Does Tyche Exist? If So, What Is It?

You may have no doubt heard about a mysterious celestial body by the name of Tyche (pronounced like Ty-kee) recently. It’s a hypothesized gas giant that has been looming in the Oort cloud, somewhere in the far distant area of our Solar System. Amazingly, it is supposedly a whopping four times larger than our own giant planet, Jupiter. Some speculate that its tug has been causing unusual anomalies and irregularities in long-period comets.

John Matese was the first to propose the existence of Tyche in 1999. This was based from a perceived bias in the points of origin for long-period comets. As opposed to arriving from some arbitrary point in space like it was commonly thought, Matese came to the conclusion that they were actually clustered together in a band inclined to the ecliptic. Clustering like this could be explained if a disturbance from an unseen object that was possibly the size of a brown dwarf was present.

The astronomers Daniel Whitmire and John Matese claim there is evidence of this planets existence, and noted that if Tyche exists, there will be no doubt that it should be detectable in the archive of data collected by NASA‘s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope. But there has been much skepticism about the existence of the planet from several astronomers. It will probably take at least a couple years of analysis to actually determine whether or not WISE has detected it, or whether it is simply nothing more than a great story.

Many ideas have spread over whether this planet is indeed real and what exactly the implications are. It has been considered by some to be the mysterious planet “Nibiru,” the winged planet, on its way back to our part of the solar system from its supposed thirty-six hundred year orbital path.

Ancient Sumerian texts seem to indicate that the Earth, or Tiamat, was struck by a huge planet which moved it into its present orbit, as well as creating the Asteroid Belt and the Moon. Zecharia Sitchin is very well known for his theories regarding this planet and the history behind it. This is all purely speculation of course, and there are many other ideas. The conspiracy theorists in particular seem to have a great many ideas about this gas giant.

However, I am not knocking them at all. As a matter of fact, I seem to have an affinity with them, and I don’t feel that what the general public is being told is at all the truth. But that is a different argument for a different day. And it shouldn’t be surprising with all the different opinions that are floating around about this particular celestial body. The world is a crazy place and people just want to make some sense out of it.

Proponents have speculated that if the planet does indeed exist, that it could be as large as four times the mass of Jupiter, and could have a temperature of approximately 200 Kelvin, or -73° C. This is probably due to residual heat still emanating from its formation and Kelvin-Helmholtz heating. In short, Kelvin-Helmholtz heating is a process that takes place when the surface of a star or planet begins to cool, causing the pressure to drop. The star or planet will begin to shrink as a result, and this compression then heats up the core of the star or planet.

By: Andrew Duley

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