so there's potentially undiscovered planets in our own neighborhood ?

GolfPopper a day ago | parent | next [-]

Yep. Who knows, maybe there's a sub-dwarf of 10 Jupiter masses faintly emitting in the infrared out there.

	▲	sapiogram 15 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Jupiter-mass objects are vanishingly unlikely to be orbiting the sun, they would have been found by infrared surveys.
	▲	pmontra a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Why not? Blindsight by Peter Watts got one, Big Ben.

▲

vkou a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes. The Kuiper belt is full of massive, yet-to-be-documented asteroids, planetoids, comets, and dwarf planets.

▲

euroderf 21 hours ago | parent [-]

But then with the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud you're getting into interstellar space, yes ? As space-based telescopes improve by another order of magnitude or two (one hopes), will we need a new term for drifting objects gravitationally influenced both by our Sol and by (say) the Centauris ?

Speaking of which, TIL there's been more discovered in those systems. There's Alpha Centauri A B & C (C is a.k.a. Proxima Centauri) AND Beta Centauri A B & C. You can't tell your players without a scorecard.

	▲	mr_toad 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> But then with the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud you're getting into interstellar space, yes ? The Kuiper belt is inside the heliosphere, the Oort cloud is outside it.