Sort of. For years have scientists and researchers debated whether or not there is another massive planet orbiting our sun at the outermost edge of our solar system? NASA has issued a press release stating that there is evidence to support our solar system does indeed have a NINTH planet—and its 10 times the mass of Earth: it’s a super-Earth.Now, after years saying there isn’t enough evidence to support the existence of Planet Nine, aka Planet X, NASA highlights FIVE different lines of evidence which suggests that the elusive world does exist, beyond the orbit of Neptune.
But despite the fact that NASA has admitted the alien world—probably—exists, we have still not seen it with our own eyes.
This is why researchers using the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii hope to spot the mysterious alien world as soon as possible as its discovery will also shed light on its origin, which also remains an enigma as the world itself.
The elusive world was first theorized by Caltech experts in 2014.
Researchers proposed the planet exists based on different clues like the strange orbit of icy objects in the Kuiper Belt.
In 2016, Dr. Batyagin, a planetary astrophysicist at Caltech in Pasadena presented a study which looked at six peculiar objects in the Kuiper Belt and found that all of them had elliptical orbits that point in the same direction and are curiously tilted 30 degrees ‘downward’ compared to the plane in which the planets in our solar system orbit the sun.
This was one telltale sign.
In order to investigate in depth, Dr. Batyagin and his colleagues ran computer simulations of our solar system WITH planet nine included and discovered that more objects should exist out there having an inclination to 90 degrees to the plane of the eight planets.
As researchers looked further into the possibility that planet nine exists, more clues popped up.
Another study by Dr. Batygin’s team, led by Ms. Elizabeth Bailey, showed that the elusive world could have tilted the planets of our solar system during the last 4.5 billion years.
“Over long periods of time, Planet Nine will make the entire solar-system plane precess or wobble, just like a top on a table,” said Dr. Batyagin.
Now, Dr. Batygin, said: “There are now five different lines of observational evidence pointing to the existence of Planet Nine.”
Astronomers showed that the presence of Planet Nine could explain why there are objects in the Kuiper Belt that orbit the sun in opposite direction from every other object in our solar system.
“No other model can explain the weirdness of these high-inclination orbits. It turns out that Planet Nine provides a natural avenue for their generation.”
“These things have been twisted out of the solar system plane with help from Planet Nine and then scattered inward by Neptune,” said Dr. Batygin.
“If you were to remove this explanation and imagine Planet Nine does not exist, then you generate more problems than you solve. All of a sudden, you have five different puzzles, and you must come up with five different theories to explain them.”