Space
New planet in the solar system? This is the new discovery by scientists that could change the view of our planetary neighborhood
A powerful new tool comes online this year that could help astronomers locate the mysterious planet hiding somewhere beyond Neptune altering object orbits.
If you get the question in Trivial Pursuit “how many plantes are there in the Solar System?”, depending on when you went to school or how old the version is, there’s a fair chance of giving the wrong answer. That’s because Pluto was downgraded from a “planet” to a “dwarf planet” in 2016 by the International Astronomical Union (IAU).
However, this year a powerful new telescope is coming online that could prove once and for all that there really is a ninth planet in our Solar System. The same year that Pluto was ignominiously stripped of its status, a paper was published theorizing that there was another planet, a very big planet, beyond Neptune.
The Planet Nine theory was based on several trans-Neptunian objects, those that are beyond the eighth planet, with highly “tilted” orbits compared to the ecliptic plane. This seemed odd and illogical as when the Solar system formed, it would be expected that objects that developed in the circumstellar disk would orbit around the Sun on a more or less flat plane like the eight planets.
A powerful telescope could solve the “Planet Nine” mystery
The planet theorized by California Institute of Technology (Caltech) astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, also called Planet X, is believed to be roughly seven times the mass of Earth but could be anywhere between five and ten times more massive. However, it is somewhere between 500 and 700 times further from the Sun than Earth making it incredibly hard to see. For perspective, Neptune is 30 times farther from the Sun than Earth.
Additionally, its orbit around the Sun could take 10,000 to 20,000 years making it difficult to locate. That said, scientists have a general idea where it should be, but current telescopes just aren’t powerful enough to properly search that portion of space. However, this year the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, built on a mountain top in Chile, will begin making observations of the night sky.
Every couple of days it will scan the night sky with the largest camera in the world. With any luck it may happen across the mysterious Planet Nine, but more likely it will identify a lot more trans-Neptunian objects and their orbits. With that new data astronomers will be able to see if the highly tilted orbits of the known objects are anomalies or if the trend continues.
If they discover that the new objects have random orbits that don’t follow the trend that has been seen so far, then it could disprove the notion that there is a ninth planet lurking out in the darkness of our Solar System beyong Neptune. But should the orbits of the new objects follow the trend, it will build a stronger case for Planet Nine.
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