Scientists looking for 9th planet orbiting sun every 20000 years

Using supercomputer simulations, California Institute of Technology astronomers Konstantin Batygin, a theoretician, and Mike Brown, who has been credited with the discovery of a number of dwarf planets, believe that they are on to something.

No sooner had we got used to the idea of there being only eight planets in our solar system, after Pluto was demoted to “dwarf” status, astronomers have gone and found a new hidden planet that’s at least 10 times more massive than Earth.

Scientists have found evidence of a ninth planet in the solar system which is travelling on a freaky elongated orbit, BBC said.

Only two planets – Uranus and Neptune – have been discovered in our solar system since ancient times.

Though no one directly observed the proposed planet yet, Brown is confident Planet Nine could still be seen if the most powerful telescopes all point in the same precise direction. “It’s a pretty substantial chunk of our solar system that’s still out there to be found”, he added. The objects are likely from the Kuiper Belt, a region of the solar system beyond Neptune that is believed to contain many asteroids, comets, and other small bodies.

Their work was published in the Astronomical Journal. A single orbit would take the planet between 10,000 and 20,000 Earth years to complete. Although Brown told the Times they have “pretty good constraints” on the planet’s orbit, they don’t know exactly where it is in that orbit, which could make it hard to spot.

The paper has been peer-reviewed by Alessandro Morbidelli, a planetary dynamicist at the Nice Observatory in France, who said in a statement that the pair made a “very solid argument” and that he is “quite convinced by the existence of a distant planet”.

On Wednesday, two astronomers reported 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. 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.

“And I’m really hoping that as we announce this, people start a worldwide search to go find this ninth planet”. About 0.007%. “So we thought something else might be shaping these orbits”.

Despite its large size, however, researchers are still working to determine the exact location of the planet, since only its highly elliptical orbit has been determined.