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In 2016, two scientists talked about Planet Nine’s existence which may guide a number of worlds into peculiar orbits, also known as Kuiper belt objects. The distant worlds loop towards the same quadrant of the solar system which may not happen by chance. Moreover, Batygin and Brown predicted that Planet Nine’s gravity would take them out of their orbit and push them into Kuiper belt. Even if astronomers have already found a strange population of worlds that orbit the sun vertically, they had never discovered the cause, except the fact that Planet Nine met all criteria.
Brown and Batygin had a similar model in their simulations and it not only reproduced almost the same characteristics, but it also predicted Planet Nine’s theory. Planet Nine is characterized as a ghost planet that is hiding far in the solar system beyond Pluto, estimated to be about 10 times the mass of Earth.
Gregory Laughlin, an astronomer at Yale University, said that this kind of discovery would be of unrivaled scientific magnitude.
A project called the Dark Energy Survey was created to probe acceleration by surveying a region above the solar system. A new object was detected in 2014, with an orbit tilted 54 degrees with respect to the plane of the solar system, something which again, Batygin and Brown predicted. After many simulations, letting the clock run forward and backward 4.5 billion years at a time, Juliette Becker, a graduate student at Michigan and the lead author on the new paper, said that Planet Nine was the best fit. Scientists are trying to expand 2015 BP519’s inclination and to push it away from the solar system, being the only way to populate the Kuiper belt, Batygin declared.
For some scientists, the solar system remains a mystery, speculating that the sun was born within a cluster of stars and was left with dwarf planets after the stars dispersed. These planets pushed 2015 BP519 into such an odd orbit. Michele Bannister, an astronomer at Queen’s University Belfast who was not involved in the study, said that at the moment the existence of Planet Nine is just an idea, one of the various ways of the creation of the solar planet.
However, there are planets between two and 10 times the mass of the Earth and the solar system is the one that doesn’t harbor one. Laughlin said that a ninth planet would be an extraordinary accomplishment, a confirmation that the scientific method is believable.
