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NASA Press Release Says Our Solar System Has a 9th Planet

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Earlier this month, NASA issued a press release stating that it’s likely that our solar system has a ninth planet—even if it’s proving difficult to find.

The planet could have a mass ten times that of Earth’s, and be situated twenty times as far from the sun as Neptune. It’s being referred to as “Planet Nine,” and while it’s very difficult to procure clear evidence of its existence, some scientists are absolutely convinced that it’s out there.

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“There are now five different lines of observational evidence pointing to the existence of Planet Nine,” said Konstantin Batygin, a planetary astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), who is part of a team on the search for the planet. “If you were to remove this explanation and imagine Planet Nine does not exist, then you generate more problems than you solve. All of a sudden, you have five different puzzles, and you must come up with five different theories to explain them.”

This image shows the strange, aligning orbits of six distant objects, evidence that our solar system has a ninth planet.

The six most distant known objects in the solar system with orbits exclusively beyond Neptune (magenta) have a tilt and alignment that can only be maintained by some outside force.

(Image credit: Caltech/R. Hurt, IPAC)

The Evidence

In a 2016 paper, Batygin and co-author Mike Brown detailed six known objects in the Kuiper Belt that behave rather strangelty. All of them have elliptical orbits pointing in the same direction, and all of those orbits are titled the same way. Both of these trait serve as clues to the presence of Planet Nine.

Computer simulations that took the hypothesized planet into account indicated that there should also be several other bodies with more extreme tilts from the solar plane, on the order of 90 degrees. Brown realized that astronomers are already aware of five such objects, meaning nature did fit with the simulations.

Finally, there are the objects in the Kuiper belt that orbit in the opposite direction of everything else in our solar system.

“No other model can explain the weirdness of these high-inclination orbits,” explained Batygin. “It turns out that Planet Nine provides a natural avenue for their generation. These things have been twisted out of the solar system plane with help from Planet Nine and then scattered inward by Neptune.”

Based on the behavior of these distant objects, the astronomers believe the planet to be a Super-Earth, a massive rocky planet that is extremely common in the universe—but which our solar system, oddly, lacks. The planet could have coalesced out in the cold reaches of our system over millions of years, formed close to the sun and then been flung outward, or even been captured by the Sun from another system.

Batygin and Brown are using the Subaru Telescope at Hawaii’s Mauna Kea to continue their search for Planet Nine. According to Batygin, this telescope is the best tool available to hunt down something dim and distant in the vast expanse of sky. However, Planet Nine isn’t the only explanation for the orbital behaviors observed. A recent survey of the outer solar system found over 800 trans-Neptunian objects. A random distribution of this matter could also potentially have the same effect on the tilt on the traits observed in various orbits—but the jury is still out.

References: Space.com, NASA

Astronomer Discover More evidence For the Existence of The Elusive Planet 9

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The search for the elusive Planet Nine continues to hold scientists enthralled. Some scientists believe that there may now be even more evidence than before that indicates that Planet Nine could be hovering somewhere on the edge of our solar system.

“There are now five different lines of observational evidence pointing to the existence of Planet Nine,” Konstantin Batygin, a planetary astrophysicist at Caltech, California, whose team is dedicatedly hunting for the distant world and may be closing in, said in a statement. “If you were to remove this explanation and imagine Planet Nine does not exist, then you generate more problems than you solve. All of a sudden, you have five different puzzles, and you must come up with five different theories to explain them.”

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Researchers believe that the yet-to-be discovered Planet Nine could be 10 times the mass of the Earth and 20 times farther away from the Sun than Neptune. Previous doomsday theories about the distant planet speculated that Planet Nine could potentially be a harbinger of destruction, colliding with the Earth and ushering in an apocalypse. However, according to Nasa, if the alien world does exist, it will likely be located so far away that there will be "no chance" of a collision with Earth.

