Global Warming and the Brown Dwarf

U.S. News and World Report, September 10, 1984
Planet X — Is It Really Out There?

JPEG Images courtesy of John DiNardo.

Shrouded from the sun's light, mysteriously tugging at the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, is an unseen force that astronomers suspect may be PLanet X — a 10th resident of the Earth's celestial neighborhood.

Last year, the infrared astronomical satellite (IRAS), circling in a polar orbit 560 miles from the Earth, detected heat from an object about 50 billion miles away that is now the subject of intense speculation.

U.S. News and World Report, September 10, 1984

"All I can say is that we don't know what it is yet," says Gerry Neugenbaur, director of the Palomar Observatory for the California Instititute of Technology. Scientists are hopeful that the one-way journeys of the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes may help to locate the nameless body.

Some astronomers say the heat-emitting object is an unseen collapsed star or possibly a "brown dwarf" — a protostar that never got hot enough to become a star. However, a growing number of astronomers insist that the object is a dark, gaseous mass that is slowly evolving into a planet.

For decades, astromers have noted that the orbits of two huge, distant planets — Neptune and Uranus —deviate slightly from what they should be according to the laws of physics. Gravitational pull from Planet X would explain that deviation.