New Evidence Points to Mysterious Planet Nine
The case for this elusive world keeps mounting
The race to find Planet Nine — sometimes known as Planet X out of respect for the now demoted Pluto — began early a couple of years ago when two astronomers noticed several objects in the Kuiper Belt behaving in a very strange way. The objects should have had random orbits, yet instead they traveled in the same direction, their oval paths stretching out into the same quadrant of the universe. The chances of this being a coincidence? 1 in 14,000. The solution to this, according to planetary scientists Konstantin Batygin and Michael E. Brown, was to suppose that far out beyond Pluto there loomed a huge and elusive planet shepherding these objects into their identical orbits. This planet would be 4 times the size of Earth and 10 times its mass, classifying it as a super-Earth. And while there are many planetary systems with several super-Earths in orbit around their stars, we have none. Our solar system ranges from small, cratered bodies like Mercury to gas giants like Jupiter and the very dense Neptune, with nothing in between despite how common super-Earths are (super-Earths are, in fact, the most common category of mass for planets in the universe, making it very strange that our solar system doesn’t posses any).
