Instead, they say, a planet with the mass of 10 Earths has forced the six objects into their unusual elliptical orbits, tilted out of the plane of the solar system.
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Astronomers have found evidence of a big, undiscovered “Planet Nine” far beyond Pluto, and a SpaceX rocket almost landed soflty on a ship at sea after a successful satellite launch.
The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) researcher and his colleague Konstantin Batygin think that Planet 9 which is lurking at the edge of our solar system is about three times larger than Earth.
That distance is roughly the equivalent of 200 astronomical units (AU), with one AU equal to the Earth-Sun distance, or 93 million miles.
It is no wonder that it takes the celestial body over 20,000 Earth years to complete one orbit! Scientists have previously speculated that there could be a missing planet in our solar system, with some theorizing that a collision caused it to be ejected out of our system some 4 billion years ago.
Observers note this isn’t the first time astronomers relied heavily on data and theoretical mathematics to discover a planet before it was found by stargazing telescopes.
They also claimed to have found a description of a huge planet among the work of the ancient Babylonian civilisation, a society well known for being pioneers of astronomy.
They theorize the planet formed with the other gas giants only to be subsequently thrown into a much more distant orbit through a gravitational interaction with another body.
Furthermore, if it existed, this large planet would push other KBOs into perpendicular orbits, a phenomenon actually observed in the outer Kuiper Belt over the last three years.
After 1992, the discovery of numerous small icy objects with similar or even wider orbits than Pluto led to a debate over whether Pluto should remain a planet, or whether it and its neighbors should, like the asteroids, be given their own separate classification. In 1978, Pluto was conclusively determined to be too small for its gravity to affect the giant planets, resulting in a brief search for a tenth planet. Could this “ninth” planet be what they’re looking for?
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To verify their suspicion, Brown and Batygin inserted a simulated planet between the objects. Let’s just see in year 2021 if Brown’s prediction does come true.
