Scientists Say They May Have Spotted a Huge Hidden Planet Deep in Our Solar System
For over a century, astronomers have wondered if there's an extra planet in our Solar System that we haven't been able to detect yet. It seems like we get another "Planet Nine" candidate — formerly known as Planet X, before Pluto was demoted — every few years, and none have been confirmed. But the possibility has never quite been put to bed, either.
Now, an international team of researchers have made a new detection that they say could be a sign of a hidden world — by, poetically, unearthing what went overlooked in very old data.
Their findings, reported in a study accepted for publication in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, suggest that the elusive planet could be up to five to ten times the mass of Earth, and is so far out in the Solar System that it takes 10,000 years to orbit the Sun.
"It is pretty amazing to think that something as big as Neptune could be sitting out there and no one would have ever noticed it," Gary Bernstein, an astronomer at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the study, told Science. "But if you put it far enough away, it gets fainter and fainter very fast."
One of the strongest hints of an undiscovered planet lies in the Kuiper Belt, a disc of icy objects beyond the orbit of Neptune that's home to comets and dwarf planets like Pluto. According to Planet Nine truthers, the unusually clustered orbits of some of the objects there, including the dwarf planet Sedna, can be conveniently explained by the existence of a stealthy world pulling their gravitational strings.
If there is a planet lurking out there, it should reflect some sunlight that we could detect. For their study, the researchers focused on invisible light, using two infrared surveys of the night sky that were conducted 23 years apart. That extreme time gap, Science notes, would allow them to see a distant, slow-moving object like what Planet Nine is thought to be, represented as a pair of dots — one of its position before, one after.
From there, the team identified thirteen candidate dot pairs which showed positioning consistent with a moving planet. One of the pairs had the same color and brightness, suggesting that both of the dots were from the same object. This, the researchers argue, could be our mysterious undiscovered world.
"I felt very excited," lead author Terry Long Phan, an astronomer at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, told Science. "It's motivated us a lot."
But others in the field are skeptical. The detected signals are extremely faint and could be random noise or another object. And we could be jumping the gun on those suspicious Kuiper Belt orbits, because we have limited observations of the objects that reside there.
"It would be really cool if there was some kind of pattern there," Samantha Lawler, an astronomer at the University of Regina, told Science. "But I am not convinced, with current data, that you can't just go with the simplest explanation."
Planet Nine or no Planet Nine, we'll soon have a chance to get a closer look than ever with the launch of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile this year, which astronomers anticipate will reveal tens of thousands of objects in the Kuiper Belt.
More on space: Scientists Intrigued by Glowing Cloud Near Our Solar System
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Fox News
15 hours ago
- Fox News
The Quiz #428 - The Heart Of It All
What is the name of the star at the center of Earth's solar system? Play. Share. Listen with Fox Business Network Host Gerri Willis.
New York Times
21 hours ago
- New York Times
The Humanist Who Designed a Deadly Weapon
Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together. Once, during an interview, I saw him in action as he described a run of knotty calculations he was doing in his head — the kind of math his peers usually worked out on paper or with computers. That gift was surely one reason that Enrico Fermi, a founder of the nuclear age who mentored him at the University of Chicago, called Richard L. Garwin 'the only true genius I have ever met.' It also played to a popular image of Dr. Garwin as slightly robotic, even computerlike, a thinking machine that happened to have legs. Dr. Garwin died last month at 97, leaving behind a legacy of contradictions. In 1951, at age 23, he designed the first hydrogen bomb, the world's deadliest weapon, a planet shaker that could end civilization. He then devoted his life to counteracting the terror. Over four decades of interviews, chats and social interactions, I learned that the man behind the stereotypes was full of surprises, which I wrote about in a recent article. He had a reputation for being cruel to those he saw as less talented. That may have been true in the prime of his professional life. But in person during his later years, Dr. Garwin came across as a gentle academic, a humanist whose life turned out to be rich in benevolent acts. Years ago, Gene Cittadino, a friend of mine who taught science history at New York University, asked me if Dr. Garwin might be willing to speak to his class. After the talk, Gene and several students took him to lunch and were regaled with stories about the presidents he advised. 'He was soft-spoken, sharp as a tack and funny,' Gene recalled. The whiz, he added, 'treated us with respect,' as if we were his colleagues. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Dehorning of S.African rhinos slashed poaching: study
The dehorning of rhinos resulted in a nearly 80-percent reduction in the poaching of the animals during a seven-year study in a major South African conservation area, researchers said Thursday. Sawing off the sought-after horns was also a fraction of the cost of other counter-poaching measures such as deploying rangers or tracking dogs, according to the study published in the journal Science. The study was carried out between 2017 and 2023 in 11 reserves around South Africa's famed Kruger National Park that protect the world's largest rhino population. During this period, some 1,985 rhinos were poached in the reserves in the Greater Kruger area despite $74 million spent mostly on reactive law enforcement measures that netted around 700 poachers, it said. By contrast, dehorning 2,284 rhinos cut poaching by 78 percent at just 1.2 percent of that budget, said the study published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "Some poaching of dehorned rhinos continued because poachers targeted horn stumps and regrowth, signalling the need for regular dehorning alongside judicious use of law enforcement," the study said. South Africa is home to most of the world's rhinos, including the critically endangered black rhino, and is a hotspot for poaching driven by demand in Asia where the horns are used in traditional medicine. Rhino horn is highly sought after on the black market, where the price by weight rivals that of gold and cocaine. Alongside ivory, the horns are coveted as status symbols or used in traditional medicine for their supposed aphrodisiac properties. "Ongoing socioeconomic inequality incentivises a large pool of vulnerable and motivated people to join, or poach for, criminal syndicates even when the risks are high," the researchers said. Corruption also played a role with gangs receiving insider tips to evade detection and arrest, they said. - Impacts unclear - "Although detecting and arresting poachers is essential, strategies that focus on reducing opportunities for and rewards from poaching may be more effective," the study said. It added, however, that "the effects of dehorning on rhino biology are still unclear, with present research suggesting that dehorning may alter rhino space use but not survival and reproduction." The co-authors of the study are from South Africa's Nelson Mandela University and the University of Cape Town, and various conservation groups including the Wildlife Conservation Network and United Kingdom's Save the Rhino International. South Africa had more than 16,000 rhinos at the end of 2023, mostly white rhinos, according to government data. But at least 34 rhinos were killed each month, the environment minister said in May. In 2024 South African scientists injected radioactive material into live rhino horns to make them easier to detect at border posts in a pioneering project aimed at curbing poaching. The radioactive material would not impact the animal's health or the environment in any way but make it poisonous for human consumption, according to the University of the Witwatersrand's radiation and health physics unit which spearheaded the initiative. Black rhinos are listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as critically endangered. ho/br/rlp
