In early 2016, two planetary scientists declared that a ghost planet is hiding in the depths of the solar system, well beyond the orbit of Pluto. Their claim, which they made based on the curious orbits of distant icy worlds, quickly sparked a race to find this so-called Planet Nine — a planet that is estimated to be about 10 times the mass of Earth.
“It has a real magnetism to
it,” said Gregory Laughlin, an astronomer at Yale University. “I mean, finding
a 10-Earth-mass planet in our own solar system would be a discovery of
unrivaled scientific magnitude.”
Now, astronomers are
reporting that they have spotted another distant world — perhaps as large as a
dwarf planet — whose orbit is so odd that it is likely to have been shepherded
by Planet Nine. The object confirms a specific prediction made by Konstantin
Batygin and Michael Brown, the astronomers at the California Institute of
Technology who first argued for Planet Nine’s existence. “It’s not proof that
Planet Nine exists,” said David Gerdes, an astronomer at the University of
Michigan and a co-author on the new paper. “But I would say the presence of an
object like this in our solar system bolsters the case for Planet Nine.”
Gerdes and his colleagues
spotted the new object in data from the Dark Energy Survey, a project that
probes the acceleration in the expansion of the universe by surveying a region
well above the plane of the solar system. This makes it an unlikely tool for
finding objects inside the solar system, since they mostly orbit within the
plane.
But that is exactly what makes the new object unique: Its orbit is
tilted 54 degrees with respect to the plane of the solar system. It’s something
Gerdes did not expect to see. Batygin and Brown, however, predicted it.