Thursday, 17 May 2012

observation - How can the orbit of a Kuiper Belt Object be differentiated from the transit of a rogue planet?

I'm not speaking from an informed position here, but two things come to mind.



First is that a rogue planet is likely to be traveling very fast, relative to our solar system. An object from within our solar system (a Kuiper/Oort object) is going to have an orbital velocity. Something that isn't a part of the system at all could be traveling much, much faster.



Secondly, if a rogue planet somehow slowly drifted into our system at almost no speed, and then got pulled into a sort of orbital speed by the sun, the direction of its orbit might give it away. For example, it's orbital inclination could be way off--even perpendicular to the normal orbital plane. It also might be orbiting in the wrong direction--that is--clockwise, instead of ante-clockwise.



That being said, there's no reason that some disturbed Kuiper belt object might not have an eccentric orbital inclination or even an anti-clockwise orbit. But the larger the object, the less likely this is, because it would need a larger and larger disturbance to throw it so out of whack.

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