Dr. Katherine Volk

So this is the current state as of last week.

A few of these objects are relatively new.

And you can see they're not all on one side anymore.

There's some spread out.

And the dynamic story could be complicated.

You could have other things.

You could still have a planet and have this be the outcome.

But it's not quite as strong an effect.

You wouldn't necessarily look at this and say, huh, that needs an explanation.

But it still could be consistent.

Some of these new objects also, so this is

You know, I've plotted them in three dimension orbits and we're just rotating our perspective.

And so this was this initial clustering where they all kind of their orbital planes were also aligned, which would also possibly need an explanation.

But some of the new objects are not quite as aligned.

So the story is a little more complicated than that.

And then of course there is this issue of incompleteness in the data set.

So there are observational biases and in fact the apparent clustering could just be biases.

I'm part of this outer solar system origin survey.

We discovered five of these objects that had similar orbits and we did an analysis because they looked clustered.

But we said, what if they were just randomly distributed?