Astronomy Cast

Ep. 159: Planet X

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Artist's illustration of the dwarf planet Eris. Image credit: NASA

Artist’s illustration of the dwarf planet Eris. Image credit: NASA

Astronomers have been searching for the mysterious Planet X for hundreds of years. It was the search for a theoretical planet beyond Uranus that turned up Neptune, and then again for Pluto. And even now there are some astronomers who think there’s a more distant planet out there. Oh, and there are a bunch of pseudoscience cranks trying to freak people out about the end of the world. Don’t worry, we’ll make time for them too, but first let’s start with some real science.

Transcript

Speaker 1 [00:00:00] I don’t know about you, but these days it feels like the world, and our lives, are moving at hyper speed. The all -new Nissan Murano is an unapologetic refuge amidst the hustle and bustle. In the Nissan Murano, you can take a beat, catch your breath, and re -energize. With its elevated modern interior and bold new exterior, this vehicle stands out. Its massaging leather -appointed seats melt away the tension of a busy day, adds to that feeling of refuge. Optional features like panoramic moonroof that adds tons of natural light to its roomy cabin, and ambient lighting sets the right vibe. So crucial in dreary winter days, the Bose Premium Sound System helps you escape further into your favorite music. The Nissan Murano and all its features gives you the greatest rush, while not feeling like you’re rushing at all. Find your moment of calm in the all -new Nissan Murano. Drive the all -new 2025 Nissan Murano today. Features listed are available upgrades. Every day, our world gets a little more connected, but a little further apart. 

Speaker 4 [00:01:09] But then, there are moments that remind us to be more human. 

Speaker 2 [00:01:15] Thank you for calling Amica Insurance. Hey, uh, I was just in an accident. Don’t worry, we’ll get you taken care of. 

Speaker 4 [00:01:21] At Amica, we understand that looking out for each other isn’t new or groundbreaking. 

Speaker 1 [00:01:27] It’s human. 

Speaker 4 [00:01:28] Amica, empathy is our best policy. 

Speaker 2 [00:01:32] This episode of Astronomy Cast is brought to you by Swinburne Astronomy Online, the world’s longest running online astronomy degree program. Visit astronomy .swin .edu .au for more information. 

Speaker 3 [00:01:49] Astronomy Cast, episode 159 for Monday, October 12th, 2009. 

Speaker 4 [00:01:56] Planet X. 

Fraser Cain [00:01:58] Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts -based journey through the cosmos where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. My name is Fraser Cain, I’m the publisher of Universe Today, and with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a professor at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. 

Fraser Cain [00:02:14] Hello, Pamela. 

Pamela Gay [00:02:15] Hey, Fraser, how’s it going? 

Fraser Cain [00:02:17] Planet X. 

Pamela Gay [00:02:18] This is so appropriate. 

Fraser Cain [00:02:21] You need to have an evil laugh after you say it. 

Pamela Gay [00:02:24] We’re approaching Halloween as we record. 

Fraser Cain [00:02:25] I know. 

Pamela Gay [00:02:27] Yeah, exactly. 

Speaker 1 [00:02:29] Spooky Planet X. 

Pamela Gay [00:02:31] Well, astronomers have been searching for the mysterious Planet X for hundreds of years. It was the search for a theoretical planet beyond Uranus that turned up Neptune, and then again for Pluto, and now there are even some astronomers who think that there’s a more distant planet out there, maybe the brown dwarf. Also a bunch of pseudoscience cranks trying to freak people out about the end of the world, but don’t worry, we’ll make time for them too. But first let’s get on with some real science. All right, so Planet X is kind of like just this placeholder. It’s like, you know, it’s the next planet we intend to discover but haven’t discovered yet, and we have some ideas on where we think it is. So where did that concept, the placeholder planet, first come from? 

