Is Tyche the Missing Planet in Our Solar System?

[bguidry17]

http://www.nationalpost.com/m/blog.html?b=news.nationalpost.com/2011/02/15/new-giant-planet-may-repeat-may-be-discovered-in-our-solar-system&s=Opinion

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/up-telescope-search-begins-for-giant-new-planet-2213119.html

Any comments on the planet Tyche? I don't know much about astronomy, but I couldn't find any thread on here about Tyche. It seems absurd to me that we haven't seen it before. Should it be considered a planet? Again, I don't know squat about astronomy, but could Tyche be the cause of the Pioneer anomaly?

 

[Janus]

Tyche is only hypothesized to exist. There has been no actual detection of or evidence for such a planet.

 

[bguidry17]

http://www.gearfuse.com/new-planet-believed-to-have-been-found-at-edge-of-solar-system/
This link says something to the extent that "it is inevitable that Tyche's existence will be proven." True or bad journalism?

 

[bguidry17]

From what I've read since my last comment, that was probably bad journalism. Here's another good article:
http://mblogs.discovermagazine.com/...-of-a-giant-planet-in-the-outer-solar-system/

 

[qraal]

Tyche is only hypothesized to exist. There has been no actual detection of or evidence for such a planet.

Of course there's evidence it exists, else it wouldn't have been hypothesized! The difficulty is whether that's the unique explanation for the observed pattern of comet influx - but that's the job of experiment isn't it? Hopefully more data will arise from WISE or some other observation campaign. Lorenzo Iorio suggests the anomalous precession of Saturn could be explained by a Tyche - or a closer, smaller planet. Thus, potentially, another line of evidence. Matese and Whitmire aren't idiots - they've made their claim based on the data, but it's just one option. A definite detection would constitute "proof", but that's not quite the same as evidence. Or is it?

 

[Helios]

Tyche is just the new name for Zecharia Sitchin 's planet Nibiru which he hypothesized. Sitchin also hypothesized that it is inhabited by an alien race called the Anunnaki.
If Janus says "no detection nor evidence for such a planet", then I'll confidently go with that.

 

[qraal]

Helios that's ridiculous! There's no connection between Sitchin'a fantasy and a hypothesized Oort gas giant.

 

[Chronos]

The collective mass of the oort cloud is is believed to be no more than about 80 Earth masses and possibly less than 2 Earth masses..

 

[qraal]

The collective mass of the oort cloud is is believed to be no more than about 80 Earth masses and possibly less than 2 Earth masses..

Kind of irrelevant to the basic question, although true enough. Tyche would presumably have formed as a wide orbit binary companion to the Sun from the same bit of collapsing nebula, rather than forming in the disk around the Sun. Alternatively the Sun might've captured the dust/gas which became the planets from a proto-Tyche, which originally had a large, massive disk and barely condensed core. Lower mass stars collapse slower than heavier stars, thus stars like the Sun would have been smaller and denser than red-dwarf and brown-dwarfs in their common birth nebula, allowing capture events to occur. That would explain why the Sun's rotation is tilted by 7 degrees with respect to the average plane of the planetary orbits.