Sharjah24 – Reuters: Evidence of the existence of a ninth planet in our solar system is unlikely to be a fluke, according to a pre-print of a California Institute of Technology study co-authored by Michael Brown, the astronomer who led the campaign that saw Pluto demoted from planet to dwarf planet.
Planet Nine, which is theorized to be many times the size of Earth, and would orbit the sun far beyond Neptune, was originally conceived of due to the unusual positioning of a number of icy asteroids and cometary cores in the Kuiper belt, according to NBC News.
There has been recent pushback against the idea, with some suggesting that ‘observation bias’ meant overrating the significance of the cluster. However, the new study, which takes into account a greater number of object observations, calculates just a 0.4 percent chance that the unusual clustering is a fluke.
The new study also calculates that Planet Nine is closer to the sun than previously proposed, with an orbit 380 times the distance between Earth and the sun at its closest, rather than 400 times. This would make Planet Nine brighter and therefore easier to see, even though Planet Nine may also be smaller than previously calculated.
If Planet Nine does exist, Brown’s latest analyses, also published on the site ‘FindPlanetNine,’ would make it likely to be either a rocky super-Earth or a gaseous mini-Neptune, according to National Geographic.
Cited by NBC News, Brown has said that Planet Nine likely formed a similar distance from the sun as Uranus and Neptune, but was thrown to its current far-out position by the strong gravity of Saturn.
Brown has hopes that the planet might be able to be seen in survey data from a new large telescope at the Vera Rubin Observatory in the mountains of northern Chile, scheduled to be fully operational in 2023.
However, interestingly, Brown is currently searching for Planet Nine using existing data, and told National Geographic he believes images of Planet Nine already exist somewhere.
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