Does Planet Nine exist?

Scientists at the California Institute of Technology in the United States put forward new arguments that demonstrate the existence of the ninth planet in the solar system.

The researchers involved, Michael Brown and Konstantin Batygin, concluded that Planet Nine has a mass approximately five times greater than that of the Earth.

In the article, published February 10 in Physics Reports, the team headed by Batygin describes the nature of Planet Nine, and the theoretical astrophysicist claims that in addition to being closer to the Sun than previously suspected, it is probably brighter.

“It has 5 land masses and probably looks a lot like a typical extrasolar super-Earth,” says Batygin, according to a statement issued Wednesday by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Super-Earths are planets that have a greater mass than the Earth, but less than a gas giant. Planets of similar size are often found around stars similar to the Sun, but Planet Nine would be a closer super-Earth.

Another article published in January by The Astronomical Journal shows that the clustering of objects in the Kuiper belt, a ring-like disk that houses both ice bodies and dwarf planets, is influenced by the gravitational pull of an invisible planet. The researchers have developed a method to evaluate the amount of bias in each observation and they have calculated that the probability of the cluster being false is about one in 500.

“Although this analysis does not say directly whether Planet Nine exists, it indicates that the hypothesis has a solid foundation,” said Brown, a professor at the astronomical observatory at Caltech.

Brown and Batygin announced the existence of Planet Nine in 2016, based on the peculiar distribution of the orbits of transneptunian objects located in the Kuiper belt. Scientists suspected that precisely Planet Nine was disturbing their orbits.

Astrophysicists continue to study the hypothesis of Planet Nine, although they accept the possibility that it does not exist. “My favorite feature of the Ninth Planet hypothesis is that it is observable. The possibility of one day seeing real images of Planet Nine is absolutely electrifying. While finding this planet is a big challenge, I am very optimistic that we will see it in the next decade,” Batygin said.

(Taken from RHC in Spanish)

Written by Radio Grito de Baire