There have been questions about a mysterious ninth planet in our solar system for almost a decade.
Pluto was destroyed in number new in 2006. Now a group of international researchers says they may have found a candidate – although nothing is certain.
“I felt very excited,” said Terry Long Phan, a student graduated in astronomy at the Tsing Hua National University of Taiwan Science this week. “It motivated us a lot.”
Phan was the main author of the results in a study which was accepted for publication in the journal Publications of the Australian Astronomical Society. Research was initially published on the Preprint Arxiv server.
The researchers used surveys on the sky from two infrared space telescopes that were launched in 1983 and 2006. They theorized that the potential orbit of a planet would allow them to see it move in the sky. They found 13 pairs of points that could be explained by a moving planet that looked like the new planet. A set of points had colors and matching brightness.
However, the announcement encountered some skepticism.
Mike Brown, a Caltech astronomer, who was part of the team responsible for the hypothesis in 2016, told the publication that he was not convinced that the infrared points that Phan and his team identified from infrared satellite data is a ninth planet. Its calculations suggest that the body would be on a much greater inclination than the plane of the solar system and orbit in a different direction from the known planets.
This difference “does not mean that it is not there, but it means that it is not Planet new,” said Brown Science. “I do not think that this planet would have any of the effects on the solar system that we think we see.”
But, if researchers are right, their planet would refute the original planet. They would make the orbits of the other unstable and could not exist together, he explained.
“It is a bit fun that a newspaper that claims to find a candidate for Planet Nine really finds something that would essentially say that we were wrong all the time,” he noted.
However, skepticism does not mean that there is nothing there.
The argument for the planet has to do with the Kuiper belt: a region of frozen debris far beyond the orbit of Neptune. The hypothetical planet would explain strange orbits of objects there.
Theoretically, the planet of the size of Neptune Brown and his colleague Konstantin Batygin discovered that orbit about 20 to 30 times further from the sun than Neptune, taking between 10,000 and 20,000 years of land to make a complete orbit around our star.
“Although we are initially quite skeptical about the fact that this planet can exist, when we have continued to investigate its orbit and what it would mean for the external solar system, we become more and more convinced that it is there,” said Batygin, assistant professor of planetary science, in 2016. “For the first time in more than 150 years.”
No observational evidence of Planet Nine has been found, although it was not the first time that a candidate has been identified in infrared data. The last time was in 2021.
Some researchers even postulate that evidence pointing towards the existence of an unknown ninth planet can in fact indicate that our ideas of gravity are incorrect.
Only time can shed light on the truth. Astronomers will have a more in -depth examination using the Roman space telescope of Nancy Grace and the Verra C observatory on the Cerro Pachón mountain in Chile.
“It is quite surprising to think that something as big as Neptune could be seated there and that no one would have noticed it,” said Gary Bernstein, astronomer of the University of Pennsylvania Science. “But if you put it far enough, it becomes very quickly and weaker.”
