Evidence found of far-flung ninth planet in our solar system

So if this Planet Nine exists, it will be ten times as massive as the Earth.

The mysterious planet, dubbed Planet X, is expected to be 1,200 times as far away as Neptune, and it may be taking as many as 20,000 years to complete an orbit around the Sun.

Bigger than our world…

The two researchers set out to explain why smaller planetary bodies like Sedna (another distant object Brown discovered) were lined up in odd orbits.

It is surrounded by much brighter lights – even the distant Pluto could be about 10,000 times brighter – and so scientists have to be sure that they point telescopes at exactly the right point and pick out an already very unlikely speck of light. But if they find this one, will you be pleased to see the solar system restored to nine planets again?

Now Caltech researchers have found evidence of a giant planet tracing a weird, highly elongated orbit in the outer solar system.

Brown and Batygin’s theory is all the more interesting because Brown was the astronomer primarily responsible for Pluto’s classification as a dwarf planet about 10 years ago.

Now, the task for stargazers worldwide is to visibly confirm the existence of Planet Nine, somewhere within the calculated planetary orbit. The researchers say it would take Planet Nine up to 20,000 years to orbit the sun.

But when the International Astronomical Union decided in 2006, to issue a new definition of “planet”, neither Eris nor Pluto made the cut.

Other scientists, such as Alessandro Morbidelli of the Côte d’Azur Observatory in France, affirmed that they are convinced by the arguments of the Caltech scientists and that they will start working to find this ninth planet. They do not know where it is and have not been able to spot it.

The planet has not been seen it directly, but its existence has been extrapolated from the movement of dwarf planets in the outer solar system. “There is solid evidence that the solar system’s planetary census is incomplete”.

Batygin and Brown were now refining their simulations, while Brown and his other colleagues would scout the skies for Planet Nine. It’s a gazillion miles away, but apparently it’s big enough to “clear the neighborhood” and thus qualify as a real planet. The two noticed that six of them seemed to be moving in a coordinated way – like their elliptical orbits all pointed in the same direction in physical space.

How could astronomers go so long without realizing another planet was out there?