Scientists have found a dwarf planet deep in the outer reaches of our solar system that has a strange gravitational quirk.
The science world has been abuzz ever since back in 2016 when some researchers suggested that there may be a ghost planet called Planet Nine orbiting somewhere way out past Pluto in our solar system. And now astronomers believe they have found new evidence of Planet Nine thanks to the discovery of a distance dwarf planet with a strange orbit.
Scientists think this dwarf planet’s strange orbit may be caused by Planet Nine’s gravity. They used data from the Dark Energy Survey, which looks at the region above the plane of the solar system, to come to their conclusions. The findings fall in line with predictions made by the scientists who originally theorized about Planet Nine back in 2016.
Specifically, this dwarf planet is tilted 54 degrees from the plane of the solar system, which is unusual for objects in the solar system. It adds onto a growing pile of evidence that somewhere, deep in the solar system beyond what we have been able to see so far, this lurks a massive object and unexplored planet.
“Planet Nine is a hypothetical planet in the outer region of the Solar System,” Wikipedia states. “Its gravitational influence could explain a statistical anomaly in the distribution of orbits of a group of distant trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) found mostly beyond the Kuiper belt in the scattered disc region. This undiscovered super-Earth-sized planet would have an estimated mass of ten Earths, a diameter two to four times that of Earth, and an elongated orbit lasting approximately 15,000 years. To date, efforts to detect Planet Nine have failed.”
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