Over the last few years, there’s been growing evidence for a huge, ninth planet lurking on the very edges of the Solar System. The dwarf planets and other icy bodies out there move in mysterious ways that suggest an unseen world is pulling on them, but new calculations suggest that there is no Planet Nine – these distant objects might just be jostling each other like bumper cars.
Ten years after Pluto was demoted to dwarf planet, the possibility of a new Planet Nine was put forward by a Caltech team in January 2016. The key evidence was the highly eccentric orbits of some Kuiper Belt objects, which are tilted 30 degrees off-kilter from the rest of the planets. Plus, their sheer distance from the Sun and the eight known planets doesn’t really make sense yet.
In the years since, more evidence of a ninth planet has turned up in the orbits of trans-Neptunian objects and the wobble of the Sun, while other astronomers have modeled its composition and even floated the idea of a Mars-sized 10th planet. But since Planet Nine has yet to be directly observed, some scientists are naturally questioning its existence. Can the quirks of these distant objects be explained some other way?
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