Fraser Cain [00:03:11] Well, as it turns out, it comes out from our inability to make accurate measurements. When we first looked at Uranus, we went, ah, its orbit does strange things. And we went and we found Neptune. And then we looked at Neptune’s orbit and we went, hmm, it also does strange things. But the strange things Neptune was doing was actually just observational error. Make better observations, figure out where Neptune is located more accurately, and Neptune has a perfectly reasonable happy orbit. But there continues to be this, hmm, its orbit is not what it should be. There must be another planet out there, myth going around because ideas never die. Right. So this is why we still get email every year saying Mars will be bigger than the Moon, and it’s why for, well, 100 years people have continued to look for a planet beyond Neptune. 

Pamela Gay [00:04:00] So let’s tell the story then about the discovery of Neptune and how, because astronomers had originally calculated where they thought Neptune was going to be, right? Yes. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:13] And that’s actually one of the more confusing stories in the history of astronomy because there was a British mathematician, John Adams, who looked at all the data we had on the then known planets and started throwing out, well, I think Neptune should be located in this place in the sky. No, not there. I think Neptune should be located in this place in the sky. No, still not there. And then independent of that, Urban Lee Verrier, who, it’s a French name, I think I pronounced that correctly, he was also working on making his own set of suggestions of where one should observe to attempt to find this object. And so he urged the Berlin Observatory astronomer Johann Gottfried Geli to use his observatory to go look in a section of the sky and see if he could find something that was moving. And sure enough, they went, they looked, and they compared what they saw with a recently drawn chart of the sky, and they found the object in Le Verrier’s predicted location. Now, the thing was, Adam, of course, also claimed to have had predictions for about the same area on the sky. So there’s controversy on who do we give the credit to. And so in a lot of different places, you’ll end up seeing credit given jointly to Le Verrier, to Adams, to Geli. What’s interesting is I’ve heard rumors that in the collection of documents that the breakfast astronomer O .J. Eggens had, literally this is the poor guy’s honest name, O .J. Eggens, when he passed away, he had a collection of documents, including letters written by people at the time of the discovery, documenting the discovery. And there’s a lot of people waiting to see if the truth changes as those documents start to get revealed. But that’s all rumors and conjecture, but quite cool. 

Pamela Gay [00:06:20] But it was, you know, it was France versus England at a time when France and England were not the best of friends. And so both countries had claimed to discover Neptune. But I think that in this case, the thinking was pretty sound. You know, they took into account the orbit of Uranus. They were able to calculate where they thought Neptune would be. And they found a planet in roughly that region, which is, you know, kudos to them. 

Fraser Cain [00:06:51] Right. It was only one degree off in the sky of where it was predicted to be. That’s two moon diameters across the sky. That’s nothing. 

Pamela Gay [00:06:59] So that could be, you know, a fairly accurate prediction, or it could be complete and total blind luck. You know, we’ll never know. But, you know, both of them made independent predictions based on the orbit. So, you know, so they did it again with Pluto. 

Fraser Cain [00:07:13] Right. Now, Pluto’s story was a bit more complicated. We had Percival Lowell, initials PL, suggesting that there’s another planet out there. Let’s go look for it. Now, he was very much a rich, aristocratic, amateur astronomer out there doing his best to facilitate real scientists doing real work. He paid to get Lowell Observatory out in Flagstaff, Arizona, set up, had some of the nicest telescopes around for doing this sort of work. He had Klein -Thomberg working for him, going out and pouring through the sky, trying to find this missing object. 

Pamela Gay [00:07:59] But it’s the same deal, right? They said, you know, here’s the orbit of Neptune. Here’s the orbit of Uranus. So Planet X should be in this region of the sky, right? Clyde, go search for it. Right. Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:08:13] Now, the thing is that this wasn’t a go out and compare to sketches and go, ah, I found a planet, which is not quite but very close to what happened with finding Neptune. Instead, it was go out, spend a year desperately searching along the ecliptic, desperately searching along the ecliptic, until you happen to find something almost a year later that moves. And they were looking for a big old object. They were looking for another giant gassy or ice planet hanging out on the outer part of our solar system. And instead, they found something that did a good imitation of a very faint star, didn’t appear to have a disk, just this little tiny thing that caused a lot of head scratching from the moment it was discovered. 

