Planet Nine

Planet Nine

Planet Nine, sometimes incorrectly referred to as Planet X, is a hypothetical planet in the outer region of the Solar System. Its gravitational effects could explain the unusual clustering of orbits for a group of extreme trans-Neptunian objects. Some astronomers do not think that the hypothetical planet exists at all, based on detailed observations and studies. As of November 2020, no observation of Planet Nine had been announced.

About Planet Nine in brief

Summary Planet NinePlanet Nine, sometimes incorrectly referred to as Planet X, is a hypothetical planet in the outer region of the Solar System. Its gravitational effects could explain the unusual clustering of orbits for a group of extreme trans-Neptunian objects. Some astronomers do not think that the hypothetical planet exists at all, based on detailed observations and studies. As of November 2020, no observation of Planet Nine had been announced. While sky surveys such as Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer and Pan-STARRS did not detect Planet Nine, they have not ruled out the existence of a Neptune-diameter object in the Outer Solar System, such as Planet Nine. The proposed Neptune-massed planet would cause the orbit of objects with semi-major axes greater than 300 AU to oscillate, delivering some objects into planet-crossing orbits and others into detached orbits like that of Sedna. The existence of this hypothetical planet is purely conjectural, as no observation has yet been made of it. It would have had a predicted mass of five to ten times that of the Earth, and an elongated orbit 400 to 800 times as far from the Sun as the Earth. It could be the core of a giant planet that was ejected from its original orbit by Jupiter during the genesis of the solar system. Others proposed that the planet was captured from another star, was once a rogue planet, or that it formed on a distant orbit and was pulled into an eccentric orbit by a passing star. It is not known if Planet Nine has been observed, but further surveys of the remaining regions are ongoing using NEOWISE and the 8-meter Subaru Telescope.

In 2012, Rodney Gomes proposed that an undetected planet was responsible for the orbits of some eTNOs with orbits and the largeSemi-major axis Centaursaurs, small bodies that cross the orbits of the giant planets, could be in a distant, eccentric, and inclined orbit. The announcement in March 2014 of the discovery of a second sednoid with a perihelion distance of 80 AU, VP113, led to renewed speculation that an unknown super-Earth remained in the distant solar System. It has been suggested that Sedna entered this orbit after encountering an unknown planet on a faraway orbit, a member of the open cluster that formed with the Sun, or another star that later passed near the Solar system. The discovery of Sednoid’s peculiar orbit in 2004 led to speculation that it had encountered a massive body other than one of the known planets. It was too large to be due to gravitational interactions with Neptune. Several authors proposed that it was due to a massive planet other than the Sun. In 2014, Chad Trujillo and Chad Brasser published their arguments detailing their arguments in Trujillos and Brasser’s article in 2014, detailing their reasons for the proposed planet’s existence. The article was published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. In it, the authors argue that the planets would be responsible for a clustered of orbits of several objects.