Scientists may have discovered ninth planet on far reaches of solar system

Planet Nine is, on average, about 20 times further from the sun than Neptune, which orbits at a distance of about 2.8 billion miles.

If telescopes confirm the maths behind the spectacular claims, then it will qualify as the ninth planet in our solar system, leading to books being rewritten and diagrams of the solar system being redrawn.

“We saw a unusual signal in the data that meant something odd was going on in the outer solar system”, Caltech’s Mike Brown told the Guardian.

Sltrib report said, after picking up his son from school and dropping off some carpooling classmates, Ben Bromley spent the rest of the ride home breathlessly sharing Wednesday’s news: The count of planets in the solar system may again reach nine.

Scientists believe it traces a highly elongated orbit and takes between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make just one journey around the sun. One called 2012 VP113, which was discovered in 2014, raised the possibility of a large, distant planet, after astronomers realised its orbit was strangely aligned with a group of other objects. In 2003, Michael led the discovery of a far more modest object named Sedna, a dwarf planet even smaller than Pluto.

“We plotted up the positions of those objects and their orbits, and they matched the simulations exactly”, Brown said.

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

Astronomers with the California Institute of Technology say they have found evidence of a ninth full-size planet, an object with a mass 10 times larger than Earth.

Brown, the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy, said the following.

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. They do know, by its gravitational effects, it is huge, likely at least 10 times bigger than Earth.

Sorry, Pluto but there’s a new kid in town.

Top image: Planet Nine-Artist’s Representation (Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)). This isn’t the first time astronomers have inferred the existence of another planet by calculating the movement of other objects in our solar system. “But I’d also be perfectly happy if someone else found it. That is why we’re publishing this paper”.

Batygin confidently went on to say that when Planet 9 is discovered, it’ll be “era-defining”.