Planet Nine's orbital influence would explain why these bodies from the distant Kuiper Belt end up "polluting" the inner Kuiper Belt.
The last telltale sign of Planet Nine's presence involves the solar system's contrarians: objects from the Kuiper Belt that orbit in the opposite direction from everything else in the solar system. "Over long periods of time, Planet Nine will make the entire solar-system plane precess or wobble, just like a top on a table," Batygin said. This could explain a longstanding mystery: Why is the plane in which the planets orbit tilted about 6 degrees compared to the sun's equator? A second article from the team, this time led by Batygin's graduate student, Elizabeth Bailey, showed that Planet Nine could have tilted the planets of our solar system during the last 4.5 billion years. Two more clues emerged after the original paper. Sure enough, Brown realized that five such objects already known to astronomers fill the bill. In fact, the tilt would be on the order of 90 degrees, as if the plane of the solar system and these objects formed an "X" when viewed edge-on. But these orbits also are tilted the same way, about 30 degrees "downward" compared to the pancake-like plane within which the planets orbit the sun.īreadcrumb number three: Computer simulations of the solar system with Planet Nine included show there should be more objects tilted with respect to the solar plane. That would be unlikely-and suspicious-enough. Six known objects in the distant Kuiper Belt, a region of icy bodies stretching from Neptune outward toward interstellar space, all have elliptical orbits pointing in the same direction.
All of a sudden, you have five different puzzles, and you must come up with five different theories to explain them."īatygin and his co-author, Caltech astronomer Mike Brown, described the first three breadcrumbs on Planet Nine's trail in a January 2016 paper, published in the Astronomical Journal. "If you were to remove this explanation and imagine Planet Nine does not exist, then you generate more problems than you solve. "There are now five different lines of observational evidence pointing to the existence of Planet Nine," said Konstantin Batygin, a planetary astrophysicist at Caltech in Pasadena, California, whose team may be closing in. One of its most dedicated trackers, in fact, says it is now harder to imagine our solar system without a Planet Nine than with one. The signs so far are indirect, mainly its gravitational footprints, but that adds up to a compelling case nonetheless. Others believe that instead of a single large planetary mass there could be two "dark super-Earths."Īn alternative theory explaining the elongated orbits of the Sednoids is that they were tugged into their present positions under the gravitational influence of a star that passed close to our solar system early in the history of its evolution and formation.If a planet is there, it's extremely distant and will stay that way (with no chance-in case you're wondering-of ever colliding with Earth, or bringing "days of darkness").It is a possible "Planet Nine"-a world perhaps 10 times the mass of Earth and 20 times farther from the sun than Neptune. They believe it is more likely comparable in size to Neptune. So we can look to see if this orbit falls in line with what we'd expect for the orbit of this hypothetical giant planet out there."Īstronomers believe it is unlikely that Planet X could be comparable in size to Saturn. He added, "If the orbit turns out to be an orbit that stays far away from the giant planet region, it's an orbit that's unperturbed by the orbit of the discovered giant planets. Observations of the elliptical orbits of Sednoids form the basis of the suggestion that there could be an undiscovered planetary mass about the size of Neptune or Uranus in the outer reaches of our solar system. This class of bodies is of special interest to astronomers because their highly-elongated orbits are suggestive of the gravitational influence of a large undiscovered body in the outer fringes of our solar system.
There are presently only two confirmed Sednoids, namely Sedna and 2012 VP113. We just know it's the most distant object known." Until the discovery of V774104, Eris was the most-distant object known in our solar system. It is about 103 astronomical units (15 billion kilometers or 9.6 billion miles) from the Sun, which makes it the most distant trans-Neptunian (TNO) object known in our solar system, farther than Eris, Sedna and 2012 VP113. According to Sheppard, V774104 is likely a dwarf planet between 300 miles (480 kilometers) and 600 miles (965 kilometers) in diameter, about the size of Ceres, a dwarf planet identified as the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
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