What Happened to Planet X?

so Chuck anything been eating you lately so many things I I don't know if we have time you know I did recently see a thing about Planet X Planet X which I was very disappointed to find out had nothing to do with Malcolm this can't be widely known because I don't hear people talking about it when they talk about Planet X right so I'm going to give you just some back story here all right [Music] William hersel accidentally discovers the planet Uranus we knew about Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn there stood right for like

Millennia he discovers Uranus it's it's a beautiful paper nobody had ever discovered a planet cuz all these planets were like known to the Ancients they're all visible in the night sky to everybody caveman knew about the plan the planets right okay anybody freaks out cuz oh my gosh there's more than five planets all right this is late 1700s and he's Brit so of course he named it after his benefactor who was the Oh The King The King yeah King which king uh George of our Declaration of Independence that's right ultimately clearer heads would Prevail and

it was renamed from George to oranos oranos yeah who oranos oranos oranos okay which by the way is a much better name than George than George okay and even better than Uranus so we're watching Uranus right and we're getting a segment of its orbit because it's far out it's not moving very fast right these things take a long time to go around the Sun even though we only had a small segment we said hey its path is not following Newton's laws of motion and gravity so someone suggested maybe we finally found the limit of new's

laws in the universe Newton you dope you Dumbass Dumbass Newton should have known no maybe they only apply to like Earth and the Moon and Earth and the Sun and inner planets and the Sun that could have been then someone said maybe Newton's Laws do apply but there's another planet out there we've yet to discover whose gravity we have have yet to reconcile in these equations which is if you just discovered One Planet maybe there's another one cuz that cracked open the egg the planet egg right so some French mathematicians and leier was one of

his name leier leier leier uh LL I think had a hand in this okay and they communicated this prediction to an observatory in Berlin and Johan gfed gal g a l l e okay how you pronounce that right practically that night he discovers Neptune that's pretty wild that that that the power of math the power of Newton's Laws right okay okay science science Neptune is moving okay so we're now in the 1800 1846 something like this mid 1800s all right and all right uh let's follow its orbit right we do that it's not following Newton's

Laws we've been down that road before well there must be another planet must be another planet of course okay let's start a hunt for that planet that started the hunt for Planet X got you so people said we've done this before let's predict just do the math of ledri look over here and it should be there should it was not there uhoh maybe it was hiding from you because you are so [Music] stupid so the hunt for Planet X was like this massive Planet it was a planet hunt like none other okay MH all right

personal L of the New England LS loved astronomy was not formally trained but he he had money built an observatory the best one in the world he was the first to figure out put the telescope on the mountain top okay above the low Cloud layers with rains and and put it in the desert right where it's dry and not a lot of clouds and not a even when you have clouds ain't a lot of clouds so he found a mountain in Arizona okay okay where else are you gonna put right Arizona there you go found

a mountain built an observatory finest Optics finest everything The Observatory is called the L Observatory the L Observatory he initiated the search for Planet X mhm he wanted to know yes instead of choosing where to look he starts a systematic survey in the plane of the solar system okay a photographic survey now how do you discover a planet it has to be a DOT of light in one photo then in another photo it is moved to a different spot right yeah okay so he initiates this brings in Clyde tomow to conduct the survey he dies

sorry because it was boring as no no LEL dies oh okay I thought Clyde died cuz he's just like all I do night after night is look up here and wait for a DOT of light this is gonna kill me oh it's gonna kill me this is gonna kill me 1930 is the announcement Planet X discovered oh by the way it got named Pluto there's a dot in one photo and it's moved to another place in another photo he would joke about this he lived uh into the 1990s he would joke about this he Clyde

how did you discover where Pluto was he said oh I looked up in the sky and there was an arrow pointing to anytime you show the slide Arrow he persists with this being Planet X into the 1990s MH well how big was it what Mass was it they assigned it the mass that Planet X would have to be to perturb Neptune in the way we discovered it right even though it wasn't anywhere where the prediction said it was going to be they said fine it's out there Planet X we we good right we good okay

over the decades we find out it's not as big and not as massive as they said it was lot of ice a lot of ice reflection we found a moon smaller than it was we we found a moon it Mass was like 1th the mass of our moon and Along Comes an astrophysicist named Neil debrass Tyson and says wait a minute there needs to be one more nail in this coffin I was an accessory to the demotion I didn't pull the trigger okay okay all right so yeah so in the '90s it got he died

before it was officially demoted they might have just that would have killed him thank God yeah so it was not until 2006 where Pluto was officially demoted but we took it out of commission here at the Hayden planetarium when we opened to the public in the year 2000 we plucked Pluto from the ranks of planets and put it with the other dirty ice balls being discovered in the outer solar system where it belongs you make it sound so derogatory okay with the other I filthy ice ball little dirty ice ball it's happier there right it's

now the king of the Comets rather than the puniest planet anyhow uh it is so small it's got so little Mass it can't possibly be Planet X okay a researcher named mil sish asked a question what are the observatories that obtain the positions of Neptune leading us to say that it's not following Newton's Law it's multiple observatories over decades and so he goes back and analyzes them one of the observatories was the US Naval Observatory okay and he goes back to the observations and finds out something like the gearbox was cleaned or oiled or something

somebody did something to the telescope before those observations were made anytime you do something to a scientific instrument you have to calibrate it he said what would happen if I ignore these measurements and fit the orbit to the remaining measurements that are out there when he did that Neptune landed right on Newton's Laws what and Planet X evaporated overnight there was nothing with a mass and gravity that was perturbing Neptune it was bad data so Pluto's mass had no effect on Nee at all no didn't make a difference did one way or another correct and

I'm saying when you're a scientist on the frontier you don't know what is accounting for the anomalous results you're getting is it a new law of physics is it something else that is correct laws of physics but is influencing you in ways you don't yet know right or is there something wrong with the data so Planet X is a centerpiece to this much longer larger story here yeah about the plight of science on the frontier and so I just want you to appreciate what scientists go through I do on that Frontier just to understand how

nature works and the data are not always correct right and and guess what and then everything else is off from that data off from the from from those data well you have my understanding but I also understand you killed Pluto that's that is not the takeaway of this s stop it okay there's been some evidence that there could be a much larger Planet out there which has been called Planet X um it's not affecting measurably the known planets but it's because it's so far away but there are other objects orbiting where Pluto is there might

be some anomalies in their orbits that could be explained by an object so far away you can't see it because it's too dark out there that's what I read it was supposed to be a Wandering Planet we're getting as a distance 10,000 times the Earth Sun distance so it's way out there way out so Poss but the the historical case of Planet X is solved all right we got to call it quits there all right that was great CH a little bit Planet X I love it you got it all right this has been Star

Talk in explainer Edition as always keep looking up [Music]