Planet Nine’s average distance from the Sun should be about 56 billion miles away. For comparison, our little blue planet averages 93 million miles away from the Sun, while Neptune orbits at a distance of about 2.8 billion miles, where the Sun is much dimmer and appears only about 3.3 percent of its size in our sky. If Planet Nine exists, it’s out in the cold, dark fringes of our Solar System.īatygin and Brown’s models say that Planet Nine should be, on average, about 20 times further from the Sun than Neptune. No, Planet Nine has not been observed as of this moment.
Some astronomers have been hunting for Planet Nine ever since, while others have fiercely debated whether the unseen giant planet exists. In 2016, Caltech astronomers Michael Brown and Konstantin Batygin published the results of their computer models, which suggested that a planet about the mass of Neptune, orbiting unseen about 20 times further from the Sun than Neptune, could provide the gravitational nudge that explains the cluster of small Kuiper Belt objects. These objects are believed to have been flung into their weird orbits by Planet Nine. It looks as if these small objects’ orbits are stretched and tilted by the gravity of something much bigger: an unseen planet. They’re all tilted at about the same slight angle relative to most of the Solar System, and they all make their closest pass to the Sun in roughly the same sector of the Solar System. These objects - including the dwarf planet Sedna - all loop around the Sun in long, narrow elliptical orbits. These objects are all in the Kuiper Belt, the same region of the Solar System that contains Pluto. Its presence is one possible explanation for the weird way a handful of small icy objects in the outskirts of the solar system seem to cluster into very similar orbits. Planet Nine is a hypothetical giant planet that might be orbiting the Sun somewhere beyond Pluto. Here’s everything you need to know about the possible lost sibling of the solar system, from the basic theory to where it may be located, its orbit, and more. And not all of them take it as a matter of time - several astronomers think that it may just be a sampling bias that may not be as weird as it seems. While the several dwarf planets seem to point toward this unseen, larger-than-Earth object, it has eluded astronomers thus far. For the last few years, astronomers have been searching for - and debating the existence of - Planet Nine, a giant planet orbiting somewhere far beyond Pluto and exerting an unseen influence on the orbits of smaller objects in the outer Solar System.
Our Solar System may be a lot more complicated than it looks.
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