Unidentified [00:09:06] Right. 

Pamela Gay [00:09:06] So they just went section by section of the ecliptic, just, you know, is there an object there? Is an object there? So the prediction, they didn’t really use the prediction. They just were very thorough. 

Fraser Cain [00:09:21] And it was the most horrible technology in some ways. They were using a blink comparison method. This is where you take two glass plates, you put them both about half a meter away from your eyes, and you look through these glasses that allow you to switch which eye you’re using, the left or the right eye. And if you have everything aligned correctly, it allows you to essentially go back and forth between seeing the two different images, and you can, because of the way your brain fills in information, fill in where anything moves. And these blink comparators, they hurt in a lot of ways to use. And so he poured over glass plate after glass plate set, two at a time, night after night after night, taking them night after night, and Flagstaff is not pleasant in the winter, and eventually found this little tiny, tiny thing moving. And that was Pluto. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:18] Planet X. 

Pamela Gay [00:10:20] Planet X. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:20] But it wasn’t big enough to account for the so -called disparities between what they thought Neptune’s orbit should be and what they thought they were observing. Turns out there was just observational error, and it’s one of the saddest stories in history in some ways. 

Pamela Gay [00:10:38] Right, so they thought that there was some big object yanking on Neptune, pulling it out of its proper orbit, and therefore there was still something big out there. And as they got more and more information on Pluto, they realized that it just was a very highly reflective object, but actually quite tiny, smaller than Mercury, smaller than many of the moons in the solar system. 

Fraser Cain [00:11:06] And as we’ve continued to look, specifically as Mike Brown has continued to look, and his collaborators, they’ve started finding other things out there, other objects that have orbits that cross the orbit of Neptune, other objects that are small and icy and faint, and they’ve found other objects that happen to be bigger than Pluto. And this is where we get to all of the chaos that actually launched our show with the Why Is Pluto No Longer a Planet episode. And that was the discovery of Eris back in 2005, which led to the International Astronomical Union deciding they needed to redefine what a planet is, because all of a sudden they had NASA saying the solar system had 10 planets, and people were kind of uncomfortable with that. 

Pamela Gay [00:11:52] Right, and obviously the problem here is that Eris is bigger than Pluto, orbits around the Sun, and so that threw the whole concept of what’s a planet and what’s not a planet into a tizzy, and astronomers had to meet and vote on what they decided was going to be a planet. And if you want more information on the story, you can listen to our first episode, and we’ve got a little bit more on our Pluto episode, but the gist being that wasn’t Planet X, and so the search for Planet X continues. 

Fraser Cain [00:12:29] And what’s cool is we’re still making new gravitational predictions. That’s one of the coolest things about this, is as you go out and you probe the Kuiper Belt, as you probe that band of icy objects that’s out starting around Neptune and continuing out into the outer regions of our solar system, you find that there’s what’s called the Kuiper Belt Cliff. It’s this place where about 50 astronomical units out, we just suddenly run out of Kuiper Belt objects. And no one’s quite sure why all of a sudden there’s no Kuiper Belt objects, and the easiest way to explain this is to put another planet out there, to put something that’s somewhere between 30 and 70 percent the mass of the Earth out, orbiting somewhere between 100 to 200 astronomical units away from the Sun. That’s why you can have a range in mass. If you move it around, you can also change the mass of the object. And by putting this smaller than the Earth object out there, you can end up causing this cliff in the distribution of Kuiper Belt objects. And so there’s a nice article out there in the Astrophysical Journal. We have links to it on our website. And it points out that there’s probably, well, not probably, there may be yet one more undiscovered planet, not a giant planet X, but just a little 30 to 70 percent the size of the Earth object, waiting to be discovered. 

