Most everyone has heard of the announcement of a discovery of a group of objects past the outer regions of our known solar system that has astronomers believing they have found evidence of a new planet, being called Planet Nine. But exactly where is this mysterious world and how do we go about proving it is there?
That’s a question that has been plaguing scientists ever since the Caltech astronomers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin made their announcement, according to discovery.com. It’s a bit more complicated than just looking through a powerful telescope for the planet. First, you have to know where to look, and even then, its like the needle-in-the-haystack approach.
Planet Nine was discovered using the same method as was Neptune back in the 19th century, namely the motion of other celestial bodies in the general area that appear to be influenced by a strong gravitational pull from another object. Astronomers are still looking for unusual drift from their paths to seek the source of the gravitational pull, hoping that will lead them to the location of the new world.
The models show Planet Nine would be orbiting in an elliptical shape, being 200 AU at its closest point to the Sun and as much as 1200 AU at its most remote. An AU is the distance from the Earth to the Sun, and is used to measure distance in the solar system. That would place the new planet about four times farther away than the former planet Pluto.
The researchers, using the gravitational data they have available, estimate the mass of Planet Nine at about 10 times the mass of Earth, making the planet comparable to Uranus in size. They also reason the planet’s upper atmosphere would be in the -226 degree Celsius range, bitterly cold, but warmer that the scientists would have predicted. This leads to the belief that the planet is being heated by its inner core.
The most prevalent theory is that the mysterious planet formed from our own sun’s proplanetary disk and used the same materials that formed the rest of the planets in our solar system, but the possibility exists, due to its extreme distance from the sun, that the planet was caught from another system and pulled into ours. That may help explain the elliptical nature of its orbit.
Until actual observations of the fascinating Planet Nine can be made, we may only speculate as to its origins and composition.