For nearly a century scientists have suspected that an undiscovered planet is lurking on the edge of our solar system, and now there’s new evidence that this mysterious “Planet X” really does exist.
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No-one has seen the planet yet, but the team, from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), believe the way other far-flung objects are seen to move indicates the presence of the planet which would orbit far beyond dwarf world Pluto.
Rather, they found it through mathematical modeling and computer simulations. “I want to understand where it is, and I think this will help”.
Dr. Brown and Dr. Batygin published a detailed circumstantial argument pleading in favor of the planet’s existence in a report published in The Astronomical Journal. It’s possible that when the solar system was forming, the ninth planet was flung into its current orbit by the gravitational influence of either Jupiter or Saturn.
“There have only been two true planets discovered since ancient times, and this would be a third”, said Brown. “This is a prediction”.
The region that it gravitationally dominates, according to the Cal Tech release and researcher Mike Brown, “makes it ‘the most planet-y of the planets in the whole solar system'”. “We have not found the object itself”, he stressed, adding that the actual discovery when it happens will be “era-defining”.
“We have pretty good constraints on [the planet’s] orbit”, Dr. Brown told The New York Times.
The Astronomer Royal Prof Sir Martin Rees said that telescopes should be able to see the planet.
How a planet ended up so far away and secreted away in a odd orbit remains a question.
Planet 9 should be large enough for some of our largest telescopes to spot – and confirmed observations of the object in orbit would be required for it to be officially recognised and named.
Nicknamed Planet Nine, the object is 2 to 4 times the size of Earth’s diameter. Unfortunately for the little guy, its status as a planet was recently stripped and we’re only just getting used to calling it a dwarf planet. It was visited by Earth for the first time last July; NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft accomplished the first-ever flyby.
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The scientists believe that Planet X was thrown into deep space by Jupiter or Saturn a long time ago, according to the Washington Post. “When the simulation aligned the distance Kuiper Belt objects and created objects like Sedna, we though this is kind of awesome-you kill two birds with one stone”, said Batygin. “Prediction is not discovery”.
