Scientists discover possible ninth planet in our solar system

After his team’s discovery of Eris, a trans-Neptunian object, it was initially announced as the tenth planet in the solar system. At that distance, it would take the planet between 10,000 to 20,000 Earth years to complete one trip around the sun.

The researchers planned to provide an update Wednesday morning at Caltech. “If other people – better astronomers – get excited about the idea of finding Planet Nine, we could hopefully see it within a couple of years”, he said. “I don’t see any alternative explanation to that offered by Batygin and Brown”.

“I think it’s going to be a lesson of 21st Century astronomy”, Stern told Mashable in an interview. In addition, the six KBOs’ orbits all share the same tilt – roughly 30 degrees downward, relative to the plane of the eight officially recognized planets. It also provides a way for Brown to assuage those who are angry with him about Pluto’s reclassification.

The last real planet to be discovered in our solar system was Neptune in 1846.

The planet, if it is, in fact, real, is big, at 5,000 times the mass of Pluto. “Neptune could not have gravitationally kicked them out to an orbit with which it doesn’t interact”.

Another scientist, Alan Stern, said he’s withholding judgment on the planet prediction. It seems like there’s a “massive perturber” lurking about, and the gravity of this potential new planet could be influencing the orbits of nearby bodies.

The Caltech group has analysed the movements of objects in a band of far-off icy material known as the Kuiper Belt. “But I’d also be perfectly happy if someone else found it. That is why we’re publishing this paper”.

“These two Kuiper belt objects are really outliers”.

Sedna, seen in an artist’s conception, is a minor planet in distant reaches of the solar sytem discovered by Mike Brown more than a decade ago.

The mysterious world, nicknamed Planet Nine, is about 10 times more massive than the Earth, thought to be gaseous, and similar to Uranus or Neptune.

There have been other searches for previously undiscovered planets at the edge of the solar system, all of which have come up empty.

“We will find it one day”, he added.

Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington said Brown and Batygin’s effort takes his own findings to “the next level”.

Two groups, Before its News and Brussell Sprout, forecast that the world would end before Christmas because Planet X was heading on a collision course with Earth. “So I guess I’ve been working on this for her”. The challenge is, while astronomers have predicted its orbit, they don’t know where the planet is along that orbit. It’s an estimated 20 billion to 100 billion miles away. With a mas about 10 times that of Earth, it would occupy a region of space larger than any known planet, making it “the most planet-y of the planets in the whole solar system”, as Brown said. This combined with its very long orbit makes getting an image of the planet extremely hard.

“It would confirm that long-held belief that I and other theorists have had that the majority of the planets are far beyond the classical ones we grew up with”, Stern said.

“It was probably the runt of the family”, said Sheppard, who co-wrote the paper that originally piqued Brown’s interest.