Planet Nine possibly exists but invisible to existing telescopes: Astronomers

Solar system cartoon [NASA]

If a planet – assuming it exists – is very far away, extremely faint, could be almost anywhere, and is barely moving relative to its background (maybe one degree every few decades), then however large it may be the chances of finding it any time soon are not great.

Astronomers think that Planet Nine exists at the edge of the Solar System, says the Tech Times.

Here’s one possible reason why the body remains elusive despite circumstantial evidence that it exists beyond planet Neptune.

Scientists think that the existence of this world could explain the strange looping of the trans-Neptunian objects or TNOs at the edge of the star system. Unfortunately, no telescope has so far been able to spot this elusive world.

Invisible To Current Observatories

California Institute of Technology astronomer Michael Brown said there is a reason to believe that if the ninth planet does exist, it could be essentially invisible to existing observatories.

In 2016, Brown and colleague Konstantin Batygin predicted that Planet Nine weighs five to 20 times more than the Earth’s mass and that it follows an elliptical orbit up to 1,000 times the distance between the Earth and the sun.

Planets twice as far away as Earth appear 16 times dimmer since the intensity of sunlight weakens by a factor of four going out and by another four times coming back.

This means that at an orbital distance of 600 astronomical units (AU), a body could be 160,000 dimmer than Neptune, which orbits 30 AU away from the sun. At 1,000 AU, the elusive Planet Nine would appear more than a million times weaker.

Continued here.