In 2006, Pluto was downgraded from “planet” status to “dwarf planet,” leaving Earth’s solar system with only eight official planetary bodies. New evidence now suggests that there may be a ninth object beyond Pluto that fits the requirements of a planet, namely that it is large and has enough gravitational pull to create an orbit of its own. Astronomers at the California Institute of Technology think they may have found one.

A paper published today in The Astronomical Journal lays out the circumstantial evidence for the planet’s existence, even though it has actually not yet been seen. According to Dr. Michael E. Brown and Dr. Konstantin Batygin, both planetary astronomy professors at CIT, they have observed six small bodies that are circling something in a distant, highly elliptical orbit.

The striking features of these bodies is that their orbits all loop outward in the same quadrant of the solar system, and they are all tilted at the same angle. Dr. Batygin says that the odds of that happening by chance is about 1 in 14,000. They feel that a ninth planet might be what is herding the smaller bodies into these orbits. According to Brown, the planets are some of the “truly dominant bodies in the solar system” that are “pushing around everything else.”

Although large – about 4,500 times the mass of Pluto and five to 10 times as large as Earth – the potential ninth planet is far enough away that detection is difficult, since it reflects very little sunlight. Pluto is 4.6 billion miles from the sun at its most distant point. The new body would be about 20 billion miles away, and might be as much as 100 billion miles as its farthest point in orbit. The astronomers say it would take anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 years for it to complete one full orbit around the sun.

Alessandro Morbidelli of the Cote d’Asur Observatory in France who is an expert in solar system dynamics is convinced. He said that the ninth planet could easily have originated from the core of a gas giant that dates back to the start of the solar system. A close pass to Jupiter could have flung it out, in the days when the sun was part of a dense cluster of stars whose gravity might have slowed the planet enough to prevent it from escaping the solar system.

Brown began searching for the planet a year ago, after initially setting out to prove that it did not exist, but the first hints of a planet hidden behind Pluto came a couple of years earlier. The Kuiper belt is a ring of icy debris beyond Neptune that extends outward from Neptune’s orbit to a bit less than twice the planet’s orbit, about 5 billion miles. Astronomers expected to find nothing but empty space beyond that.

Surprisingly, Brown and two of his colleagues found a 600-mile-wide icy world that was 8 billion miles out, well beyond the Kuiper belt. Dr. Brown named the object Sedna. No one has a good explanation for how it got there. Sedna is too far out to be flung by the big planets’ gravitational swings, and is too close to have been affected by the gravitational tides of the Milky Way.

Astronomers looking for more Sedna-like worlds found nothing, until Chadwick Trujillo, one of Brown’s colleagues, and Scott S. Sheppard, a Carnegie Institution for Science astronomer, reported a smaller object which became known as 2012 VP113. It was in a Sedna-type orbit beyond the Kuiper belt. Trujillo and Sheppard picked up several Kuiper belt objects that had similar orbital characteristics, which led them to the theory that a planet might be disturbing the orbits of the object.

Brown said that he and Batygin “sat down and beat our heads against the wall for the last two years,” focusing on the six objects noted to be in stable orbits, and ignoring objects recently flung out by Neptune that would eventually leave the solar system. He said that made the picture clearer.

After some experimentation, Batygin tried a simulation placing a planet among the six objects that was looping in the opposite direction from Sedna and the others. He says that gave “a beautiful match to the real data.”

However, Sheppard says that, despite the evidence, it is still a big unknown as to whether a ninth planet really exists. “Until we actually see it for real, it will always be questionable as to whether it exists,” he said.

Morbidelli feels confident that scientists will locate the elusive body. “We will find it one day,” he said. “The question is when.”

Most grown-ups are aware that Spiderman is not real, but now researchers have proved that he not only isn’t real, but is truly impossible due to the size of the sticky pads that would be required to enable him to walk up a wall. Scientists have been studying how animals are able to scale walls and have found that the heavier an animal is, the harder it is to carry that load vertically.

Spiderman would have to have adhesive pads covering 40 percent of his body surface in order to be able to walk up a wall.

