We Saw Planet 9 In The 80s (Possibly)
The mysterious world hidden from view may finally be revealing itself
How many planets are there in our Solar System? The answer may seem straightforward as we can only see eight. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. But for decades scientists have pondered on whether there is a giant, hidden planet in the far far reaches of the our system, whose gravitational pull bends the orbits of asteroids and planetoids beyond Neptune. But, despite every effort to find this mysterious object, it has eluded us. Or has it? A recent study may have found our distant world in 40-year-old data. Is this the missing ‘Planet 9’?
Before we can look at this 1980s data, we first need to know why Planet 9 could exist and why we have struggled to find it for so long.
Past Neptune, in the outer reaches of the Solar System, there are thousands-upon-thousands of asteroid-like objects known as the Kuiper Belt. Most of these are clumps of frozen nitrogen, fragments of planets and even captured interstellar objects. But their orbits are bizarre and can’t be explained by the gravitational effects of Neptune alone.