Pamela Gay [00:13:58] And so, like Earth, it would be clearing out its orbit of objects, either colliding with them or gravitationally kicking them inward or outward. And I guess that might also be an explanation of some of the comets that we see coming through, some of the short period comets, right? 

Fraser Cain [00:14:17] And comets are another one of those ways that we start predicting that there just might be crazy stuff out there waiting to be determined. So we’re not entirely sure what causes all the short period comets. Irregularities and how they interact with one another, possibly this planet X. There’s lots and lots of different ideas out there on why we get random short period comets. But it’s the long period ones that are really mysterious, because they’re coming in from strange directions. They’re coming in from way far away. And there seems to be this strange every 26 million year periodicity and the rate of impacts on the planet Earth. Potentially, people aren’t entirely sure. 

Pamela Gay [00:14:58] So every 26 million years, we get more comet impacts than sort of the background average. 

Fraser Cain [00:15:10] More being one giant one. 

Pamela Gay [00:15:12] So here’s the deal. 

Fraser Cain [00:15:14] When we look through the rate of extinctions on the planet Earth, roughly every 26 million years or so, there’s a mass extinction. When you look and you can identify the causes of the mass extinction, which is really hard to do. We can’t consistently identify the triggers. We know of at least two that it looks like they were caused by either a comet or an asteroid impact. So based on that, it’s easy to say, well, we don’t generally get smacked with large objects. So this hints that maybe there’s some sort of a periodicity and stuff coming into the inner solar system. The other thing that we see is going out and studying the moon. It looks like, if you read some of the papers specifically by Richard Mueller, that we went from having a lull in the rate at which the moon was getting impacted and then all of a sudden the rate of impacting increased and then it decreased again. So then you have to try and explain that as well. And all of these phenomenas, Richard Mueller and several other astronomers, but he’s really the key name to Google, several other astronomers put forward as, well, what if our solar system had a red dwarf or a brown dwarf binary companion that was on a highly elliptical orbit that started out as a circular orbit? So for the first few eons of our planet’s existence, the bombardment rate was able to decrease just because we were gravitationally vacuuming things up and there was less stuff around to collide with us. But then we had a near miss with another star system that sent our binary star companion from a circular orbit into a highly elliptical orbit. And now, every 26 million years or so, it knocks around the Kuiper belt and the effects of that knocking around the Kuiper belt may take time to propagate through and send things in that actually hit the planet Earth. It’s an intriguing idea. And what’s cool is the science can’t look at it and say, no, this doesn’t work. So there’s room in science for this idea to still exist. And there’s predictions on what missions could find this nemesis star if it’s out there. 

Pamela Gay [00:17:36] Right, right, right. Yeah, you just mentioned, this is the nemesis theory, right? That we have a brown dwarf, red dwarf companion or some really giant planet that is causing these random fluctuations of extra comet bombardments. But there’s no evidence, I mean, there’s no observational evidence apart from, you know, this might explain additional comets. 

Fraser Cain [00:18:02] Right, and this is where the predictions of what could observe it becomes so important. The problem with the nemesis star is if it does exist, it’s going to be a faint object, something that you could probably see with binoculars but not with your eyes, that’s just faint enough that we won’t have been able to accurately measure its parallax distance, to accurately measure how far away it is by its apparent motions on the sky as the Earth orbits around the sun. And so it could be an object that we already know about, but we just don’t know enough about the object to say where it is in three -dimensional space. And it’s an object that is faint enough that we haven’t cataloged it enough times to go, oh, this sucker’s moving.

Pamela Gay [00:18:51] But weren’t there missions like the Hipparchus mission that cataloged hundreds of thousands of stars? I mean, wouldn’t they have picked up every single star in the nearby area? 

Fraser Cain [00:19:02] Only the right ones. That’s the frustration with the Hipparchus catalog, is the Hipparchus catalog is limited to only the brightest stars out there. 

