Scientist who grew up near Toledo may have discovered a planet

A scientist who grew up near Toledo may have discovered a planet at the far edge of our solar system.

A University of Arizona scientist who grew up near Toledo has the world of astronomy buzzing about the possibility of a planet bigger than Mars near the outer edge of the solar system.

Kathyrn Volk at an observatory in Arizona. Volk, who grew up in Ottawa Hills, may have discovered a planet at the far edge of our solar system.

KATHRYN VOLKEnlarge

Kathryn “Kat” Volk, 32, who lived in Ottawa Hills until she was 12 before moving with her family to Blissfield, Mich., is gaining attention in the world of astronomy thanks to her research of the Kuiper Belt with her mentor, Renu Malhotra, a University of Arizona planetary sciences professor.

What is the Kuiper Belt? It’s basically a vast region beyond Neptune at the farthest edge of the solar system with thousands — possibly even millions — of relatively small, icy rocks and other objects floating through it. It is believed nearly all are masses too small and oddly shaped to be considered planets. Some are as oblong and funny-looking as dog bones.

Pluto is in the Kuiper Belt. Although it lost its status as the solar system’s ninth planet back in 2006, there are two separate projects going on that could bring the solar system up to 10 planets even if Pluto’s status times that of Earth. If there is such a planet, it is believed to be so big and so far away that it needs 10,000 to 20,000 years to do one complete orbit around the sun.

This year, Ms. Volk and Ms. Malhotra made headlines when they came up with evidence of a smaller — though still incredibly large — planet based on their theory that something other than Planet Nine is out there warping the average orbital plane of the outer solar system.

They believe the planet, if it exists, is at least as big as Mars but smaller than Earth. They’ve calculated their odds of being wrong at only 1 percent to 2 percent. Their findings appeared in the latest issue of the Astronomical Journal, a publication of the American Astronomical Society.

Their hypothesis doesn’t rule out the possibility that Planet Nine might exist, too, Ms. Volk said.

The evidence for both comes from a combination of data scientists have meticulously gathered over many years. Some of it is based on faint castings of reflected sunlight they’ve seen with some of the world’s most powerful telescopes and incremental movement they’ve documented over years. Warped orbits and gravitational relationships to other objects are taken into consideration, as well as many other physical observavtions and mathematical calculations.

A yet to be discovered, unseen "planetary mass object" makes its existence known by ruffling the orbital plane of distant Kuiper Belt objects, according to research by Kat Volk and Renu Malhotra of the UA's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.

Heather Roper/University of ArizonaEnlarge

“We think we see gravitational influence of some things we haven’t seen,” Ms. Volk said, explaining how it would take a large mass to explain the kind of warp they’ve documented in the orbits of other objects.

How far out are we talking? In terms of miles, the numbers are, well, astronomical. Think of it this way: Earth is about 93 million miles from the sun — what scientists refer to as one astronomical unit. The celestial object Ms. Volk and Ms. Malhotra think is out there is believed to be at least 50 AU. That’s 4.65 billion miles, minimum. It could be as many as 100 AU, or 9.3 billion miles from the sun.

Planet Nine is believed to be about 56 billion miles from the sun, roughly 20 times farther than Neptune, which orbits the sun at an average distance of 2.8 billion miles, according to Caltech.

“Our inventory of the distant solar system is not complete,” Ms. Volk said. “I think in the next 10 years we will either find [those two planets] or not.”

Complicating the research are some 2,000 non-planetary objects that have been seen in the Kuiper Belt — a fraction of the 40,000 to 100,000 objects believed to be out there. As technology improves and more objects are identified, astronomers will have a lot more things to keep straight.

“It’s like archaeology,” she said. “We’re trying to find out what happened in the solar system.”

The vastness of it all is hard to comprehend. The Kuiper Belt starts beyond Neptune at about 35 AU, roughly 3.3 billion miles from the sun. Nobody knows exactly how far out the Kuiper Belt extends, the point at which our solar system ends and other parts of the Milky Way begin. But at some point, the sun starts losing its gravitational tug-of-war with other parts of the galaxy.

An artist's rendering of what the planetary mass object the size of Mars in the distant Kuiper Belt might look like.

HEATHER ROPER/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONAEnlarge

So what exactly is a planet? That’s still a source of debate. But scientists generally confer planet status on objects when they are so large they have been formed into a sphere by their own gravity and have cleared their orbital paths of icy objects and other forms of debris. (This is what got Pluto demoted, although there is now a move afoot to restore Pluto’s status as a planet.)

Like other people, Ms. Volk was a star gazer during her youth and often imagined what’s out there in other parts of the galaxy. She loved horseback riding as a child and was good at it — she won numerous championships for showing horses and competitive high-jumping — but she was more bitten by the science bug and fascinated by astrophysics at an early age.

“I’ve always loved space science as long as I can remember,” Ms. Volk said, adding that she attended astronomy summer camps at Michigan State University and Wittenberg University and that she once did the week-long U.S. Space & Rocket Center’s Space Camp in Huntsville, Ala., with her older sister, Amy Hall, who now lives in Indianapolis.

“Most of my childhood was focused on the horses, but I always loved science,” Ms. Volk said. “I always thought school was fun, which is not true for every student.”

Her appetite for astronomy also was whetted by an uncle who’s an amateur astronomer.

“Other fields of astronomy didn’t interest me as much as the solar system and planetary science,” she said. “My research is mostly physics. I study how things orbit the sun.”

In 2006, Ms. Volk earned a bachelor’s degree in physics and Russian Area Studies from Wittenberg, a small private school in Springfield, Ohio, which her sister and her father, Tom Volk, attended before her. She got her Ph.D in planetary sciences from the University of Arizona in 2013.

Her father raced cars for many years. He is owner-president of Ohio Belting & Transmission Co. in Toledo and owns Racer Parts Wholesale in Indianapolis. Her brother, David Volk, is assistant director of Toledo Technology Academy, where her father also has served as a board director for many years. The possibilities of new discoveries keep Kat Volk inspired.

“It’s really exciting to think there could be other planetary life objects out there,” Ms. Volk said. “There’s also a small chance the data could be a fluke. But we think it’s more likely to be out there than not.”

Contact Tom Henry at thenry@theblade.com, 419-724-6079 or via Twitter @ecowriterohio.

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