Trappings Of The Ninth Planet Revealed

A ninth planetary contender in the solar system may exist after all, researchers claimed on Wednesday.

According to The New York Times, the theorized planet's orbit has been estimated and so has its impact on distant objects beyond Neptune. All that remains to be done is to actually spot the planet! A team of researchers, including a scientist who helped oust Pluto from the planetary world, has proposed that the ninth planet could be as large as Neptune and ten times heavier than Earth.

"This would be a real ninth planet," Michael. E. Brown said. "There have only been two true planets discovered since ancient times, and this would be a third. It's a pretty substantial chunk of our solar system that's still out there to be found, which is pretty exciting."

Dubbed the 'Inclined Perturber', the ninth planet is the best fit to explain the movement and alignment of nearly half a dozen Kuiper Belt Objects (KBO). Observations have revealed that some of the objects point in the same direction in their highly elliptical orbits. These observations remained unexplained satisfactorily until the latest theory put forth by Michael. E. Brown and his colleagues. Given the small odds of such similarity in movement, the explanation of a cause became warranted.

"We find that the observed orbital alignment can be maintained by a distant eccentric planet with mass > 10 m⊕ [mass of earth] whose orbit lies in approximately the same plane as those of the distant KBOs, but whose perihelion is 180° away from the perihelia of the minor bodies," the researchers wrote in The Astronomical Journal.

In essence a giant planet, which when placed pointing opposite to the KBOs, could explain the observations. The planet in its orbit would be much farther than Pluto is from the Sun, the team noted.