Astronomers have been hunting for an undiscovered “Planet X†for nearly two centuries, generally without success. The notable exception: Neptune’s presence in our solar system was predicted by observing irregularities in the orbit of Uranus — and then later proven by observation through telescopes. Brown and Batygin’s finding is similar, in that they’ve done the math that strongly suggests the presence of a large planet in an weird orbit way beyond Pluto. But until someone spots the planet with a telescope, it’s just a theory.
Until recently, conventional wisdom held that we were done finding large objects in our solar system. In 2006, when Pluto was demoted, Brown recalls telling many people, “That’s it. That’s the end of planets. We get eight in this solar system and that will have to be enough.†A survey by NASA’s Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite essentially proved that there couldn’t be anything Saturn-sized or larger hiding out beyond Pluto.
Batygin and Brown’s theoretical “Planet Nine†— the scientists have even set up a website at findplanetnine.com — slides under the WISE size limit, because it’s smaller than Neptune. That far away from the sun, there’s very little light and heat, making it extraordinarily difficult to detect smaller objects. The search is already underway at ground-based telescopes around the world, but it’s a little like searching for a needle in a haystack in the dark. Brown and Batygin are using the Subaru telescope in Hawaii to search for the object, but it might take as much as five years for them to find it.
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