David Labonte, one of the researchers, said in a news release that as animals increase in size, the amount of body surface area per volume actually decreases. For instance, an ant has a lot of surface area compared to its weight. A blue whale has a lot of volume compared to its surface area.

Larger animals thus need more sticking power to match the stickiness-per-pound requirements. The scientists say that a gecko is about the maximum size for an animal who can use its sticking powers to climb vertical or inverted surfaces.

The researchers believe that their insights may have lead to new possibilities for large-scale adhesives, such as the sticky pads that would allow Spiderman to really climb a wall. The study, published Monday in PNAS, reveals that climbing animals range in size from mites to geckos, with the percentage of body surface covered by adhesive footpads increasing as the creature increases in body size.

Mites use about 200 times less of their body surface area for sticky foot pads than geckos do. Humans would require 80 percent of the front of the body to be sticky in order to climb walls. To climb a wall the way a gecko does a human would need huge sticky feet, U.S. size 114, according to Walter Federle, senior author of the study who is from the Cambridge Department of Zoology.

One other possible solution to the wall-climbing problem is to make the adhesive stickier. Some animals, such as tree frogs, have evolved this way. Labonte says there is still a lot of interesting work that can still be done on animals with stickier adhesive. These strategies would possibly allow the “development of large-scale, powerful yet controllable adhesives.”

Until then, no Spiderman.

The first flowers ever grown in space are blooming on the International Space Station. The flowers are zinnias, and they are considered a small step toward NASA’s goal of one day growing food for the space station and exploration missions of long duration.

Astronaut Scott Kelly tweeted an image of the flower over the weekend. They are the second species of plant successfully grown on board the ISS. Lettuce was planted in July and astronauts were able to harvest and even eat the fresh leafy greens. This was the second attempt at lettuce. The first batch failed due to drought stress, so they were “very vigilant with respect to the second crop,” according to Veggie project manager Trent Smith.

Smith says growing zinnias is very different from growing lettuce, as it is even more sensitive to its environment. It also has a longer growth duration of 60 to 80 days. He says these factors make it good practice for growing tomatoes, which will be the next crop.

The space flowers showed signs of stress early on, thought to possibly be due to high humidity or too much water. The excess moisture caused some of the leaves to become moldy.

Astronaut Kelly took over garden duties on the International Space Station from NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren in December. He cut away the moldy plant tissue and sanitized the plant surfaces with cleaning wipes. Fans were operated at high speed to try and keep the Veggie chamber dryer. However, the fans dried out the plants too much. Kelly called earth on Christmas Eve to say they needed water, even though the next scheduled watering was on Dec. 27. He asked for the autonomy to decide on his own when to water the plants.

The ground gardeners turned over the gardening duties. Smith said Kelly “has the helm.” They just provided him some guidelines to understand zinnias.

Growing plants in space is in the public eye lately due to the Matt Damon movie The Martian. Damon’s character, who is left alone on Mars, survives by growing potatoes for food. The International Space Station’s lettuce and zinnias may be a first step toward making this scenario a reality. The world will be waiting to see if space tomatoes become a success.

Falcon 9, the most recent SpaceX rocket to attempt a landing after delivering a satellite into orbit, tipped over on impact and exploded. It was a near miss. The rocket reached the 300-by-170 foot landing pad on an ocean barge successfully, but tipped when one of its four legs failed to latch. The rocket then exploded.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk posted a video of the landing attempt on Instagram. His post stated that the cause of the failure may have been “ice buildup due to condensation from heavy fog at liftoff.”

The rocket was able to successfully deliver a satellite into orbit on Sunday. It was intended to land on an unmanned sea-based barge. The company is still working on re-landing its SpaceX rockets in hopes of reusing them for future launches, thereby saving money on unmanned space missions. Only one out of four attempts in the past year have been successful. Although the landings have largely gone wrong, SpaceX has shown itself to be reliable in getting its payloads into space.

