New evidence points to the existence of a ninth planet in the solar system

In recent years, rumors have ballooned. Planet Nine will hide on the edge of our planet solar system. What put a flea in the ears? Astronomy scientists ? The eye socket Details of several Kuiper belt bodies. All assumptions pass there. Even those who argue this ninth planet It would be an exoplanet captured by our solar system. Or… a little Black hole!

For its part, simulations of the evolution of our solar system struggle to explain the composition of this small corner of the universe. Because they lack information, researchers from the University of British Columbia (Canada) and the University of Arizona (USA). So they suggest a planet the size of ours Earth or Mars You could have been born between gas giantsbefore being pushed out of orbit Neptune .

Because according to astronomers, there is something strange about the current composition of our solar system. They argue that the outer part of our system is unlikely to consist of four giant planets Then nothing else world of dwarves . Their simulations show that planets of other sizes should indeed exist. and add rocky planetAmong the giants produces a more accurate model. At least for the early stages of our solar system’s development. Then she managed to join the dwarf planets. Or even, to be literally expelled into interstellar space.

A planet betrayed by beings across Neptune

While researchers hope to learn more from telescopesThe new generation who will soon wipe the sky with unprecedented sharpness, Astronomers at the University of Oklahoma (USA) also designed a fileThe evolution of our solar system. Among its four giant planets. A million icy bodies inhabit the Kuiper belt disk. All at least 4 billion years old!

Models involving Planet Nine show that distant objects—those that never come within 40 to 50 times the distance between Earth and our sun—tend to cluster in orbits of relatively low inclination, compared to the plane of the Solar System. A characteristic that seems to indicate the existence of a ninth planet. Because it does not appear in the models with eight planets.

So, if you fail to get your hands on this ninth planet that everyone is talking about, observing this gathering of distant objects could constitute new, indirect evidence of its existence. Here again, we will have to wait for new tools to run. The Legacy of survey space and time (LSST) from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, for example. It will start observing the sky in 2023 and should be able to spot the trans-Neptunian objects that astronomers search for so often.