Most of us have learnt Pluto’s name as the ninth planet and for whatever reason it was downgraded to a dwarf planet in 2006, most people didn’t like it. So when you hear that a ninth planet could exist out there, it is not about counting Pluto amongst the planets again. An object 10 times the mass of Earth, orbiting sun, could exist beyond Neptune and might as well soon be the ninth planet.
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A study was published on arXiv preprint server, a new paper using data from dark Energy Survey and it claims to have found a “Trans Neptunian Object” orbiting the sun in a slightly tilted path. But this object is not the planet we are talking about, but the shape of it’s orbit, according to the researchers is an indication of it’s interaction with an unknown planet. The team which conducted this study is led by University of Michigan graduate student Juliette Becker.
In our solar system, objects orbit the sun pretty much in the same plane. But the trans neptunian Object dubbed 2015BP519 is moving at an elliptical orbit that spans 35 to 862 times the radius of Earth at a 54 degree angle to the plane taken by earth. Juliette modelled the movement of this object and arrived at the conclusion that something else should be existing out there to explain this strange orbit.
Not everyone in the scientific world seems to agree with this theory though. They say that we know very little about early solar system and there could be any number of other reasons for objects like 2015BP 519 to behave the way it does. Perhaps it’s too early to even say that the strange orbit occurs due to a ninth planet.
A couple of years ago a similar theory surfaced that said looping orbits of world’s in Kuiper belt is caused by the gravity of a ninth planet. The current theory of Juliette Becker seems to agree with that.
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