Astronomer, planet hunter, Pluto killer, bear whisperer, finger-wrapped dad. Dangerous secularist. Striving to be antiracist and antisexist.
May 4, 2020 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
Last Saturday, at 12:02pm, I found what looked an awful lot like Planet Nine (spoiler: it wasn't). It was in the data in the right places at the right brightness moving in the right directions. The data in that part of the sky were generally pretty good. My breathing slowed...
I fit the data to an orbit; the orbit as good and made sense for how we think P9 is affecting the outer solar system. My mind starting racing to "what do I do now?". My daughter was the only person home. She was going to be the second human to know (then I'd call @kbatygin )
Mar 17, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
High school/college science teachers/students: check out the online Science of the Solar System. It is 100% free and a top rated online science class. The Coursera class starts March 30th and is organized weekly. I'm spending today pulling the content out of Coursera... (1/)
to make it easier for people who want to organize their own versions. It includes things like problem sets and exams (not posting those publicly; access TBD) and additional resources (free!) for reading etc. (2/)
Jun 7, 2019 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
It's now been a year since the Zwicky Transient Facility has been operating at Palomar Observatory. So it is time to answer the question everyone should have been (but no one was? maybe?) asking. Is Planet Nine in the public ZTF archive already?
ztf.caltech.edu/news/public-da…
The answer SHOULD be "probably not." ZTF runs on the relatively small 48-inch Schmidt telescope at Palomar (discoverer of Eris, Makemake, Gonggong, Sedna, and more), so unless P9 is brighter than anticipated it shouldn't show up there.
Jan 21, 2019 • 19 tweets • 8 min read
1/ Clustering in the outer solar system. A thread, which is really a discussion of tinyurl.com/p9cluster
Three years ago @kbatygin and I proposed the existence of Planet Nine because we noticed two strange things about the most distant objects in the solar system.
@kbatygin 2/
First, Kuiper belt objects with distant, very eccentric orbits are predominantly aligned in one direction. They should be more or less randomly oriented in space. Something has to cause that.
Second, the orbits of these bodies are mainly tilted in one direction. Also odd.
Dec 10, 2018 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Final night (of 7!) at the @SubaruTelescope . Once again a spectacular looking one. I haven't had 7 nights of good data in a row since, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, ever? My feeling is that *if* we are going to find Planet Nine with Subaru these are the data in which we will find it.
This week's data covers something like the ~85% confidence region of where we think Planet Nine is (except for the region of the Milky Way galaxy, which we'll talk about later).
