Scientists: Good evidence for 9th planet in solar system

Caltech researchers say they have found evidence of a giant planet tracing a “bizarre, highly elongated orbit in the outer solar system”.

Two astronomers reported Wednesday that they had compelling signs of something bigger and farther away – something that would definitely satisfy the current definition of a planet, where Pluto falls short.

The pair have detailed their findings in a paper published in the Astronomical Journal today, but as yet they have no direct evidence for the existence of the new planet, which means it’s time for astronomers to fire up their telescopes and get hunting.

Once detected, the researchers insist there will be no Pluto-like planetary debate because one of the researchers, Mike Brown, is the so-called Pluto killer.

“We are pretty sure there’s one out there”, said Michael E. Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology.

But NASA has argued there is no evidence of what they call the “hypothesized celestial body”.

Sheppard, who co-awrote the paper that Brown and Batygin set out to disprove, says the existence of a hidden planet is still a big unknown. Or good backyard telescopes may spot it, they noted, if the planet is relatively closer to us in its swing around the sun. But hints of such a distant world being real have intensified in the last decade, spurred by the discovery of mini-worlds in the comet belt beyond Pluto.

What Brown and a fellow Caltech professor, Konstantin Batygin, have not done is actually find that planet, so it would be premature to revise mnemonics of the planets just yet.

Unlike smaller dwarf planets, Planet 9 dominates its part of the solar system gravitationally a fact that Brown says makes it “the most planet-y of the planets in the whole solar system”. “Until we actually see it for real, it will always be questionable as to whether it exists”, he said, cautioning that the latest calculations are based on a relatively small number of known objects and that further observations and detections of perturbed bodies would bolster the hypothesis.

Sheppard is one of researchers who, after discovering Biden and the unusual orbits, suggested a large planet might be the culprit.

Brown said he walked down the hall to Batygin’s office, and “the two of us sat down and beat our heads against the wall for the last two years”.

An artist’s impression of Planet Nine, which could sit at the edge of our solar system. “I’d be very happy if the Brown-Batygin were the exception to the rule, but we’ll have to wait and see”. Their computer simulations predicted that if this hypothetical planet existed, it would twist the orbits of other small bodies in a certain way.