Orbital Precession in the Distant Solar System: Further Constraining the Planet Nine Hypothesis with Numerical Simulations

Abstract

Abstract The longitudes of perihelia and orbital poles of the solar system’s dozen or so most remote detected objects are clustered in a manner inconsistent with that of a random sample of uniformly distributed orbits. While small number statistics and observational biases may explain these features, the statistical significance of the clustering has led to the recent development of the “Planet Nine hypothesis.” In the proposed scenario, orbits in the distant solar system are shepherded via secular perturbations from an undetected massive planet on an eccentric orbit. However, the precession of perihelia and nodes in the outer Kuiper Belt and inner Oort cloud are also affected by the giant planets, passing stars, and the galactic tide. We perform a large suite of numerical simulations designed to study the orbital alignment of extreme trans-Neptunian objects (ETNOs) and inner Oort cloud objects (IOCOs). In our various integrations that include Planet Nine, we consistently find that ≳60% of ETNOs and IOCOs that are detectable after 4 Gyr are also anti-aligned in perihelia with the distant massive perturber. However, when we randomly select 17 objects from this sample of remaining orbits, there is significant scatter in the degree of longitude of perihelion and orbital pole clustering that might be observed. Furthermore, we argue that, in the absence of Planet Nine, 17 randomly drawn orbits should still exhibit some clustering even if the underlying distribution is uniform. Thus, we find that still more ETNO and IOCO detections are required to confidently infer the presence of Planet Nine.