Orbital clustering in the distant solar system

Abstract

The most distant Kuiper belt objects appear to be clustered in longitude of perihelion and in orbital pole position. To date, the only two suggestions for the cause of these apparent clusterings have been either the effects of observational bias or the existence of the distant giant planet in an eccentric inclined orbit known as Planet Nine. To determine if observational bias can be the cause of these apparent clusterings, we develop a rigorous method of quantifying the observational biases in the observations of longitude of perihelion and orbital pole position. From this now more complete understanding of the biases we calculate that the probability that these distant Kuiper belt objects would be clustered as strongly as observed in both longitude of perihelion and in orbital pole position is only 0.2%. While explanations other than Planet Nine may someday be found, the statistical significance of this clustering is now difficult to discount.

References in corpus (4)

• Evidence for a Distant Giant Planet in the Solar System
• OSSOS VI. Striking Biases in the detection of large semimajor axis Trans-Neptunian Objects
• Observational bias and the clustering of distant eccentric Kuiper belt objects
• Beyond the Kuiper Belt Edge: New High Perihelion Trans-Neptunian Objects With Moderate Semi-major Axes and Eccentricities

Cited by in corpus (26)

• The Planet Nine Hypothesis
• Origin and evolution of long-period comets
• Tuning the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Observing Strategy for Solar System Science
• A search of the full six years of the Dark Energy Survey for outer Solar System objects
• Solar System Physics for Exoplanet Research
• Testing the isotropy of the Dark Energy Survey's extreme trans-Neptunian objects
• OSSOS XV: Probing the Distant Solar System with Observed Scattering TNOs
• Injection of Inner Oort Cloud Objects Into the Distant Kuiper Belt by Planet Nine
• Perspectives on the distribution of orbits of distant Trans-Neptunian Objects
• Orbital precession in the distant solar system; further constraining the Planet Nine hypothesis with numerical simulations
• Stability of Neptune's distant resonances in the presence of Planet Nine
• A Pluto--Charon Sonata: Dynamical Limits on the Masses of the Small Satellites
• The Resonance Hopping Effect in the Neptune-Planet Nine System
• A search for Planet 9 in the IRAS data
• On the origin of extreme trans-Neptunian objects within Modified Newtonian Dynamics
• Dynamical evolution of a self-gravitating planetesimal disk in the distant trans-Neptunian region
• Machine Learning for Searching the Dark Energy Survey for Trans-Neptunian Objects
• Exploring the Solar System with the NOIRLab Source Catalog I: Detecting Objects with CANFind
• A Lopsided Outer Solar System
• Apsidal asymmetric-alignment of Jupiter Trojans
• A Search for Planet Nine with IRAS and AKARI Data
• Suppression of the inclination instability in the trans-Neptunian Solar system
• Steeper Scattered Disks Buckle Faster
• A Far-Infrared Search for Planet Nine Using AKARI All-Sky Survey
• Migration of giant gaseous clumps and structure of the outer Solar system
• The orbit of Planet Nine