A new ninth planet may have been detected, scientists Say

They found an unusual match: a massive planet in an anti-aligned orbit, which is an orbit in which the planet’s closest approach to the sun is 180 degrees across from the closest approach of the objects and known planets in the solar system.

The research was led by Caltech researcher Mike Brown, who became famous a decade ago for making discoveries that eventually led to the reclassification by the International Astronomical Union of Pluto as a dwarf planet.

According to the researchers, Planet Nine helps explain a number of mysterious features of the field of icy objects and debris beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper Belt. Together, they noted that six of the furthest noted objects in the Kuiper Belt “all follow elliptical orbits that point in the same direction in physical space”.

Batygin and Brown called the object Planet Nine and they are locating it with a large telescope.

The astronomers hypothesize that Planet X has a rocky core with a thick atmosphere, up to about three-fifths the size of Neptune, according to the New York Times, which reports Brown is confident in the new planet’s existence. Brown told the Washington Post he and Batygin “thought their idea was insane”, but used mathematical formulas and computer models to find that Sheppard and Trujillo’s proposal was not so preposterous after all.

This is a distant view from Planet Nine back towards the sun. Of the others: we’re standing on one, Uranus was discovered in 1781, Neptune in 1846 and Pluto (recently relegated) in 1930. Researchers said it would take the planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make one full orbit around the sun.

Alessandro Morbidelli of the Côte d’Azur Observatory in France, an expert in dynamics of the solar system, said he was convinced.

“This would be a real ninth planet”, says Brown.

Now Brown has teamed up with Caltech colleague Konstantin Batygin to do a new analysis of oddities in the orbits of small, icy bodies out beyond Neptune. It is so big that researchers have branded it ‘the most planety planet of the solar system’.

However the Caltech boffins say that with a mass ten times that of Earth, Planet Nine will tick all the necessary planetary definition boxes.

No one has directly observed the possible planet.

“If it does turn out to exist it would expand our knowledge of the solar system and make us question whether there is anything even further out”.

The astronomers argue that it could be the gravitational pull of the giant Planet Nine basically herding these six into an orbit.