Planet 9 Of Our Solar System Is Out There

Posted on Tuesday, 24 October, 2017 by Zheluo Cai

Planet 9 Of Our Solar System Is Out There.

Planet Nine is a hypothetical large planet in the far outer Solar System, the gravitational effects of which would explain the improbable orbital configuration of a group of trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) that orbit mostly beyond the Kuiper belt. Recent speculation about the alignment of the eTNOs being due to a distant massive planet began with a 2014 letter to the journal Nature, in which astronomers Chad Trujillo and Scott S. Sheppard inferred the possible existence of a massive trans-Neptunian planet from similarities in the orbits of the distant trans-Neptunian objects Sedna and 2012 VP113. On 20 January 2016, researchers Konstantin Batyin and Michael E. Brown at Caltech explained how a massive outer planet would be the likeliest explanation for the similarities in orbits of six distant objects, and proposed specific orbital parameters. The predicted planet could be a super-Earth, with an estimated mass of 10 Earths (approximately 5,000 times the mass of Pluto), a diameter two to four times that of Earth, and a highly elliptical orbit with an orbital period of approximately 15,000 years. Planet Nine does not have an official name, and it will not receive one unless its existence is confirmed, typically through optical imaging.