Pamela Gay [00:19:10] So there isn’t a really comprehensive catalog of dim stars searching for moving stars. Anybody want a Nobel Prize? 

Fraser Cain [00:19:25] Yeah, Hipparchus only went down to about magnitude 7. So this object is posited to be between magnitude 7 and magnitude 12, so it’s just beyond what could have been done by this particular mission. 

Pamela Gay [00:19:37] And there could be all kinds of interesting objects that are at that lower magnitude. I mean, there’s going to be many multiples of the Hipparchus catalog in those dimmer areas, and you never know. It’s funny, you would think you would notice. Isn’t that kind of weird? I mean, you would think you would be like, hey, that red dwarf is moving really quickly. Has anybody noticed that? Because it would be. It would be the fastest moving star in the sky, right? And yet, you know, nobody really has the data on this. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:09] Well, the frustration is we could have the data, and no one’s just put all the pieces together yet. So once you start getting down to 7th to 12th magnitude, well, anyone who’s toured around the sky using an 8 -inch telescope or so knows, wow. 

Pamela Gay [00:20:27] It’s full of stars. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:29] Yeah, it’s lots and lots of stuff out there at those magnitudes. So you have to have not only very accurately cataloged the positions of these stars, which is something that you can start to do with USNOA -A and B, two of the United States Naval Observatory catalogs. Okay, fine, that’s a start, but that’s a start, and those aren’t long -term catalogs. So when’s the last extremely accurate fainter magnitude? Well, you have the Hubble Guide star catalog as well. But still, not enough data. So the number of stars that we have enough accurate positions on that are faint enough, there’s just not enough stars that we could have identified this little sucker moving out there. 

Pamela Gay [00:21:11] And I think that’s a bit of a misunderstanding in people’s minds. It’s very much, you know, you say, like, most of the ocean has never been explored. Right. And it’s kind of the same thing. Astronomers are looking at specific objects very often. They’ll always come back to great big spiral galaxies and watch for supernovae, or they’ll take a look at this pulsar or that nebula. But there aren’t actually a lot of really comprehensive all -sky surveys looking at everything, you know, just sweeping in everything. And I think that’s one of the big undiscovered countries in astronomy still, is to really just take these great big robotic observatories like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, make it far more precise, and take another shot and just map the whole sky. And it’s a lot harder than it sounds, and it sounds hard. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:09] And it is. And to start finding things like the Nemesis Star, you have to do it not just once, but you have to do it over and over and over again, comparing the images, hopefully with software, because there’s just not enough astronomers to do it, comparing the images, looking for the things that move. And this is where we live in a really wonderful time to be astronomers, because in the not -so -distant future, we have some really amazing telescopes coming. We have the PanStar Survey coming. We have the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope coming. And with these two survey instruments, they’re going to be out there. LSST is scary with how much science it’s going to be able to do. It’s going to be out there, I think, imaging the entire sky every three nights, or the entire visible sky for its part of the world during that time of the year. And if there’s a Nemesis out there and it’s in a fairly normal orbit, LSST will find it. If there’s more really faint, coin -propelled objects, there’s a good chance those are going to get turned up as well. 

Pamela Gay [00:23:15] Planet -killing asteroids, you name it, they’ll find it. Right. 

Fraser Cain [00:23:18] And so the primary mission of the LSST is to make sure the Earth does not get destroyed, to go out and find all the asteroids that are big enough and crossing the Earth’s orbit that they pose potential danger for us so that we can find them, find them ahead of time enough that we can divert them as necessary. But the same technique that you use to find all those asteroids, that’s the same thing that you use to find variable stars, to find supernova, to find all these transient objects out there. And it’s also the same thing that you can use by stacking the images over and over and over to start probing faintly into the universe. So we’re about to get buried in more data than the scientists of the world know what to do with. And it’s an exciting time. 