According to Batygin and his co-author, Caltech astronomer Mike Brown, there are five fascinating indications that point to the existence of Planet Nine:-

Six planetary objects discovered in the Kuiper Belt, all of which were discovered to have elliptical orbits pointing in the same direction.
Moreover, each of the orbits of the six objects tilted 30 degrees and downward.
Computer simulations of the solar system revealed that there may be even more tilted planetary objects. “The tilt would be on the order of 90 degrees, as if the plane of the solar system and these objects formed an 'X' when viewed edge-on. Sure enough, Brown realized that five such objects already known to astronomers fill the bill,” Nasa said.
Yet another study by Batygin's graduate student, Elizabeth Bailey, showed that Planet Nine could have tilted the planets in our solar system during the last 4.5 billion years, further solving the mystery of why the planets' orbit is tilted around 6 degrees, when compared to the Sun's equator.
The final sign of Planet Nine's existence is presented by the Kuiper belt objects, which unlike every other planetary body in our solar system, orbit in the opposite direction. According to Nasa, Planet Nine's existence would explain this mysterious behavior.

“No other model can explain the weirdness of these high-inclination orbits,” Batygin said. “It turns out that Planet Nine provides a natural avenue for their generation. These things have been twisted out of the solar system plane with help from Planet Nine and then scattered inward by Neptune. Over long periods of time, Planet Nine will make the entire solar-system plane precess or wobble, just like a top on a table.”

We Now Have More Evidence for the Existence of Planet Nine

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In January of 2016, astronomers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin published the first evidence that there might be another planet in our Solar System. Known as "Planet 9", this hypothetical body was estimated to be about 10 times as massive as Earth and to orbit that our Sun at an average distance of 700 AU. Since that time, multiple studies have been produced that either support or cast doubt on the existence of Planet 9.

While some argue that the orbits of certain Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) are proof of Planet 9, others argue that these studies suffer from an observational bias. The latest study, which comes from a pair of astronomers from the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), offers a fresh perspective that could settle the debate.

Artist's impression of Planet Nine, blocking out the Milky Way. The Sun is in the distance, with the orbit of Neptune shown as a ring. Credit: ESO/Tomruen/nagualdesign

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Using a new technique that focuses on extreme TNOs (ETNOs), they believe the case for Planet 9 can be made. Extreme Trans-Neptunian Objects are those that orbit our Sun at average distances greater than 150 AU, and therefore never cross Neptune's orbit. As the UMC team indicate in their study, which was recently published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the distances between the ETNOs nodes and the Sun may point the way towards Planet 9.

These nodes are the two points at which the orbit of a celestial body crosses the plane of the Solar System. It is at these points that the chances of interacting with other bodies in the Solar System is the greatest, and hence where ETNOs are most likely to experience a drastic change in their orbits (or a collision).

By measuring where these nodes are, the team believed they could tell if the ETNOs are being perturbed by another object in the area. As Carlos de la Fuente Marcos, one of the authors on the study, explained in an interview with The Information and Scientific News Service (SINC):

"If there is nothing to perturb them, the nodes of these extreme trans-Neptunian objects should be uniformly distributed, as there is nothing for them to avoid, but if there are one or more perturbers, two situations may arise.

One possibility is that the ETNOs are stable, and in this case they would tend to have their nodes away from the path of possible perturbers, he adds, but if they are unstable they would behave as the comets that interact with Jupiter do, that is tending to have one of the nodes close to the orbit of the hypothetical perturber".

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For the sake of their research, Doctors Carlos and Raul de la Fuente Marcos conducted calculations and data mining to analyse the nodes of 28 ETNOs and 24 extreme Centaurs (which also orbit the Sun at average distances of more than 150 AUs). What they noticed was that these two populations became clustered at certain distances from the Sun, and also noted a correlation between the positions of the nodes and the inclination of the objects.

This latter find was especially unexpected, and led them to conclude that the orbits of these populations were being affected by the presence of another body – much in the same way that the orbits of comets within our Solar System have been found to be affected by the way they interact with Jupiter.

