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NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 24, 2023--

There are eight planets in our solar system – plus poor old Pluto, which was demoted in 2006 – but what if there were more? Turns out that might be the case. Astronomers have calculated there is a 7 per cent chance that Earth has another neighbour hiding in the Oort cloud, a spherical region of ice chunks and rocks that is tens of thousands of times farther from the sun than we are. “It’s completely plausible for our solar system to have captured such an Oort cloud planet,” said Nathan Kaib, a co-author on the work and an astronomer at the Planetary Science Institute. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Hidden worlds like this are “a class of planets that should definitely exist but have received relatively little attention” until now, he said.. If a planet is hiding in the Oort cloud, it’s almost certainly an ice giant. Large planets like Jupiter and Saturn are generally born as twins. They have huge gravitational pulls of their own, however, and sometimes destabilise one another. That could have led to a planet to be nudged out of the solar system entirely – or exiled to its outer reaches, where the Oort cloud resides. “The survivor planets have eccentric orbits, which are like the scars from their violent pasts,” said lead author Sean Raymond, researcher at the University of Bordeaux’s Astrophysics Laboratory. That means that the Oort cloud planet could have a significantly elongated orbit, unlike the near-perfect circle Earth tracks around the sun. Trouble is, when things are that far away, they’re pretty difficult to spot. “It would be extremely hard to detect,” added Raymond. “If a Neptune-sized planet existed in our own Oort cloud, there’s a good chance that we wouldn’t have found it yet,” said Malena Rice, an astronomer at MIT not involved in this work. “Amazingly, it can sometimes be easier to spot planets hundreds of light-years away than those right in our own backyard.” Time to crack out the telescope. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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FIFA 23 Serie A Team of the Season attacker, midfielder, defender and goalkeeper nominees plus how to vote.

Microsoft’s Thursday today didn’t give us any bold new hardware ideas. Instead, the company settled

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 19, 2023--

By Elizabeth Howcroft Worldcoin has no problem attracting eyeballs. More than 2.2 million people have signed up, getting

Big tech appears to be continuing its strong growth turnaround from last year, as it kicks off earnings report season for the quarter ended in September.

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Twitter is refusing to stand by a $1 billion contract with Google to use its cloud hosting services, according to reports. Elon Musk’s company is in the process of moving away from Google Cloud before the contract expires on 30 June, Platformer reported, leaving the social media firm’s trust and safety teams in peril. The move appears to be part of radical cost-cutting measures that have been underway since Mr Musk’s takeover of Twitter in October 2022, which has already seen thousands of employees laid off and a reduction in infrastructure spending. The deal with Google Cloud relates to hosting services, which include protecting accounts and fighting spam on Twitter. The effort to move to a different platform is reportedly “running behind schedule”, which could potentially impact Twitter’s ability to detect and remove spam and child sexual abuse material. Twitter did not respond to a request for comment – the company’s PR team was effectively eliminated during the lay-offs – while Google is also yet to respond. A separate report from The Information last month claimed that Twitter also delayed payments to Amazon Web Services. The latest issues come after internal documents revealed that Twitter’s advertising revenue is down by more than half since Mr Musk’s takeover. The company’s main revenue stream was initially hit by advertisers withdrawing over concerns related to the direction of the platform and its leadership, though Mr Musk claimed in April that “almost all advertisers have come back or said they are going to come back”. Twitter’s valuation since Mr Musk bought the company for $44 billion has dropped to around $15 billion, according to estimates from investment firm Fidelity. Newly-appointed Twitter chief executive Linda Yaccarino, who took over from Mr Musk last week, has been tasked with improving relationships with advertisers, while Mr Musk focuses on “overseeing product, software and sysops as the firm’s chief technology officer. Read More Twitter ad sales down by more than half since Elon Musk takeover, report claims

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