• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Is “Planet 9” Out There? Astronomers Find Evidence Of Massive Object Beyond Neptune’s Orbit

December 14, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

We have discovered thousands of exoplanets in the last few decades, while the number of planets in the Solar System has remained at eight – but our discovery of more might not yet be over. 

A team of researchers say they have found the “strongest statistical evidence yet that Planet 9 is really out there”, after studying a population of distant, unstable objects that cross Neptune’s orbit.

Advertisement

In 2015, two astronomers from Caltech presented evidence that six objects past the orbit of Neptune were bunched together in a way that suggested they were being “herded” by something with a large gravitational pull. 

Despite suggestions the planet could be due to a statistical anomaly and selection bias, the team believes the objects could be moving due to the influence of a large object beyond Neptune’s orbit. 

In a recent paper, the team looked at long-period objects that crossed the path of Neptune’s orbit, finding that their closest point of orbit to the sun was around 15-30 astronomical units (AU), with one AU being the distance between the sun and the Earth.

ⓘ IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.

Advertisement

Carrying out simulations to try and discover what best explains the orbits of these objects, the team found that a model that includes a massive planet beyond the region of Neptune explained the steady state of these objects much better than in simulations where planet 9 was not included.

ⓘ IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.

Though this is intriguing, the analysis does not narrow down where to look for such a planet. 

It is also not the only possible explanation for the unusual orbits of trans-Neptunian objects. Another team believes it could be down to a close encounter, where a star passed by our own Sun several billion years ago in our history.

Advertisement

The team ran 3,000 simulations of scenarios where stars of various masses passed by our own at different distances. Though we have only discovered an estimated 1-10 percent of TNOs, making further observations and study of their orbits necessary for a full explanation, the researchers found that a close flyby of a slightly smaller star than our own could produce a Solar System that looks remarkably similar to how it looks today.

“The best match for today’s outer Solar System that we found with our simulations is a star that was slightly lighter than our Sun – about 0.8 solar masses,” Amith Govind, co-author of the “close encounter” hypothesis paper, explained in a statement. “This star flew past our sun at a distance of around 16.5 billion kilometres [10.3 billion miles]. That’s about 110 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun, a little less than four times the distance of the outermost planet Neptune.”

Thankfully, we might not have too long to wait for either hypothesis to be further tested. 

“Excitingly, the dynamics described here, along with all other lines of evidence for Planet 9, will soon face a rigorous test with the operational commencement of the Vera Rubin Observatory,” the authors of the Planet Nine paper concluded. “This upcoming phase of exploration promises to provide critical insights into the mysteries of our solar system’s outer reaches.”

Advertisement

The “Planet Nine” study is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and the “close encounter” study in Nature Astronomy.

An earlier version of this article was published in April 2024.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. No ‘magic wand’ to fix Lebanon crisis, new prime minister says
  2. Despite preparation, California pipeline operator may have taken hours to stop leak
  3. Why Physicists Say The Centrifugal Force Is Not Real
  4. Rare Footage Reveals The Courtship Dance Of Pygmy Blue Whales For The First Time

Source Link: Is “Planet 9” Out There? Astronomers Find Evidence Of Massive Object Beyond Neptune’s Orbit

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • What Alternatives Are There To The Big Bang Model?
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version