchers infer its presence from to its effect on the orbits of Kuiper belt objects.



If such a planet exists, and is the cause of the Kuiper belt object alignments, could it not also knock such objects in to the inner solar system, creating non-periodic comets with huge aphelion orbital distances? Could our current observations of non-periodic comets be used to infer properties of the planet?

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