Apparently a hacker helped expose the discovery of a potential 10th planet in our solar system. According to a press release from the California Institute of Technology, Mike Brown, a planetary scientist there, announced that a " planet larger than Pluto has been discovered in the outlying regions of the solar system with the Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory." From the press release:
The planet is a typical member of the Kuiper belt, but its sheer size in relation to the nine planets already known means that it can only be classified as a planet, Brown says. Currently about 97 astronomical units from the sun (an astronomical unit is the distance between the sun and Earth), the planet becomes the farthest-known object in the solar system, and the third brightest of the Kuiper belt objects.
"It will be visible over the next six months and is currently almost directly overhead in the early-morning eastern sky, in the constellation Cetus," says Brown, who made the discovery with colleagues Chad Trujillo, of the Gemini Observatory, and David Rabinowitz, of Yale University, on January 8.
Brown and Trujillo first photographed the new planet with the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope on October 31, 2003. However, the object was so far away that its motion was not detected until they reanalyzed the data in January of this year. In the last seven months, the scientists have been studying the planet to better estimate its size and its motions.
Some wonder why the scientists "witheld" the information for more than two years, but I’m not the least bit surprised. In order to maintain credibility in the scientific fields, one must not only publish information first, but one must also ensure the accuracy and certainty of the information. Brown, Trujillo and Rabinowitz were just doing what would be expected of a scientist before announcing their discovery. It’s a shame that their announcement had to be rushed on account of compromised security on a website.
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