• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I find it amusing that we can prove the existence of black holes thousands of light years away and glean the state of the universe at its earliest moments, but we can’t decide whether there’s a rock big enough to count as a planet floating around the inside rim of the Oort Cloud.

    • Audacious@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      It might be a miscalculation of orbital body models, which has happened before. Urbain Le Verrier was able to predict Neptune’s existence. Then he tried to predict a planet between Mercury and the Sun, because the current Newtonian physics wasn’t lining up to observations, a similar situation to how Neptune was found. Then Einstein’s work on gravity modeled the orbital bodies more accurately, ending the debate if there was another planet closer to the sun than Mercury. Just a different food-for-thought point of view, as I don’t know what the answer is obviously.