A candidate location for Planet Nine from an interstellar meteoroid: The messenger hypothesis

Abstract

The existence of a hypothetical Planet 9 lurkng in the outer solar system has been invoked as a plausible explanation for the anomalous clustering in the orbits of trans-Neptunian objects. Here we propose that some meteoroids arriving at Earth could serve as messengers with the potential of revealing the presence of a hitherto undiscovered massive object. The peculiar meteor CNEOS 2014-01-08, recently put forward as the first interstellar meteor, might be one such messenger. The meteor radiant is in the maximum probability region calculated for the Planet 9 location in previous works. The odds of this coincidence being due to chance are ~1%. Furthermore, some statistical anomalies about CNEOS 2014-01-08 are resolved under the hypothesis that it was flung at Earth by a gravitational encounter. Integrating its trajectory backwards in time would then lead to the region of the sky where Planet 9 is more likely to reside. Based on the available data, we propose the region at coordinates R.A. 53.0 +/- 4.3 deg, declination 9.2 +/- 1.3 deg as a plausible candidate location for Planet 9.

Accepted for publication in ApJ

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Oort cloud perturbations as a source of hyperbolic Earth impactors
• On the origin of extreme trans-Neptunian objects within Modified Newtonian Dynamics
• Dark matter heating of Planet 9, and its observational implications
• A search for Planet Nine with small spacecraft:Three-body, post-Newtonian, non-gravitational, planetary and Kuiper Belt effects