Renegade Game Studios Renegade Game Studio | The Search for Planet X | Board Game | Ages 13+ | 1-4 Players | 60 Minutes Playing Time

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NASA's WISE telescope can spot objects such as massive planets and dim brown dwarfs in the infrared. However, no Saturn-sized objects were found out to 10,000 AUs, while no Jupiter-sized or larger objects were spotted out to 26,000 AUs, the region of the Oort Cloud. (Image credit: Penn State University) Lowell dubbed the putative body Planet X; his persistence led to the 1930 discovery of Pluto. By 1978, scientists had concluded that Pluto was too small to affect the larger bodies, and began searching for a large missing planet. Players take it in turns to complete actions to uncover more clues to solve the puzzle. There are four actions you can take each time: You can’t do this action two turns in a row and it’s worth noting that the topics will only give one clue each, so there’s no need to research any of them more than once.

a b Dennis Rawlins (1973). "Mass and Position Limits for an Hypothetical Tenth Planet of the Solar System". Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 162 (3): 261–270. Bibcode: 1973MNRAS.162..261R. doi: 10.1093/mnras/162.3.261. Rawlins also took into account Pluto's stellar occultation failure as reported by Halliday, I.; Hardie, R.; Franz, O.; Priser, J. (1966). "An upper limit for the diameter of Pluto". Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. 78 (461): 113–124. Bibcode: 1966PASP...78..113H. doi: 10.1086/128307. S2CID 121483531. In the 1840s, the French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier used Newtonian mechanics to analyse perturbations in the orbit of Uranus, and hypothesised that they were caused by the gravitational pull of a yet-undiscovered planet. Le Verrier predicted the position of this new planet and sent his calculations to German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle. On 23 September 1846, the night following his receipt of the letter, Galle and his student Heinrich d'Arrest discovered Neptune, exactly where Le Verrier had predicted. [10] There remained some slight discrepancies in the giant planets' orbits. These were taken to indicate the existence of yet another planet orbiting beyond Neptune. Matese, John J.; Whitmire, Daniel P. (2011). "Persistent evidence of a jovian mass solar companion in the Oort cloud". Icarus. 211 (2): 926–938. arXiv: 1004.4584. Bibcode: 2011Icar..211..926M. doi: 10.1016/j.icarus.2010.11.009. S2CID 44204219. Research a Topic – There are six different topics that you can research (A to F), and the title of each will tell you what objects you will learn something about. Choose one of the topics and the app will tell you a logic rule that is in place for this particular game. There is an area on your sheet where you can mark down this information. It costs 1 hour to Research a topic; and you should remember that you cannot research two turns in a row.

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Throughout the mid-20th century, estimates of Pluto's mass were revised downward. In 1931, Nicholson and Mayall calculated its mass, based on its supposed effect on the giant planets, as roughly that of Earth; [34] a value somewhat in accord with the 0.91 Earth mass calculated in 1942 by Lloyd R. Wylie at the US Naval Observatory, using the same assumptions. [35] In 1949, Gerard Kuiper's measurements of Pluto's diameter with the 200-inch telescope at Mount Palomar Observatory led him to the conclusion that it was midway in size between Mercury and Mars and that its mass was most probably about 0.1 Earth mass. [36] a b c JG Chhabra; SD Sharma; M Khanna (1984). "Prediction of Pluto by V. P. Ketakar" (PDF). Indian Journal of History of Science. 19 (1): 18–26. Bibcode: 1984InJHS..19...18C. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2009-02-25 . Retrieved 2008-09-04. L. Iorio (2014). "Planet X revamped after the discovery of the Sedna-like object 2012 VP113?". Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters. 444: L78–L79. arXiv: 1404.0258. Bibcode: 2014MNRAS.444L..78I. doi: 10.1093/mnrasl/slu116. S2CID 118554088. There is also a Conference symbol located in one of the sectors (two on the expert side of the board). As with the Theory symbol, when this is pointed at or passed over, pause the game, carry out a ‘Conference Phase’.

If you’re correct, well done! All players can mark that object on their sheets. Any theories in the same sector can now be flipped, whether they made it to the innermost space or not.

Some of these include extremely close stars, such as one located only 20 light-years away in the constellation Norma. A study that looked at WISE data last year found a pair of brown dwarfs just 6.5 light-years from Earth, making it the closest star system discovered in almost 100 years.

Locate Planet X – Follow the usual steps for locating Planet X, but don’t advance your telescope 5 spaces. a b James W. Christy & Robert S. Harrington (August 1978). "The Satellite of Pluto". Astronomical Journal. 83 (8): 1005–1008. Bibcode: 1978AJ.....83.1005C. doi: 10.1086/112284.

In 2014 astronomers at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid suggested that the available data actually indicates more than one trans-Neptunian planet; [71] subsequent work further suggests that the evidence is robust enough but rather than connected with Ω and ω, semi-major axes and nodal distances could be the signposts. [72] [73] Additional work based on improved orbits of 39 objects still indicates that more than one perturber could be present and that one of them could orbit the Sun at 300-400 AU. [74] You can draw a line through any two points," he says. "If they had three I might say this is interesting." Even then, the burden of proof would be high. Sheppard isn't a stranger to speculation about massive objects beyond Neptune—he has done some estimates based on perturbations of dwarf planet orbits. However, he's never floated the idea of one explicitly. Survey for an object (? Time) – Decide which object you want to look for and choose a number of sectors in which to search (e.g., Asteroids in sectors 1-6). The app will tell you how many of those objects are in your selected area. Locate Planet X. If you think you know where Planet X is, you take this action, and input the sector into the app. To make sure that you really know what you’re talking about, the app also requires you to know what is in the sector to the left and right of Planet X as well. It costs 5 hours to take this action. If you are right, the end game is triggered. If you are wrong, the game continues. Either way, your opponents do not know in what sector you looked in.