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In the far reaches of our solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune, a mysterious and yet-unseen world may be lurking in the darkness. Dubbed “Planet 9,” this hypothetical celestial body has been the subject of intense scientific debate and speculation since its existence was first proposed in 2016. Now, a new study published to the arXiv pre-print service by a team from the California Institute of Technology, Université Côte d’Azur, and Southwest Research Institute has provided compelling evidence supporting the presence of this enigmatic planet. The origin of the Planet 9 hypothesis stems from the peculiar alignments in the...

Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt, and NASA's Dawn spacecraft will arrive there on March 6. Pluto is the largest object in the Kuiper belt, and NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will arrive there on July 15... The efforts of a very small clique of Pluto-haters within the International Astronomical Union (IAU) plutoed Pluto in 2006. Of the approximately 10,000 internationally registered members of the IAU in 2006, only 237 voted in favor of the resolution redefining Pluto as a "dwarf planet" while 157 voted against; the other 9,500 members were not present... Unlike the larger planets, however,...

A planet is a planet wherever it resides, right? Dave Eicher examines the case of the icy world.In 1930 a young astronomer from Kansas, employed as an observer at Lowell Observatory in Arizona, discovered Pluto. It was the first planet in the solar system to have been discovered since 1846, when astronomers in Germany detected Neptune. Clyde Tombaugh, just 24 at the time, was hailed as a hero, Disney named a cartoon dog after the new planet, and for 76 years the solar system was a happy place. And then, in 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) reconsidered Pluto’s status....

Our understanding of the Kuiper belt has changed dramatically in these past five years. The best example of this change comes, I think, from the discovery of a large Kuiper belt object that was announced just a few days ago... But, by decoding the numbers, I could tell it was something that had just been discovered a few days before. Like anyone else, my first attempt to know more was a quick trip to Google. Ah ha! A new large Kuiper belt object found from a telescope Chile, by David Rabinowitz! Yes, the same David Rabinowitz from the Haumea discovery....

Data from a spacecraft orbiting Earth has revealed ripple structures in the termination shock and heliopause: shifting regions of space that mark one of the boundaries between the space inside the Solar System, and...interstellar space. ...Sun affects the space around it...solar wind, a constant supersonic flow of ionized plasma. It blows out past the planets and the Kuiper Belt, eventually petering out in the great emptiness between the stars. The point at which this flow falls below the speed at which sound waves can travel through the diffuse interstallar medium is called the termination shock, and the point at which...

Scholz's star -- named after the German astronomer who discovered it -- approached less than a light-year from the Sun. Nowadays it is almost 20 light-years away, but 70,000 years ago it entered the Oort cloud, a reservoir of trans-Neptunian objects located at the confines of the solar system. ... Now two astronomers from the Complutense University of Madrid, the brothers Carlos and Raúl de la Fuente Marcos, together with the researcher Sverre J. Aarseth of the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom), have analyzed for the first time the nearly 340 objects of the solar system with hyperbolic orbits (very...

Over a 17-year period, an international team of astronomers monitored Neptune’s atmospheric temperatures. They discovered that Neptune’s global temperatures dropped unexpectedly, followed by a dramatic warming at its south pole. Credit: ESO/M. Roman ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Using ground-based telescopes, including the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), an international team of astronomers track Neptune’s atmospheric temperatures over a 17-year period. They found a surprising drop in Neptune’s global temperatures followed by a dramatic warming at its south pole. “This change was unexpected,” says Michael Roman, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Leicester, UK, and lead author of the...

Unravel the cosmic enigma with our latest video on the elusive "Planet Nine"! Join the quest as astronomers explore gravitational hints, peculiar orbits, and groundbreaking techniques in the relentless search.Are We about to Discover a New Planet in Our Solar System? | 21:46Astrographics | 44.6K subscribers | 329,973 views | February 7, 2024

Quaoar is one of the so-called trans-Neptunian objects, small planets orbiting beyond the solar system's outermost planet Neptune. Quaoar is a proud owner of its own moon, the 100-mile-wide Weywot. And a recent observation campaign revealed that it also has a ring of material in its orbit. Quaoar's ring is at a very unusual distance from its parent body. In fact, before astronomers discovered Quaoar's ring in observations from several telescopes conducted between 2018 and 2021, they had thought that it was impossible for a ring to exist at such a distance. With a radius of about 2,420 miles from...

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows off its capabilities closer to home with its first image of Neptune. Not only has Webb captured the clearest view of this distant planet’s rings in more than 30 years, but its cameras reveal the ice giant in a whole new light. Most striking in Webb’s new image is the crisp view of the planet’s rings – some of which have not been detected since NASA’s Voyager 2 became the first spacecraft to observe Neptune during its flyby in 1989. In addition to several bright, narrow rings, the Webb image clearly shows Neptune’s fainter...

