The social system without Planet Nine is five sigma ruled out, and the social system with Planet Nine is indistinguishable from the data. It's surprising that the most unstable, boring part of the Kuiper Belt gives you the most statistically significant thread. That's the most stringent evidence we have that Planet Nine is

really out there. The quest to uncover Planet Nine, new research that will be coming up involving LSST or the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile, where the next frontier in planetary research, not just in exoplanets as we've talked about way more than this topic. This is inner planets, planets in our own solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune. And last but not least, you're gonna hear a deep dive into the physics behind Jupiter's past history. How can we do archaeology on planets in our own solar system? Well, Konstantin's figured out a way to do that, and it involves, of all things, its magnetic field. You'll hear about that, see the latest research into the planetary dynamics of our own solar system. Konstantin's no stranger to attention. You'll see him featured in sixty minutes.

Now, I want you to sit back, relax, and enjoy this episode of Into the Impossible with the irrepressible professor Konstantin Batygin. Welcome back, everybody, to an episode that promises to be out of this world with a friend, a two time guest of the Into the Impossible podcast, Professor Konstantin Patygin. Welcome, my friend. You survived fires and floods and mudslide potential to be here.

Yeah. And then we're not even talking about the drink.

No. That was just to get down here.

I mean, that was wild.

I always thought it was a good day to come down to San Diego. Whenever I'd leave Caltech's confines and come down here, I always felt it was a good day. We're so happy you're here. We're gonna be talking about

It's good to be here, man.

The Hebrew planet, as I call it, Jupiter.

You know, Jupiter? Yes.

We'll be talking about that. We'll learn about how it got its size. You collaborate with, Fred Adams, I think, on that.

I sure do. Yeah.

Recent paper. He's been a guest a long time ago. I gotta get him back, and I'll use this as an opportunity to do that. But first, we gotta talk about updates to the most important topic, your band. How's your band doing?

Man, my band is doing awesome. So we, you know, we played a couple gigs, I think it was in November and December, and it's been a tremendous amount of fun. Like, the club we play at most often now, the mix, has this, like, huge screen behind the stage. And so, you know, we've been kind of incorporating that, into the show and also just because, like, AI video production is now so easy. Oh, god. It's been kind of adding an extra element. We've we're, we're working on a new album. So things are going, you know, knock on wood, things are going well.

That's awesome. Okay. Let's get to some of the meat of the conversation because we're gonna talk about lots of things involving planets. I have some planetary swag. You'll find out about that in just a bit. Good. But the first thing is, you know, for someone who's not familiar, Planet Nine, we used to have Planet Nine. Actually, this asteroid up here, you can barely see it.

It's called Asteroid 6,618 Jim Simons. Got that named after Jim Simons. And it was discovered by, see the discoverer? Can you read that?

Clyde Tombaugh.

Yeah. Now, what's the, importance of Clyde Tombaugh in the world of planetary discoveries?

Clyde Tombaugh famously discovered Pluto, of course. Right? Pluto was the original planet X. Right? If you go back in history about a century ago, right, there was all of this discussion about there being an additional planet, which was largely driven by Lowell. Mhmm. Right? And, like, Lowell Observatory was in part constructed in order to look for this elusive, you know, planet. And Lowell died, I think, in nineteen sixteen, sixteen, but the search kept going and Clyde Tombaugh, who was employed at Lowell Observatory in 1930, discovers Pluto. Now one of the things that I think many people don't realize, when you just discover something up in the night sky, you don't know how massive it is. And so you kind of say, well, I was looking for a thing that was supposed to be seven Earth masses, so it's probably seven Earth masses.

But Clyde Tombaugh immediately realized that, well, if it was something that big, you should be able to resolve the disk. And instead, it looked kind of like a point source. So it was like, probably one Earth mass. Like, you know, there's no way to to calculate it if it doesn't have a satellite. And, you know, you can watch Pluto's mass kind of decrease through the literature. And there's even some joke paper, from like the eighties that makes a plot of Pluto's mass as a function of time between 1930 and then, like, nineteen eighty something and predicts how Pluto would disappear. Right? It would cross zero in, like, 02/2005 or something like that. And that

might matter.