As De la Fuente Marcos emphasised:

"Assuming that the ETNOs are dynamically similar to the comets that interact with Jupiter, we interpret these results as signs of the presence of a planet that is actively interacting with them in a range of distances from 300 to 400 AU.

We believe that what we are seeing here cannot be attributed to the presence of observational bias".

As already mentioned, previous studies that have challenged the existence of Planet 9 cited how the study of TNOs have suffered from an observational bias. Basically, they have claimed that these studies made systematic errors in how they calculated the orientations in the orbits of TNOs, in large part because they had all been directed towards the same region of the sky.

By looking at the nodal distances of ETNOs, which depend on the size and shape of their orbits, this most recent study offers the first evidence of Planet 9's existence that is relatively free of this bias. At the moment, only 28 ETNOs are known, but the authors are confident that the discovery of more – and the analysis of their nodes – will confirm their observations and place further constraints on the orbit of Planet 9.

In addition, the pair of astronomers offered some thoughts on recent work that has suggested the possible existence of a Planet 10. While their study does not take into account the existence of a Mars-sized body – which is said to be responsible for an observable "warp" in the Kuiper Belt – they acknowledge that there is compelling evidence that such a planet-sized body exists.

As de la Fuente Marcos said:

"Given the current definition of planet, this other mysterious object may not be a true planet, even if it has a size similar to that of the Earth, as it could be surrounded by huge asteroids or dwarf planets.

In any case, we are convinced that Volk and Malhotra's work has found solid evidence of the presence of a massive body beyond the so-called Kuiper Cliff, the furthest point of the trans-Neptunian belt, at some 50 AU from the Sun, and we hope to be able to present soon a new work which also supports its existence".

It seems that the outer Solar System is getting more crowded with every passing year. And these planets, if and when they are confirmed, are likely to trigger another debate about which Solar bodies are rightly designated as planets and which ones aren't. If you thought the "planetary debate" was controversial and divisive before, I recommend staying away from astronomy forums in the coming years!

Scientists May Have Found a New Planet

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Looking at the orbits of objects from the Kuiper Belt - an area primarily comprised of asteroids and frozen objects - researchers argued that there could theoretically be another large object (possibly a planet) in the vicinity, influencing the area. Now, more evidence appears to be reinforcing the idea that there may be a ninth planet hiding at the edge of our system.

Researchers from the Complutense University of Madrid have released research looking into the orbits of objects beyond the planet Neptune. The reason astronomers have to resort to analysing the orbits of the objects in this way, is because the region of space is simply so far away and cannot be observed conventionally.

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Observing how objects interact with each other, their trajectories and whether they cluster together in certain locations, is where the main evidence for Planet 9's existence comes in. In addition to the initial research of the Kuiper Belt, astronomers noticed that the objects beyond Neptune were being clustered and patterned in such a way that denoted a large body.

The Spanish researchers looked for specific points in the orbits of the objects, specifically their nodes - this is the point orbits cross certain places. If there is nothing influencing them, the asteroids and other objects follow a predictable pattern. However, if there are one or more 'perturbers', it's a different story.

Carlos de la Fuente Marcos, one of the authors, told SINC:

If there is nothing to perturb them, the nodes of these extreme trans-Neptunian objects should be uniformly distributed, as there is nothing for them to avoid, but if there are one or more perturbers, two situations may arise.

One possibility is that the ETNOs are stable, and in this case they would tend to have their nodes away from the path of possible perturbers. But if they are unstable they would behave as the comets that interact with Jupiter do, that is tending to have one of the nodes close to the orbit of the hypothetical perturber.

Put simply, if multiple objects behave in a recorded way that don't follow the norm, they are being influenced by something. This supports the theory that there is a massive body, exerting a force and disturbing said objects, at the far reaches of the solar system.

The Independent reports that the scientists are also discussing the possibility of a 10th planet that may be a similar size to Mars. They hope to use similar techniques to identify it.

