Search for ‘Planet Nine’ turns up extreme objects at the edge of the solar system

For the past several years, scientists have been gathering more and more evidence indicating a large planetary object is orbiting our Sun at a distant far outside the orbit of Neptune.

The evidence for a so-called Planet Nine is based on observations of known extremely distant objects in our Solar System are apparently being disturbed by the gravity of a large planetary body, and a new paper set to be published in The Astronomical Journal has identified several more of these distant affected objects.

The positioning and orbits of small, “extreme trans-Neptunian objects”, can help define the size and range from the Sun of the ninth planet, because that planet’s gravity impacts the movements of the smaller objects beyond Neptune.

Finding New Planetary Objects

In 2014, researchers announced the discovery of 2012 VP113, dubbed “Biden”, which has the furthest known orbit in our Solar System. Upon the discovery of Biden, researchers also noticed a number of other extreme trans-Neptunian objects all bunched up with comparable orbital angles. This led them to theorize that there is a planet at over 200 times our distance from the Sun. Possibly ranging in size from a few Earths to a Neptune equivalent, the object is seemingly pushing smaller objects into very similar kinds of orbits.

Further work since 2014 has further defined Planet Nine’s potential properties. Evaluation of “neighboring” small body orbits indicate that it is many times more immense than Earth, possibly around 15 times the size, and at the nearest point of its extremely extended, oblong orbit it is a minimum of 200 times more distant from the Sun than Earth, or more than 5 times the distance from the Sun to Pluto.

Researchers are currently performing the largest, deepest survey for items beyond Neptune and the Kuiper Belt and have covered almost 10 percent of the sky to date using cutting-edge telescopes and cameras. As they locate and confirm extremely remote items, they analyze if their discoveries match the bigger theories around how relationships with a substantial remote planet could have molded the outer Solar System.

“Greater numbers of extreme trans-Neptunian objects must be found to fully determine the structure of our outer Solar System,” project leader Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at Carnegie Science, said in a statement.

One recent discovery called 2014 FE72 is the first faraway object discovered with an orbit completely beyond that of Neptune’s. It has an orbit that takes the object so far away from the Sun; it is probably being affected by forces of gravity from beyond our Solar System like other stars, the project scientists said. It is the first Solar System object seen at such a massive distance.

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Image credit: NASA

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