Former supervising astronomer of US Naval Observatory on Planet X [Video]

I couldn't find this by a quick search, so I'll post it here:



No comments.

-v

Harrington died of cancer in 1993. He was trying to find planet X, not nibiru. He didn't believe that there was a massive planet that swept into the inner solar system every 3600 years. He believed there was a (at the time) 10th planet beyond pluto of significant mass and size that would account for observational discrepancies in the orbit of uranus. If he had lived to see the work of Myles Standish later in the very year he died he would have recanted his position. Standish used Voyager 2's Neptune flyby data to determine the mass of Neptune to greater accuracy than ever before, which resulted in a new figure about half a percent smaller than before. When this new figure is plugged into predictions of the outer planets orbits, the supposed "planet x" effect goes away completely.

For Standish's excellent work on the subject, see:
adsbit.harvard.edu...

[edit on 17-11-2008 by ngchunter]

reply to post by ngchunter


Thank you for the update. I guess you took that Nibiru as an issue because of Sitchin in that video? Yes, he was talking about planet X, not Nibiru. I think it is now settled enough even though the title of this thread already suggested it.

Anyways, gotta take a look on that research you linked. It seems interesting! Personally haven't heard about it before but it sure is from sound source Thank you for pointing it out! Anyway, how much can one tell about planets by mere optical analysis? Well, I am no expert, but I'd say it would take more than a close look to tell whether some distant gravitional force is affecting them?

Sincerely,

-v

[edit on 17-11-2008 by v01i0]

Originally posted by v01i0
reply to post by ngchunter

 

Thank you for the update. I guess you took that Nibiru as an issue because of Sitchin in that video? Yes, he was talking about planet X, not Nibiru. I think it is now settled enough even though the title of this thread already suggested it.

My apologies, I can't view youtube videos at the moment, had to go on what others were saying about the video.

Anyway, how much can one tell about planets by mere optical analysis? Well, I am no expert, but I'd say it would take more than a close look to tell whether some distant gravitional force is affecting them?

You can tell a lot by optical analysis. You can measure the position of the planet down to the arcsecond in the sky, and with that information you can determine the orbit of the planet directly. By looking at the motions of the moons of a planet you can also determine the planet's mass to a fair amount of accuracy (the faster the moons orbit their parent the more massive the parent must be). The problem was that plugging in the numbers for the planets' mass and distance from the sun left a very tiny discrepancy between the expected orbit of Uranus and the true orbit. The reason was that we had the mass for neptune a tiny bit wrong until about 15 years ago. Notice in this picture how large the moon Triton looks compared to Neptune; this is because Neptune is so far away, it's almost right at the resolution limit of most of our telescopes. Triton is basically a point light source, and Neptune is nearly so (only about two and a half acrseconds across, that's tiny!)
www.ipac.caltech.edu...
Therefore, our ability to measure triton's orbit with extreme accuracy was limited. The better our numbers, the better we can predict what we'll see in the telescope. Until Voyager made a flyby, our ability to measure Neptune's mass was the limiting factor in predicting the correct orbit of uranus. As you can see in this paper, it was as recently as 1988 that we were trying to nail down the exact mass for Neptune by looking at distant triton:
adsabs.harvard.edu...

[edit on 17-11-2008 by ngchunter]