Pamela Gay [00:24:07] That’s cool. Now, there’s a few other weird things that people have been searching for that I think, you know, they didn’t call them Planet X, but like people were searching for the planet Vulcan, right? 

Speaker 5 [00:24:18] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:24:18] Yeah, that’s one of those things. Nice try. Now we know it’s not there. 

Pamela Gay [00:24:22] So what was it? What was the theory? 

Fraser Cain [00:24:24] Well, it was the… Well, why couldn’t there be a planet closer to the Sun than Mercury? It was mathematically suggested, again, by Le Verrier. He was trying to figure out Mercury’s orbit back before we knew anything about relativity. And Mercury’s close enough to the Sun and orbiting fast enough that its orbit starts to get affected by relativity. And this led to this weird anomaly in how it moved across the sky that couldn’t be understood until Einstein came along. And the idea that, well, maybe if we throw another planet in there, maybe that’ll fix it. And no, there’s nothing in there. We’ve looked and looked and looked. And we would have seen it by now. We’ve sent spacecraft in there. SOHO sees the entire inner solar system constantly. Just as we see every comet that commits suicide, we would have been able to see a planet Vulcan weaving its very overheated way around the Sun by now. 

Pamela Gay [00:25:28] Right. But the… I guess the just being that back then, they didn’t have the observatory, the instruments to be able to really detect something that would be that close in to the Sun. And, of course, the irony is that astronomers have now found all kinds of crazy objects that orbit other stars at well within the orbits of Mercury and would easily qualify as a planet Vulcan. 

Fraser Cain [00:25:52] You know, you would… 

Fraser Cain [00:25:54] Exactly. Planets can exist that close. They’re just not causing our planet Mercury’s procession 

Pamela Gay [00:25:58] to do weird things. Right, right, right. That’s relativity. So, okay, well, then I think we’ve run out of science. 

Fraser Cain [00:26:08] There is no Vulcan. There might be one more planet smaller than the Earth that’s an honest -to -God planet out there. 

Pamela Gay [00:26:15] And it could be a nemesis red dwarf star or brown dwarf star out there. Now, there is a pseudo -scientific theory going on about something called Nibiru. It’s even pronounced Nibiru, yeah. Nibiru, anyway. So what’s that? 

Fraser Cain [00:26:35] It’s this so -called planet that’s on a highly elliptical orbit that depending on what pseudo -science website you read is going to come into the inner solar system and destroy us all in roughly December of 2012. 

Pamela Gay [00:26:50] Right, and the evidence for this is I… The theory originally came from Stitchin, right, who wrote about it quite a while ago. But the evidence is, you know, that people have been contacted by aliens and have told them that this is going to happen, and they’ve predicted it several times. It was supposed to… The last time we dealt with this in the universe today was 2003. Right. And that Nibiru was going to sweep past the Earth in 2003 and flip the planet over 

Fraser Cain [00:27:26] and cause a pull shift and… 

Fraser Cain [00:27:31] And some of the silliest things that come out of this is some of the theories are based on a Sumerian carving that depicts 11 objects in the sky, and the Sumerians considered the sun and the moon planets. And so they sort of went, okay, sun, moon, we’re not counting the Earth, so that means we have Mercury, Venus, not Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. There must be something out there. Pluto, there must be something beyond that. And they named it Nibiru. And no, that doesn’t work, because the Sumerians didn’t know about anything beyond Jupiter. So it’s a pretty picture. It was a pretty picture that needed to have 11 shining objects in the sky. Sometimes people take artistic license. Don’t cause planetary destruction theories to emerge from artistic license. 

Pamela Gay [00:28:30] And unfortunately now this has gotten sucked up into this 2012 madness as well. So now this is like another reason why people think the world is going to come to end in 2012. They’re taking the same idea that we’re going to hit in 2003, and then they kept changing the date, and now, you know, 2012. And so just to sort of set the record straight, so imagine there was an object that was coming towards the Earth, and it was three years out. We’d see it. How, I mean, wouldn’t that be like, you know, sort of about as far as from us to say Jupiter or Saturn? You’d expect that. 

