Planet 9 is running out of places to hide
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Loading... - Yui Yamamoto
- 02 Aug 2022
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We have a pretty good idea of what lurks within our solar system
We have a pretty good idea of what lurks within our solar system. We know there isn't a Mars-sized planet orbiting between Jupiter and Saturn, nor a brown dwarf nemesis heading our way. Anything large and fairly close to the sun would be easily spotted. But we can't rule out a smaller, more distant world, such as the hypothetical Planet 9 (or Planet 10 if you want to throw down over Pluto). The odds against such a planet existing are fairly high, and a recent study finds it even less likely.
Many astronomers have wondered about the existence of planets that might hide at the edge of our solar system, particularly when the power of our telescopes were fairly limited.
But as large sky surveys started to scan the heavens they found nothing beyond asteroid-sized worlds. But the orbits of the worlds we did find seemed to be clustered in a statistically odd way, as if they were being gravitationally perturbed by a larger object. If that were the case, this Planet 9 would have a mass of about five Earths, and an orbital distance of a few hundred to a thousand astronomical units. In other words, just small enough and distant enough that it wouldn't be easily seen in sky surveys. Read More...