Scientists Find More Evidence That Mysterious ‘Planet Nine’ Exists

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Scientists are claiming to have found more proof that a planet 10 times the size of Earth is lurking beyond Pluto. The enigmatic ice planet is believed to be so massive that one year there would last around 20,000 Earth years. Theories surrounding the mysterious Planet Ninecame to light last year when scientists noticed a group of small planets called Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOS) behaving strangely.

California Institute of Technology researchers suggested that a massive planet’s gravitational pull might be warping their orbit. If true, experts predict that Planet Nine would be 20 times the distance from the sun as our planet.

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The claims sparked huge debate among the scientific community – and fueled several conspiracy theories that a fabled Planet Nibiru was about to come smashing into Earth. Stargazers at Canadian-French-Hawaiian project OSSOS poured cold water over the research – claiming there were several cases of small planets behaving in this way across the universe.

But two astronomers from the Complutense University of Madrid recently published a study in the journal MNRAS: Letters, which indicates that there is a ninth planet. They introduced a new technique, analyzing Extreme TNOS (ETNOS) at the point where the chance of interacting with other objects is highest.

Here, the ETNOs may experience a drastic change in their orbits or even a collision – indicating that a larger planet is influencing their movement.

“If there is nothing to perturb them, the nodes of these extreme trans-Neptunian objects should be uniformly distributed, as there is nothing for them to avoid, but if there are one or more perturbers, two situations may arise. One possibility is that the ETNOs are stable and in this case, they would tend to have their nodes away from the path of possible perturbers. But if they are unstable they would behave as the comets that interact with Jupiter do, that is tending to have one of the nodes close to the orbit of the hypothetical perturber.” said co-author Carlos de la Fuente Marcos.

Estimated orbital alignment of Planet Nine.Caltech/NASA

By looking at how comets react with Jupiter, they found that the ETNOs are likely being manipulated by a huge object.

“Assuming that the ETNOs are dynamically similar to the comets that interact with Jupiter, we interpret these results as signs of the presence of a planet that is actively interacting with them in a range of distances from 300 to 400 AU,” added De la Fuente Marcos.

The discovery of Planet Nine comes with a grim warning. It could destroy the solar system by causing devastating “death dance,” sending planets “pinballing” into outer space or plunging into the sun, astronomers have warned.

But the terrifying events won’t take place for another seven billion years, when the sun begins to die and the solar system collapses.

Mysterious ‘Planet Nine’ Might Not Actually Exist After All

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Skywatchers have been theorizing and dreaming about a mysterious unknown planet hanging out at the edge of our Solar System for many years. Sifting through an incredible amount of data, both professional scientists and amateur space sleuths have suggested that a planet is hiding somewhere past the recently demoted Pluto, and have repeatedly claimed that they have evidence that the reclusive world is out there.

Now, after extensive study of four large bodies in the outer reaches of the Solar System seems to cast some serious doubt on Planet Nine’s existence, and it’s a huge blow to the effort of many astronomers in the ongoing search.

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The research, which focused on a huge collection of objects in our system called the Kuiper belt, looked for the telltale signs of a hidden planet affecting the movement of a handful of large objects known to exist there. By detecting anomalies in the path of each object, scientists could have proven that an unseen force is acting on them, but unfortunately for Planet Nine believers, no irregularities were found.

Initially, researchers believed that the clustering of several large Kuiper belt objects may have occurred thanks to the force of a massive planet pulling them closer together. However, lengthy observation from Earth using the powerful Canada-France-Hawaii telescope, astronomers now believe that the appearance of clustering was actually a product of observations conducted under poor visibility.

As unfortunate as the news is for those who have been searching for evidence of Planet Nine, there’s still some good news. The clustering of objects was only one of many potential clues that point to the existence of a hidden planet, and there are still many other unexplained observations of objects moving in the outer Solar System that suggest a planet may still be lurking out there, though further research is needed before any conclusions can be made.

Astronomers Have Officially Found a Candidate for Planet Nine

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