As most of you would know, there has been lot of talk
of evidence of ninth planet at the edge of our solar among scientist since the
start of 2016. In January, the astronomer who played a key role in demoting
Pluto to a dwarf planet, said he had found an important evidence of the existence
of a ninth planet in the solar system just past Neptune. Research carried out
by Mike Brown, a planetary astronomer currently working at Caltech, indicate
the presence of the ninth planet, which seems to be orbiting the Sun on a
super-elongated path that takes an unbelievable 10,000 to 20,000 years to
complete.
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Image: Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)
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And now thanks to a newly discovered Kuiper Belt Object (KBO), Mike says, the presence of ninth planet just got more evident. Brown tweeted this weekend “Hey Planet Nine fans, a new eccentric KBO was discovered.
And it is exactly where Planet Nine says it should be”. So how does the
discovery of a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) prove the existence of a ninth planet?
According to Mike, Planet Nine is estimated to be
10 times more massive than our Earth and nearly four times the size and it
exists inside a fairly crowded patch of the Universe. So it is pretty obvious
to notice some gravitational disturbance around this region, and that’s exactly
what Brown and his colleagues have been looking for.
Mike told Ian Sample at The Guardian “We saw a
strange signal in the data that meant something odd was going on in the outer
Solar System. All of these distant objects were lined up in a
weird way and that shouldn’t happen. We worked through the mundane
explanations, but none of them worked out.”
Mike and his colleagues discovered six KBOs and
these six objects were ‘lining up' oddly, and now a seventh KBO has been added
to the list. This seventh KBO seems to have been pushed into an odd orbit by
some great force nearby, almost 149 billion km from the Sun, that’s precisely
where astronomers think Planet Nine is located.
This seventh KBO was discovered by astronomers
using Canada France Hawaii Telescope while conducting the massive Outer Solar
System Origins Survey (OSSOS).
So now astronomer are quite confident about this
Planet nine, and there is strong evidence now, via the strange behaviors of
seven known KBOs, which indicates that something pretty gigantic is lurking in
the far reaches of our Solar System.
As it is incredibly far away from Earth, there is
currently no way we can visually confirm its existence.
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