Planet ‘Nine’ is playing hide-and-seek
Planet ‘Nine’ playing hide-and-seek, and its hiding right beyond Neptune.
And the mysterious therories of the ninth planet is back again. Many have raised a question whether there is a ninth planet? Well if you go by the latest report, yes there exist a planet nine. But there is Planet Nine doesn’t officially exist … yet. Even if there is, it would be way too far away for stargazers to see with the naked eye or even a big telescope. Astronomers are still convinced a mysterious ‘Planet Nine’ exists beyond Neptune.
Researchers spotted a distant rocky object that they suggest was pushed into an “extraordinary orbit” by the gravitational pull of an uncharted planet. They say that their finding bolsters the ever-convincing case that a so-called “Planet Nine” exists.
Planet Nine was first theorised by experts at Caltech in 2016 when they spotted that a group of icy objects on the edges of the solar system have tilted orbits. They suggested the orbits of these lumps of ice – so-called Trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) – were warped by the gravitational pull of a ninth planet in the solar system.
Even NASA had officially claimed that it is harder to imagine our solar system without a Planet Nine. “There are now five different lines of observational evidence pointing to the existence of Planet Nine,” Konstantin Batygin, a planetary astrophysicist at Caltech in Pasadena, California, had said in the NASA 2017 press release. “If you were to remove this explanation and imagine Planet Nine does not exist, then you generate more problems than you solve. All of a sudden, you have five different puzzles, and you must come up with five different theories to explain them,” he added.
The planet, named Planet Nine, is believed to be 10 times bigger than Earth and 20 times farther out from the sun than Neptune – the outer-most planet in the solar system. While Planet Nine’s existence has yet to be officially proven, esteemed researchers strongly suspect that there is a large planet lurking in the far edge of our solar system. Scientists are now experimenting with ways to confirm its existence.