(ORDO NEWS) — A group of scientists from the California Institute of Technology (USA) put forward a new hypothesis regarding the current position of the ninth planet in the solar system.
Astronomers in 2016 suggested that if such a planet exists, then it moves in an eccentric, elongated orbit. Astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Michael Brown published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters the results of their calculations showing the current location of planet X.
The main proof of his hypothesis was the current location of some trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), which never approach our star closer than 30 AU. (1 AU is the average distance from the Earth to the Sun) and more than 150 AU away from it.
The orbits of the above trans-Neptunian objects are located so that the lines connecting the point of the orbit closest to the luminary with its farthest point are almost at the same angle. This may indicate that some large body influences TNO.
When astronomers discovered even more TNOs by 2019, they revised the previous data. Previously, they believed that the mass of the ninth planet is ten times the mass of the Earth, and now they believe that its mass is five times the mass of our planet.
Now Batygin and Brown have revisited their hypothesis, considering how a hypothetical ninth planet might have affected the icy bodies of the Oort Cloud since the solar system’s inception.
During the inception of the solar system, an internal Oort cloud should have formed around it, since passing stars would push icy objects towards the Sun. Computer simulations showed that over the entire existence of the solar system, Planet X should have influenced the orbits of ice bodies, which mixed with the TNO in the Kuiper belt and showed weak orbital clustering.
Recent results indicate the existence of a large space object with a more elongated orbit than previous studies showed.
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