Claim for Giant 'Planet Nine' at Solar System's Edge Takes a Hit

Eratosthenes writes:

Science Mag says:

For planetary scientists, it was the boldest claim in a generation: an unseen extra planet, as much as 10 times the mass of Earth, lurking on the Solar System's frontier, beyond Neptune. But the claim looks increasingly shaky, after a team of astronomers reported last week that the orbits of a handful of distant lumps of rock are not bunched together by the gravity of "Planet Nine," as its proponents believe, but only seem clustered because that's where telescopes happened to be looking.

Planet Nine supporters aren't backing down yet but one skeptic not involved with the new work says she is "very happy" to see it. The study has carried out "a more uniform analysis" than done previously of the far-off rocky bodies known as known as Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), says astronomer Samantha Lawler of the University of Regina, who has tried and failed to simulate the clustered orbits in computer models with an extra planet.

Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin of the California Institute of Technology made headlines worldwide in 2016 with their prediction for a distant Planet Nine. They based their conclusion on a study of six TNOs, each smaller than Pluto, in extremely elongated and tilted orbits around the Sun. The orbits of these "extreme" TNOs were bunched together, Brown and Batygin said, because Planet Nine's gravity had nudged them there over billions of years. Several more extreme TNOs discovered since then seemed to cluster as well. "I would argue that the relevant [Planet 9] dataset is in pretty good shape," Batygin says.

But then, the evil selection bias crept in.

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