I would like to take this opportunity to stress once more the importance of the construction of TMT as well as preserving the current observatories on Mauna Kea.
Some big news hit the science community recently in the field of astronomy. A pair of respected planetary scientists — Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena — may have substantial evidence there is a ninth, giant, Neptune-sized planet, which could be located out of the nearest planet forming region near the sun and settled into a distant elliptical orbit. For the time being, it is a theoretical discovery, based on mathematical calculations, as the planet has not been observed as of yet. But according to Brown, who some of you may be familiar with as ironically being Pluto’s killer, the odds are good.
“It’s almost like having six hands on a clock all moving at different rates, and when you happen to look up, they’re all in exactly the same place,” Brown said of the discovery.
The odds of having that happen are something like 1 in 100, he says. But on top of that, the orbits of the six objects are also all tilted in the same way—pointing about 30 degrees downward in the same direction relative to the plane of the eight known planets. The probability of that happening is about 0.007 percent.
“Basically, it shouldn’t happen randomly,” Brown said. “So we thought something else must be shaping these orbits.”
Astronomers in Hawaii, in this case with the Subaru Telescope which has the largest field of view, will be once more at the forefront of the studies and hopefully find the visual evidence needed to make the theory a reality. For those of you who don’t follow much science, this is as big as discovering a new continent and it could reevaluate the theories we currently have on how our solar system came to be.
Understanding our universe, and going as far as reaching out to space with manned Mars missions are not sci-fi anymore but realities that we may be privileged to witness in our lifetime. Scientific discoveries and human exploration could answer fundamental questions such as life existing beyond Earth as well as opening possibilities for the future of humankind. What could possibly be more important than that?
Imua TMT.
I. De Groote is a resident of Waikoloa
My Turn opinions are those of the writer and not West Hawaii Today