Fraser Cain [00:29:14] And here’s the thing, as things on highly elliptical orbits come toward the inner solar system, they’re accelerating, they’re getting faster and faster, because they’re moving the fastest along their orbit that they move when they’re closest to the Sun. So we’d have this object literally basically nose diving into the solar system, and that’s the type of motion that’s really easy to pick up. And if it’s a big object, yeah, it should be out in order of where Jupiter is probably. 

Pamela Gay [00:29:43] Yeah, and so people are taking, they take these pictures of like the Sun, and then they note some object in their picture, like a digital camera, like a picture of the digital camera of the, say, sunset or the Sun, and then there’s like a little object that’s in the picture, and usually it’s just like a lens flare or, you know, reflections of the Sun inside the lens, and they say, well, see, there it is. There’s the planet. But, you know, we could easily turn the Hubble Space Telescope towards that lens flare and have a quite a big, amazing, you know, detailed picture of such an object, and it just, you know, there is no zero evidence that anything is coming towards us. 

Fraser Cain [00:30:29] And the way Michael Brown 

Fraser Cain [00:30:31] discovers 

Fraser Cain [00:30:32] Kuiper Belt objects left and right, he would have found this by now. 

Pamela Gay [00:30:36] Yeah, and that’s what he does, right? I mean, he just takes really detailed pictures of space, one after the other, searching for movements, and, you know, any object that was big enough to cause us any problem if it came nearby us would be, you know, we’d be seeing craters on its surface at this point. So it’s, it just doesn’t exist. And unfortunately, you know, people are going to forget that 2012 is going to roll through, and everything is going to still be fine, and we’ll be on to the next thing. So, but I, you know, I kind of like that there’s, that there is a constant search for a real Planet X, you know, which is a placeholder, a placeholder for the possibility of the next thing that we’re going to discover in astronomy. And I think that’s great to keep, you know, Planet X will never be discovered because it will just be, you know, 

Fraser Cain [00:31:31] renegotiated 

Pamela Gay [00:31:32] to be the next thing that we haven’t discovered yet. And so I think Planet X will always be undiscovered. All right. Well, thanks a lot, Pamela. 

Fraser Cain [00:31:40] And we’ll talk to you next time. Sounds great, Fraser. 

Pamela Gay [00:31:42] I’ll talk to you later. 

Fraser Cain [00:31:44] This has been Astronomy Cast, a weekly facts -based journey through the cosmos. Show notes and transcripts for every episode are available on our website. Check it out at astronomycast .com. You can send us any comments, questions, or feedback to info at astronomycast .com. We read every email. The show is a non -profit educational resource provided by Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay. We’re supported through the kind donations of listeners like you. If you enjoy Astronomy Cast, why not give us a donation? It helps us pay for bandwidth, transcripts, and show notes. Just click the donate link on the website. All donations are tax deductible for U .S. taxpayers. You can support the show for free, too. Write a review or recommend it to your friends. Every little bit helps. Click support the show on our website to see some suggestions. To subscribe to the show, point your podcasting software at astronomycast .com slash podcast dot xml or subscribe directly from iTunes. Music is provided by Travis Searle. The show was edited by Preston Gibson. Astronomy Cast is produced at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, with generous support from Universe Today. 

Speaker 5 [00:33:19] Breastfeeding is natural, 

Fraser Cain [00:33:20] but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. 

Speaker 5 [00:33:22] That’s where the Lactation Network comes in, a network of highly credentialed lactation consultants who provide support at every step of your breastfeeding journey. With their expert guidance, you can prepare for your baby’s arrival, resolve breastfeeding issues, create a plan to wean, or anything in between. The Lactation Network offers in -person visits in all 50 states and is now in -network with most major health plans. To see if you are covered, visit tln .care today.