(ORDO NEWS) — Our solar system is a pretty busy place. Millions of objects are moving around – from planets to moons, comets and asteroids.
And every year we discover more and more objects (usually small asteroids or fast comets) that call the solar system home.
By 1846, astronomers had found all eight major planets. But it’s not. stop us from looking for more.
Over the past 100 years, we have discovered smaller distant bodies that we call dwarf planets, which we now classify as Pluto.
The discovery of some of these dwarf planets has given us reason to believe otherwise. may be hiding on the outskirts of the solar system.
Could there be a ninth planet?
There is a good reason why astronomers spend many hundreds of hours trying to find Planet Nine, also known as “Planet Nine” or “Planet X”.
And that’s because the solar system as we know it doesn’t make sense without it.
Every object in our solar system revolves around the sun. Some move fast, some move slowly, but all move according to the laws of gravity.
Everything that has mass has gravity, including you and me. The heavier something is, the more gravity it has.
The planet’s gravity is so strong that it affects how things move around it. This is what we call it “gravitational attraction”. The gravitational pull of the Earth is what holds everything on earth.
In addition, our Sun has the largest gravitational pull of any object in the solar system, which is why the planets revolve around it.
Through our understanding of gravitational pull, we have a clue to a possible Planet Nine.
Unexpected behavior
When we look at really distant objects, such as the dwarf planets beyond Pluto, we find their orbits a little surprising.
They move in very large elliptical (oval) orbits, are clustered together and exist at an angle compared to the rest of the solar system.
When astronomers use a computer to simulate the required gravitational forces, they find that it would take a planet at least ten times the mass of the Earth to make these objects move in this way.
These are very exciting things! But then the question arises: where is this planet?
Now our problem is to try to confirm whether these predictions and models are correct. The only way to do that is to find Planet Nine, which is definitely easier said than done.
The hunt continues
Scientists around the world are on the hunt for visible evidence. The ninth planet for many years now.
Based on computer models, we think that Planet Nine is at least 20 times further from the Sun than Neptune.
We try to detect it by looking for sunlight that it can reflect, just like the Moon shines from reflected sunlight at night.
However, because Planet Nine is so far from the Sun, we expect it to be very faint and difficult to detect even with the best telescopes on Earth. Besides, we can’t just look for it at any time of the year.
We only have small windows of nights when conditions should be just right. In particular, we need to wait for a night without a moon, when the place from which we observe is facing the right side of the sky.
But don’t lose hope just yet. In the next decade, new telescopes will be built and new surveys of the sky will begin. They may simply give us the opportunity to prove or disprove the existence of Planet Nine.
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