Of the 461 objects described for the first time in the new paper, a few stand out. Nine are known as extreme trans-Neptunian objects, which have orbits that swing out at least 150 AUs from the sun. Four of those are extremely extreme, with orbital distances of 230 AUs. At these distances, the objects are hardly affected by Neptune's gravity, but their strange orbits suggest an influence from outside the solar system. Some researchers think that influence might be a yet-undiscovered planet, dubbed Planet Nine. (Others think that the combined gravity of lots of little objects, or, alternatively, nothing more...

They may not be black or holes. Some astronomers believe there is a massive planet, far beyond the orbit of Neptune, orbiting the sun — but after years of searching, scientists have not found this theoretical world, which they've dubbed "Planet Nine." This has spurred theorists to consider a radical hypothesis: Perhaps Planet Nine is not a planet but rather a small black hole that might be detectable from the theoretical radiation emitted from its edge, so-called Hawking radiation. For centuries, astronomers have used variations in planetary orbits to predict the existence of new planets. When a planet's orbit doesn't...

Over the past few years, researchers have noticed an odd clustering in the orbits of multiple trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), which dwell in the dark depths of the far outer solar system. Some scientists have hypothesized that the TNOs' paths have been sculpted by the gravitational pull of a big object way out there, something five to 10 times more massive than Earth (though others think the TNOs may just be tugging on each other). This big "perturber," if it exists, may be a planet — the so-called "Planet Nine," or "Planet X" or "Planet Next" for those who will always...

A new paper describes how the researchers connected the moving dots to find the new TNOs, and also says this new approach could help look for the hypothetical Planet Nine and other undiscovered worlds. The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is designed to probe the origin of the accelerating universe and help uncover the nature of dark energy by measuring the 14-billion-year history of cosmic expansion with high precision. It studies galaxies and supernovas and precisely tracks their movements. This survey has been active since 2013, using the 4-meter Blanco Telescope located at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile. The...

Primordial black holes (PBHs) are old and relatively small black holes that emerged soon after the Big Bang. They are thought to have been formed as a result of density fluctuations in the very early universe. It is believed that PBHs with the lowest mass have likely evaporated. However, those with larger masses may still exist, evaporating at the present epoch—even though they have been never directly observed. Astronomers Jakub Scholtz of Durham University and James Unwin of University of Illinois at Chicago, assume that PBHs could reside even closer to us than we think. In a recently published paper,...

The records include dates and times, Cesario said, which makes them useful to modern-day astronomers. Planet Nine, if it exists, would have about 10 times the mass of Earth and orbit 20 times farther from the sun than Neptune does... Scientists suspect the existence of Planet Nine because it would explain some of the gravitational forces at play in the Kuiper Belt, a stretch of icy bodies beyond Neptune. But no one has been able to detect the planet yet, though astronomers are scanning the skies for it with tools such as the Subaru Telescope on Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano....

Act Two of the 12-year-old New Horizons mission to Pluto and the solar system’s icy Kuiper Belt is heating up, with less than a month to go before NASA’s piano-sized spacecraft makes history’s farthest-out close encounter with a celestial object. The New Year’s flyby of a mysterious Kuiper Belt object (or objects) known as Ultima Thule (UL-ti-ma THOO-lee) follows up on the mission’s first act, which hit a climax three years ago with a history-making flyby of Pluto. Launched in 2006, New Horizons was never meant to be a one-shot deal. Even before the Pluto flyby, mission managers used the...

Kathryn Volk and Renu Malhotra at the University of Arizona have noticed some strange movement out in the Kuiper belt…movement that they believe could suggest the existence of a tenth planet. ... Objects in the Kuiper belt are far enough away from the other major bodies in our solar system that the gravitational influence of the large planets doesn’t impact them (at least, not to a measurable degree); however, their movements can still be predicted, thanks to sky surveys and a host of advanced technologies. The search for Planet Nine has lead scientists to believe that it is orbiting around...

University of Arizona scientists have uncovered a curious case of missing asteroids. The main asteroid belt is a zone containing millions of rocky objects between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The scientists find that there ought to be more asteroids there than researchers observe. The missing asteroids may be evidence of an event that took place about 4 billion years ago, when the solar system's giant planets migrated to their present locations. UA planetary sciences graduate student David A. Minton and UA planetary sciences professor Renu Malhotra say missing asteroids is an important piece of evidence to support an...

Many of the primitive bodies wandering the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter are former comets, tossed out of orbit by a brutal ballet between the giant outer planets, said a team of astrophysicists. A commonly accepted theory is that the asteroid belt is the rubble left over from a "proto-planetary disk," the dense ring of gas that surrounds a new-born star. But the orbiting rocks have long been a source of deep curiosity. They are remarkably varied, ranging from mixtures of ice and rock to igneous rocks, which implies they have jumbled origins. The answer to the mystery, according...