There May Be a Ninth Planet After All Says CalTech Astronomer

In an interview with the Astronomical Journal, Brown and his colleague, Konstantin Batygin, stated that this planet is approximately 10 times larger than the Earth. By their calculations, the perturbing body would be roughly ten times the mass of Earth and orbiting the Sun at hundreds of times farther than Pluto.

Brown says that while observing Sedna, they noticed that is had an odd orbit, nearly like it was being affected by the gravitational pull of a larger planet.

But before you start celebrating and adding the new plane to your solar system chart and song, keep in mind that the existence of Planet 9 has only been confirmed with computer simulations – No human has ever seen it. In fact, Brown and Batygin are not even sure of its exact location.

Some science buffs have long believed in the existence of a distant ninth planet, but were ridiculed by the scientific community for years, The Sun reports.

Rogue scientists had speculated about the existence of another planet since the 1800s, but their theories were rubbished and the search for what they termed “Planet X” was called off. The real smoking gun was at the edge of the Kuiper belt, the disk of debris that circles the Solar System and is home to dwarf planets like Pluto and Eris.

However, some theorist may have already predicted this earlier than Brown and Batygin did. But when or if the faint glimmer of Planet Nine is detected, it will be the first planet to be discovered since Neptune was first observed in 1846.

Bolstering the theory are many observations of similar planets in other solar systems, suggesting this is a fairly common planetary configuration in the universe.

The problem is that Planet 9, if it exists, orbits the sun every 15,000 to 20,000 years – so it isn’t easy to spot.

So the man whose discovery led to Pluto’s being stricken from the roster of planets has now found evidence of a substitute.

This is especially fitting for Brown, because he is the astronomer who notoriously demoted Pluto to a dwarf planet, thus slimming the Solar System to eight known planets. Many scientists feel the findings are strong enough to begin the quest to pinpoint the object predicted to be 10 times bigger than the Earth.

The orbit of the inferred planet is similarly tilted, as well as stretched to distances that will explode previous conceptions of the solar system.