Two days ago we built a planetary system with an Earth that has five Suns in the sky. It looks like this: Yesterday we explored the motions of the heavens on this 5-Sun Earth: how the Suns move across the sky and when night falls (not too often, it turns out). Today we are going…
In yesterday’s post we built a planetary system with an Earth that has five Suns in the sky. Here is what it looks like: Today we are going to pretend that we are inhabitants of this five-Sun Earth and look up at the sky. How do the Suns move across the sky? And, with all…
We Earthlings have just one Sun. Tatooine has two. Wouldn’t it be even cooler with three Suns in the sky? Or four or five or twenty? Several extra-solar planets have been found in triple- and even quadruple-star systems (for example, GJ 667C and PH1b). But none of these planets has more than two Suns because…
It is hard to know where things come from. If I drink a Belgian-style beer brewed in Colorado using hops from Washington state and I live in France, where did the beer actually come from? And what does that mean anyway? The cosmic situation is just as confusing. We know where the planets are right…
We are discussing the origins of Planet Nine. In part 1 we explored whether it could have been produced during an orbital instability in the early Solar System. In part 2 we showed that Planet Nine could have been captured from another star. Here we will explore another plausible idea that is a little less…
We are discussing the origins of Planet Nine. In part 1 we explored whether it could have been produced during an orbital instability in the early Solar System. Here we will explore a much more exotic origin. Scenario 2. Planet Nine is a planet that formed around another star and was captured by the Sun…
It’s official: there might be an extra planet in the Solar System. It’s called Planet Nine. Like Hansel, it’s so hot right now. To find it you must trek past Uranus and Neptune into the dark reaches of the Solar System. It’s on an orbit hundreds of times larger than Earth’s, that takes 20,000 years…
