There may be a Planet Nine in our solar system located beyond Pluto
(Mirror Daily, United States) – Astronomers have been hoping to find new planets in our galaxy for a long time now and finally scientists might have found planet nine.
Since 2003, a team of researchers at the California Institute of Technology have discovered several dwarf planets orbiting on the Kuiper Belt. However, dwarf planets are supposed to be wannabe planets and not exactly the real thing, pretty much like Pluto’s story. What the astronomers saw was that these dwarf planets as well as some other cosmic objects have a very regular pattern of movement which is quite curious for objects located at such a great distance from the sun.
But discovering this singular orbit has led scientists to believe that the only explanation for its existence is that there is a planet orbiting around our Sun in a timeframe of 10,000 to 20,000 years. This means the said planet is located very far away from the center of our galaxy, far beyond Pluto, which has been considered to be the ninth planet in our solar system until 2006. Now, this mystery planet could take its place.
Astronomers are going to use the Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea to try and get a glimpse of the planet to discover how it looks like. When it comes to its size, scientists believe it should be somewhere in between Earth and Neptune, so it would be the fifth planet in our solar system as size.
Why is this Planet Nine so far away from the sun? It is thought that when our solar system was formed and major cores gathered gas to form Neptune, Uranus Saturn and, of course, Jupiter, this planet has been somehow cast off. Being so far away, it is very difficult to observe even with the most powerful telescope.
However, other astronomers were convinced by this theory and are making plans to help in the discovery of the Planet Nine. In other words, since scientists around the world are mobilizing for this search, it probably means that we will pretty soon manage to see images of this long lost planet.
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