Pluto Killer Thinks He Has New Ninth Planet
冥王星的“除名者”称其发现新的“第九行星”

Caltech astronomer Mike Brown, the driving force for demoting Pluto, now claims evidence for a massive, distant replacement ninth planet in our solar system
加利福利亚理工学院的天文学家，迈克·布朗(Mike Brown)，冥王星除名的主推，现在声称找到一个巨大且遥远的第九行星的候补。

撰文/播音 史蒂夫·米尔斯基(Steve Mirsky)
翻译 Meatle
审校 乔虹

“All those people who are mad that Pluto is no longer a planet can be thrilled to know that there’s a real planet out there still to be found.” Caltech planetary astronomer Mike Brown. He knows about those mad people—he’s the guy most responsible for demoting Pluto and messing up everyone’s mnemonic devices to remember the names of the planets: My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine…it used to be pickles, but without Pluto, we don’t know.
“那些被‘冥王星不再是行星’弄疯了的人可能会感到兴奋：太阳系中还有一个真实存在的行星尚未被发现。”加利福利亚理工大学的行星天文学家，迈克?布朗(Mike Brown)说。他最明白那些疯狂的人们，因为他就是冥王星降格中负有最大的责任的人，而且还打乱了所有人记忆行星名字的方式。以前是：My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine（我那受过良好教育的母亲刚刚给我们上了9盘…..）,最后一个单词原本是pickles（腌菜），但现在没有了冥王星，整个句子都凑不齐，我们不知道该怎样记住行星名字了。

But now Brown, who wrote the book How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming and whose twitter handle is @plutokiller, wants to return the solar system to being nine planets strong. Because he and his colleague Konstantin Batygin think they have evidence that an object that will surely qualify as being a full-fledged planet lies way out at what’s usually considered the edge of the solar system.
然而现在，写下了《我如何把冥王星除名，以及为什么》 (How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming)，并在twitter上使用@plutokiller (冥王星除名者) 头衔的布朗，想让太阳系恢复有9个成员的强大队伍。因为他和他的同僚，康斯坦丁·巴特金(Konstantin Batygin)，认为他们有证据证明在太阳系的边沿上存在一个确实能够符合行星条件的天体。

“When we looked at the outer solar system, we realized that while most of the very distant objects, these objects beyond Neptune, beyond Pluto, most of these objects, they all go around the sun and they’re all sort of pointing off in all different directions, but the most distant objects all swing out in one direction in a very strange way that shouldn’t happen. And we realized that the only way we could get them to all swing in one direction is if there is a massive planet, also very distant in the solar system, keeping them in place while they all go around the sun…and we started looking at this and thinking, this must be either a coincidence or it’s caused by something else, it can’t be caused by a planet because that’s crazy, there are no planets out there…and went from trying very hard to be skeptical that what we were talking about was true to suddenly thinking, oh, this actually might even be true.”
“我们观察太阳系外沿时，那些遥远的天体，那些比海王星，比冥王星还遥远的天体，它们中的大多数围绕太阳运动的方向都不尽相同。但这些天体中离我们最远的那些，却全部都异常地朝同一个方向摇摆运动。这种状况不应该发生。同时我们明白只有一种可能会使这些小行星往一个方向摆动：如果那里存在一个远离太阳系中心的巨大质量的天体，把这些小行星吸引到它的附近，同时它们也一起围绕着太阳公转…我们开始集中思考这种假设，这种现象绝对是一种巧合或有其他成因。这种现象不可能是行星造成的，因为这是一种疯狂的想法，那里没有行星…而我们努力的尝试着保持怀疑态度，继续观察和分析的时候，我们发现这个突如其来想法是真的，这个假设确实有可能是真的。”

The researchers reported their finding in the Astronomical Journal. [Konstantin Batygin and Michael E. Brown, Evidence For A Distant Giant Planet In The Solar System]
研究人员将他们的发现刊登于《天文学学报》（Astronomical Journal.）。[Konstantin Batygin and Michael E. Brown, Evidence For A Distant Giant Planet In The Solar System]

The proposed planet should be more massive than the Earth, but less massive than Neptune.
他们设想中的行星可能比地球的质量更大，但比海王星要轻。

“We have nothing like it in the solar system, so it’s new for us. It is however the most common mass of planets that have been found around all of the other stars. People have always looked at all these other planets in this strange mass range and said, wow, I wonder what these are, I don’t know what these are, because we don’t have anything like it in the solar system. Looks like maybe we do.”
“在我们已知的太阳系中，我们没有遇到过这样的事，可以说，这是新的发现。然而在其他星系中，这个质量对于围绕着恒星运动的行星来说是最平常不过的了。人们总是看着这些在异常的质量范围的天体，并说：‘哇，那是什么。’我不知道那是什么，因为太阳系内并没有类似这些天体的东西。虽然看起来，我们可能知道。”

Mister Vastly Erudite Michael Just Served Up New Planet.
知识渊博的迈克尔先生刚刚提出了一个新行星。

原文链接：http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/pluto-killer-thinks-he-has-new-ninth-planet/

（题图来源：http://www.scientificamerican.com）