The search for a mysterious planetary body beyond Neptune has narrowed down its possible location—if it exists at all

Does Planet Nine exist?

This mystery has puzzled scientists for decades, but the answer—and the suspected world—remains elusive.

Astronomers leading the search for the potential planet orbiting our sun far beyond Neptune recently revealed that they’ve whittled away at where it might be in the sky, eliminating 78 percent of its possible hiding places. While that lengthens the odds that the planet exists, there’s a still a lot of sky left to search, including spots that are much tougher to sift through.

  • Sludgehammer@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 months ago

    I really hope that Planet Nine exists, because if it does it’s gonna screw up the IAU definition of planet again.

    An orbit as big as they hypothetical Planet Nine is just so vast that it’s pretty much impossible for something Neptune sized to clear out all the Kuiper belt bodies. As such, since it hasn’t “cleared the neighborhood” it wouldn’t be a planet, but instead a “dwarf planet” that is many times larger than the Earth.

  • marine_mustang@sh.itjust.works
    2·
    2 months ago

    I remember when the paper by Brown and Batygin was first published, Mike Brown did an online Q&A and I asked if the Vera Rubin Observatory would be able to definitively rule out Planet 9’s existence if it wasn’t seen. Mike’s response was that he hoped to have an answer before then. Rubin goes online next year.