Question: How high is the probability of the existence of a ninth planet in the solar system? When should we expect an unambiguous answer to the question of its existence?
Answer: This question for the last several years is actively discussed in the scientific community. Indeed, there is some reason to believe that beyond the orbit of Neptune there may be another undiscovered large celestial body. When I say large, I mean a celestial body with a mass approximately equal to ten Earth masses. At the moment, it is absolutely impossible that there could be another giant planet like Jupiter or Saturn beyond the orbit of Neptune.
How do we know that such a celestial body can exist?
The fact is that there are rather strange patterns in the orbits of trans neptunian objects. It looks like they are lined up in the same direction and it is up to us to understand why this happened. It could also be that it just happened by chance, although this is highly unlikely. Much better such orbits can be explained by the presence of another planet, which by its gravitational influence made the small trans neptunian bodies to line up exactly this way and not otherwise.
Calculations show that if such a planet exists, it is now in the region of its apogee (or otherwise — aphelion) — the farthest point of its…
