Could there be a planet the same size and mass as earth on exactly the opposite side of the sun ?

Question

could there be a planet the same size and mass as earth on exactly the opposite side of the sun in the same orbital position so we could never actualy see it?

Answer 1

i think some people are misunderstanding your question, i am assuming you have basic knowledge and do in fact know the earth orbits the sun. i think you are asking if there could be another planet half an orbit behind (or in front) of the earth. the answer is no, this is for 2 reasons:
1) the earth orbits the sun in an ellipse not a circle, this means that at some points during an orbit the other planet would not be hidden behind the sun and would be visible.
2)even if we couldn't see it we would still be able to feel its effects ie. its gravity would have an impact on the orbits of the inner planets.

Answer 2

No.

The planets' orbits are slightly elliptical with the sun at one of the axes. If there was another planet orbiting exactly half way round we would still glimpse it at some point in the year. Also considering that there has been so many space probes sent out there one of them would have found it by now.

Answer 3

No.
we can predict the path of all the planets with a very high degree of accuracy.
Just because we can't see it directly, does't mean it wouldn't have an effect on the other planets nearby.
It would affect the orbit of mars and venus and could be measured and deduced.
it would simply take a probe to confirm its location and mass if mathematical models indicated that there was a "problem" with the inner planets orbits.

Answer 4

If there was we would know about it.

Everything with any mass has a gravitational field. The smaller the thing, the smaller the field. The moon's gravitational pull is what affects our tides. Something the size of the planet earth would have a big enough gravitational pull to affect things around it, which we would notice.

Answer 5

No. Astronomers know the masses and gravitational pull of every planet in the solar system. They would have already known about it by having to account for the extra G forces in the solar system acting on the planetary orbits even without seeing it.

Answer 6

Yes, but with two conditions,

1) It is completely invisible to the naked eye and any detection instruments

2) even though its mass is identical to earth, for some reason it exerts absolutely no pull on other astronomical bodies!

Honestly, who asks a question like this?

Answer 7

No, it cannot. You see, planets ORBIT around the sun. This means that thay REVOLVE or CIRCLE around the sun. They keep moving around it so there can't be an empty side where another Earth can exist.

Extra knowledge: The Earth moves around the sun ONCE in a YEAR.

Thanks for the question

Answer 8

No, but that was the plot of a Twilight Zone episode a long time ago. If there was a planet there, we would see indications of it by observing the patterns of the stuff we can see--its gravitational pull would give it away.

Answer 9

In 1772, the famed Italian-French mathematician Joseph Louis Lagrange was working on the infamous three-body problem when he discovered an interesting quirk in the results.

Lagrange’s work led him to hypothesize how a third body of negligible mass would orbit around two larger bodies which were already orbiting one another, which at specific points in its orbit would become stationary relative to one of its host bodies (planets). These points were named “Lagrangian points” in Lagrange's honour.

In theory, Lagrangian point L3 (180 degrees away from us, around our orbit) is somewhere that another body could be in stable orbit, but only if it was much much smaller in size and mass than the earth.

The Lagrangian points are the five positions in interplanetary space where a small object affected only by gravity can theoretically be stationary relative to two larger objects (such as a satellite with respect to the Earth and Moon).

The Lagrangian Points mark positions where the combined gravitational pull of the two large masses provides precisely the centripetal force required to rotate with them. They are analogous to geosynchronous orbits in that they allow an object to be in a "fixed" position in space rather than an orbit in which its relative position changes continuously.

Lagrangian Points L4 and L5 are occupied more often than L3 in practice. L4 is 60 degrees ahead of the orbiting body and L5 60 degrees behind it in its orbit.

Examples:

(a) The Sun–Earth L4 and L5 points lie 60° ahead of and 60° behind the Earth in its orbit around the Sun. They contain interplanetary dust.

(b) The Sun–Jupiter L4 and L5 points are occupied by the Trojan asteroids.

(c) Neptune has Trojan Kuiper Belt Objects at its L4 and L5 points.

(d) Saturn's moon Tethys has two much smaller satellites at its L4 and L5 points named Telesto and Calypso.

(e) The Saturnian moon Dione also has two Lagrangian co-orbitals, Helene at its L4 point and Polydeuces at L5.

(f)The giant impact hypothesis suggests that an object named Theia formed at L4 or L5 and crashed into the Earth after its orbit destabilized, forming the moon.

Tethys and Dione are hundreds of times more massive than their "escorts" and Saturn is far more massive still, which makes the overall system stable.

As regards the L3 point in the Earth-Sun system, Wikipedia has this to say:

"L3 in the Sun–Earth system exists on the opposite side of the Sun, a little farther away from the Sun than the Earth is, where the combined pull of the Earth and Sun again causes the object to orbit with the same period as the Earth. The Sun–Earth L3 point was a popular place to put a "Counter-Earth" in pulp science fiction and comic books - though of course, once space based observation was possible via satellites and probes, it was shown to hold no such object."

There are no known large bodies in the Sun–Earth system's L4 and L points, but clouds of dust surrounding the L4 and L5 points were discovered in the 1950s.

Clouds of dust, called Kordylewski clouds, even fainter than the notoriously weak gegenschein, are also present in the L4 and L5 points of the Earth–Moon system.

To see a diagram of the 5 Lagrangian points and read further details, see the link below

Answer 10

You've been watching the 1970's B movie "Journey to the Other side of the sun"...


Technically there is no reason whatsoever for this NOT to happen but I'm afraid there isn't one beause we would have been it by now from all our deep space mission.