Three years ago, a pair of astronomers hypothesized the existence of Planet Nine but have still yet to verify its existence. They were Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown. Given the presence of several dwarf planets on the outer skirts of our solar system, they concluded that there must be a planet messing with their orbits.
In recent years, a number of small worlds in the outer solar system such as Eris, Sedna, and Makemake have joined Pluto in dwarf planet category. Enough of these small, distant worlds have been discovered that astronomers started noticing a pattern: Many of them have extremely elongated orbits. Sedna, for instance, gets about 7 billion miles from the Sun at its closest, and almost 90 billion miles at its farthest. Sedna isn’t alone; nearly every significant object we’ve found past Pluto has an orbit that looks like a flat oval.
This is particularly weird because extremely ovular orbits don’t just happen on their own. This type of orbit can only be formed in a few ways: either all of these worlds were rogue planets captured by our Sun, or their gravity was disrupted by something lurking in our outer solar system.
It hasn't been confirmed whether this occurrence was caused by Planet Nine but it is one possibility that astronomers are considering. Both Batygin and Brown have been gathering data and evidence to support their hypothesis but no actual sighting of Planet Nine has been made.
(Image credit: R. Hurt/Caltech)
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