Planet X

I was reading up recently on Planet X, a potential new celestial homie in our outer solar system that either is or isn’t there depending on who you ask, and I was struck by some of the overlap between the search to observe it and the ways in which I poke around in my own darkness. Let’s start with the basics. Perhaps the most important fact to know about gravity, other than that it’s interchangeable with “marriage” in this Princess Bride clip, is that we’re not really sure why it works or what it is. Nevertheless, whatever that theory is trying to describe undeniably exists, and since speaking imperfectly about fundamental things is the only entrypoint we have available in the exploration of our inner and outer cosmos, we continue to vibe out with it. Maybe the second most important thing to know about it, at least when it comes to looking up, is that when you have very little light your next best option is to observe the movements of what you can see. This can let you know if anything else is around by way of wobbles or alterations that aren’t otherwise explainable, and if nothing is acting strange then what you see is probably what you’ve got.

And this is how astronomers arrived at the possible existence of Planet X. A handful of objects we knew about in the Kuiper belt were moving around in wonky ways, and the specific patterns observed seemed to suggest that something roughly the size, or at least gravitational pull, of 10 earths was causing the unrest. And it reminded me of one of my favorite poems, Horses At Midnight Without A Moon, and more specifically its line “we know the horses are there in the dark meadow because we can smell them.” Because there are times now when I only know something is there in my own dark because of something else. I suppose this is a short follow-on to my note yesterday, but I’ve found that tracing my day to day behavior feels the same as tracking those objects in the Kuiper belt. It’s true that we have strange, singular moments that seem to move through us like Oumuamua, but I think that’s very rarely the case. More often, we have objects in us, some genetic, some traumatic, some otherwise, orbiting our center at different rates and causing our various behaviors as they move and interact with one another. Earth, for instance, orbits the sun every 365ish days, and Planet X orbits every 10,000 to 20,000 years, so you would expect the mismatched friskiness to keep them separate, and it does. But the same can’t be said for X’s more immediate neighbors.

Where this ties in, at least in my mind, is that we all have large objects in our own inner darkness and I’m not sure that it necessarily has to matter. This is sort of similar to, say, the ancient myths about the Kraken. Do I think there is a monstrous octopus swimming around out there somewhere gobbling things occasionally? Sure. Do I feel the need to get into a boat and force some sort of showdown with it? No lol. Because finding the Kraken doesn’t mean I can do anything about it anymore than finding the planet implies that its gravitational behavior is going to change. Those objects will continue to be pulled around in those particular ways whether we have a specific name for what’s doing it or not. And where cosmic exploration perhaps builds in interest, my inner version wanes in a directly inverse way. I can’t control every sort of machination my inner solar system goes through, and neither can you, and I’m certainly not going to be able to fix most of the stuff I discover anyway because the gears are too huge. And I feel more strongly these days that it’s OK to observe the magnitude of our own particular difficulties and despairs and allow them to continue on their way. That’s the only type of relationship we’re actually able to have with them anyway, and pretending that’s not the case seems the same as calling myself the master of the universe after having a good time at the planetarium. Anyway, here’s a video about Planet X and I hope you have a great Tuesday.