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🕒 21 hrs ago

Taiwan’s Heat-Hunting Scientists Spot Two Planet 9 Shadows Near Neptune

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Image & Source: tempodeconhecer

Taiwan’s astronomers, chasing Planet 9 with heat sensors, narrowed five million far-infrared signals to just two—FISSSDL J0250422-15011 and FISSSDL J0301112-164240—lurking near Neptune’s Kuiper Belt. Why can’t we see Planet 9 with normal telescopes? What makes infrared crucial for space discovery? Instead of sunlight, they hunted faint warmth that lingers across 400 Earth-Sun distances. “Any object above absolute zero emits thermal radiation,” explained the team, flipping expectations of planetary hide-and-seek.

These two ghostly candidates, unlike telescope-evading planets of yore, glowed in the AKARI telescope’s far-infrared net and vanished six months later like cosmic Houdinis. How did scientists find Planet 9? What evidence supports Planet 9’s existence? Each candidate survived a cosmic game of elimination: thousands of false positives, cosmic dust, and stationary impostors fell away. Now Taiwan’s team awaits confirmation, peering into the void while their hypothetical planet performs a slow-motion disappearing act.

From over five million signals, only two thermal suspects now haunt the Kuiper Belt—each named with a code only an accountant could love, awaiting optical confirmation.

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