In January 2016, Michael Brown and Konstantin Batygin, two astronomers at the California Institute of Technology, warned that they were reasonably sure that beyond the orbit of Pluto there is a large, hitherto unknown planet. In an article published in the Astronomical Journal , these researchers indicated that although they had not directly sighted it, the influence it exerted on some objects in the Kuiper Belt was remarkable.
Since then, at least eight groups of experts have scoured the outer reaches of the Solar System in search of this elusive world, which could be ten times more massive than Earth. Located about twenty times farther from our star than Neptune, the hypothetical Planet Nine, as it is informally known, would take about 15,000 years to complete one revolution around the star king.
Now new data has become known that will allow astronomers to narrow the search area. During the last meeting of the American Astronomical Society, held in Pasadena (California), it was announced the discovery of three new trans-Neptunian objects whose movements could also be affected by the gravity of Planet Nine. This would allow to corroborate its existence, something that not all astronomers admit . And even so, the presence of such a massive object and the unusual trajectory that it follows – it moves with a deviation of about 30 degrees compared to the plane in which the other planets do – could explain the six degrees of apparent inclination that presents the Sun with respect to the orbital plane.
In the coming months, astronomer Scott Sheppard, from the Carnegie Institution, in Washington, whose team already proposed the existence of Planet Nine in 2014 and who has now discovered two of the aforementioned trans-Neptunian objects, will examine with the Victor Blanco telescopes and Magallanes, in Chile, a third of the possible orbit of this world. In his opinion, it is possible that it could be detected at the end of 2017 . Mike Brown, one of his “co-discoverers”, is also optimistic, and maintains that it could be located in the first quarter of 2018.
If Planet Nine is indeed confirmed to be there, it will be the first find of this nature in nearly a century, since Clyde William Tombaugh announced the discovery of Pluto in 1930. However, in 2006 the International Astronomical Union decided that the latter The object was not exactly a planet, but a dwarf planet.
Image: Caltech / R. Hurt (IPAC)