The Jason-3 satellite delivered by Falcon 9 will “monitor 95 percent of the world’s ice-free oceans every 10 days,” according to a news release from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). It will undergo a six-month test phase of its instruments before officially beginning operations. Jason-3 will join Jason-2, which was launched in 2008.

Last month a SpaceX rocket landing at Cape Canaveral, Fla. was successful. This was the first time an unmanned rocket returned to a vertical landing at Cape Canaveral. It represented a huge success for the SpaceX program. This landing took place at a former Atlas missile-launching site about 6 miles from the Cape.

In a Tweet on Sunday, Musk acknowledged the difficulty of landing a rocket on an ocean barge. “Definitely harder to land on a ship. Similar to an aircraft carrier vs land: much smaller target area, that’s also translating & rotating.”

Musk plans to continue to attempt ship landings, which he cites as important for higher-velocity launches. He was encouraged by the most recent rocket landing attempt, saying that “at least the pieces were bigger this time!”

Jason-3 is an international mission. NOAA is partnering with NASA, the French Space Agency CNES, and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT).

Particles from space collected from inside the Egyptian Bent Pyramid may soon provide clues as to how the 4,600-year-old wonder was constructed. Researchers will soon begin analyzing these cosmic particles, which were collected on plates planted inside the pyramid last month. The radiographic particles, known as muons, fall from earth’s atmosphere. They easily pass through empty spaces, but are deflected or absorbed by harder surfaces. By studying the accumulations of these space particles, scientists hope to learn more about the Pharoah Snefru’s construction of the pyramid.

The scientists will study the patterns of the particles. Hany Helal, vice-president of Heritage Innovation Preservation Institute which is conducting the study, says there is no single theory as to the pyramids’ construction that is 100 percent proven. All are hypotheses. With the new technology the team would like to “either confirm or change or upgrade or modify the hypotheses that we now have on how the pyramids were conducted.”

The Scan Pyramid project, which is expected to go on until the end of 2016, involves four ancient pyramids. The study will be conducted through the application of muon radiography imaging, 3D reconstruction and infrared thermography.

Thermal anomalies were also been found in the 4,500-year-old Khufu Pyramid in Giza, known as the Cheops pyramid. Canada’s Laval University’s Matthieu Klein said at a news conference in November that they found a “clear separation of temperature on the west face of the Red pyramid. The bottom is colder than the top.”

Researchers feel confident that upcoming tests on space particles could be the key to finding out more about the ancient Egyptian pyramids. Mehdi Tayoubi, who is president of the Heritage Innovation Preservation Institute, says that even if they find “one square meter void somewhere” it may “help solve the definitive questions.”

The Bent Pyramid is located in Dahshur, about 40 kilometers from Cairo. It is thought to be the ancient Egyptians first attempt at constructing a smooth-sided pyramid.

The largest supernova in history has been discovered with the assistance of machine learning, which helped to separate transient images from the deluge of information available in the sky. The technology was developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and played a key roll in detecting the exceptionally powerful explosion that was the death of the star known as ASASSN-15lh. It is thought to be the most luminous supernova in history.

The explosion was 570 billion times brighter than Earth’s sun, and over twice as luminous as the supernova holding the previous record. The event is described in a new study that was published Jan. 15 in the journal Science.

Przemek Wozniak is principal investigator in the project that created the software system that was used to spot the supernova. All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASAS-SN) is a leader in the search for supernovae through the use of small robotic telescopes that look repeatedly at the same areas of the sky and watch for “interesting changes.”

Wozniak says this is a “golden age” to study changes in astronomical objects thanks to the rapid grown in computing and imaging technology.

ASASSN-15lh was first seen in June 2015. It was 200 times more powerful than the typical supernova, and is being considered an extreme example of what is known as a “superluminous supernova.” These rare cosmic explosions are thought to be associated with the gravitational collapse of the death of a massive star.

Wozniak says the team developed “an automated software system based on machine-learning algorithms to reliably separate real transients from bogus detections.” The technology will enable scientists to find perhaps hundreds more supernovae and explore them in detail.