1983 Washington Post Article About Planet 9(X) at 50 Billion Miles from Sun.

a reply to: ElectricUniverse

The evidence you are presenting seems a bit misinformed. It sounds as if you think it likely that the 1983 study actually found a planet. However, reading the info presented in the original study and since then, the reality of it is that the evidence is pretty weak for any of the objects they identified was a Planet.

originally posted by: ElectricUniverse
originally posted by: Phage

And again with this claim of yours that WISE didn't find it... How do you know? Did you personally look through all the WISE data to make this new claim?

Well, maybe somewhere buried in the noise of the data of WISE or IRAS is a faint dot that turns out to be the Planet Nine that has been in the news lately, but that is a far cry from saying that it was "discovered" just because that dot might exist among the millions of other ots in the WISE and IRAS data.

What I mean is that pictures of the entire sky exist (in different EM wavelengths, and one of those pictures may very well have captured dim dot that is Planet Nine, but unless someone can point to that dim dot and identify it as a planet, then it hasn't been "discovered".

In fact, when Planet Nine is eventually discovered (and I think there's a good chance it does exist, and will be found), and its orbit plotted, someone might go back to old IRAS and WISE data, look along that newly-plotted orbit, and find it and say "Oh -- there it was. We already had an image but didn't know it".

As you mentioned, the same thing had happened with Pluto. People unknowingly photographed Pluto in the early 1900's, decades prior to Tombaugh's 1930discovery, but since they didn't know they photographed it, the official discovery wasn't until Tombaugh in 1930.

Lots of confused debating in this thread, so let's refer to Wikipedia for clarity:

The observatory made headlines briefly with the announcement on 10 December 1983 of the discovery of an "unknown object" at first described as "possibly as large as the giant planet Jupiter and possibly so close to Earth that it would be part of this solar system". Further analysis revealed that, of several unidentified objects, nine were distant galaxies and the tenth was "intergalactic cirrus". None were found to be Solar System bodies.

I'm well aware that Wikipedia gets bad press concerning realiability, so it's all about the sources quoted. The first one was that archived article from Tom Chester (who was actually part of IRAS team, so it's "straight from the horse's mouth" as they say), and the other one is from Phil Plait.

To recap:

Most people debating here with you (including myself) agree that there might be a whole new planet out there, and that it might be found soon. What we don't agree on is that IRAS found this planet in 1983. The only people who believe it did, are conspiracy believers and Nibiru-chacers. In astronomy, like in any other science, it would be proper to separate wheat from the chaff.

It wasn't dust clouds. It was an object called 1983 TB, or 3200 Phaethon. Discovered on October 11, 1983 by Simon Green and John Davies at IRAS.
It flew by Earth in 2007 (~50x the distance to the moon).

originally posted by: Pedro68
It wasn't dust clouds. It was an object called 1983 TB, or 3200 Phaethon. Discovered on October 11, 1983 by Simon Green and John Davies at IRAS.
It flew by Earth in 2007 (~50x the distance to the moon).

No it wasn't. 3200 Phaethon was recognised as an asteroid straight away (just as it says in that Wikipedia article you linked). It has nothing to do with "mysterious object" that is the subject of this thread.