A team of astronomers claim to have found visual evidence of the long-sought after Planet Nine, except that there’s one catch: it’s nowhere near where Planet Nine is expected to be, and if this find is verified, it might actually disprove a decade-old theory of the elusive planet’s existence.

Although the idea of a planet lurking in the depths of space beyond Pluto’s orbit has been around for decades, that idea became a workable theory in 2016 when California Institute of Technology researchers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown found indirect evidence that a number of trans-Neptunian objects—celestial objects found beyond Neptune’s orbit—are in orbits scattered about in a manner that could only be explained by the presence of a yet-undiscovered object roughly five times the mass of the Earth in the vicinity.

Although extensive computer modeling of the interaction of such a planet with known dwarf planets has helped bolster the case for its existence, Planet Nine has yet to be directly confirmed through visual data. Being between 200 and 370 times further out from the Sun than the Earth—Neptune itself is only around one-tenth of that distance—such a far-flung planet might be too dim to be seen with optical telescopes.

To get around that limitation, a team of astronomers hailing from Australia, Japan and Taiwan made use of far infrared images taken by two sky surveys, in the hopes that the object might be emitting enough IR radiation to be seen. The two surveys, the NASA-Netherlands-UK Infrared Astronomy Satellite (IRAS) and Japan’s AKARI, were launched 23 years apart (1983 and 2006, respectively), enough time for a planet with such a long orbital period to move far enough across the sky to be noticed.

The two surveys presented a combined total of around 2 million targets for the team; after filtering stars and other extraneous noise from the data, the team found that there were 13 possible pairs remaining. A manual examination of the remaining candidates revealed a single pair that matched in both color and brightness, suggesting that the images were of the same object at different points in its orbit.

“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,” remarked Gary Bernstein, an astronomer at the University of Pennsylvania. “But if you put it far enough away, it gets fainter and fainter very fast.”

However, even if this object proves to be an actual object lurking in the far reaches beyond Neptune, it is unlikely to be the Planet Nine proposed in 2016 by Batygin and Brown: when Brown, who was uninvolved with the study, plotted the orbit of the object in the new data, its path came nowhere close to matching what would be needed for the celestial body that is supposed to have caused so much chaos at the extreme edges of the Solar System.

While Batygin and Brown’s Planet Nine would have an orbital tilt that differs somewhere between 15 to 20 degrees from Earth’s orbital plane, the object found in the infrared images would have an inclination of around 120 degrees, meaning that it would travel around the Sun in a direction opposite to that of the rest of the planets.

Unfortunately, two objects of the proposed mass of Planet Nine couldn’t coexist without destabilizing one-another’s orbits, meaning that if the images of the new object are verified, it disproves Batygin and Brown’s earlier theory.

“It’s kind of fun that a paper that purports to find a candidate for Planet Nine is really finding something that would basically say that we were wrong the entire time,” Brown remarked.

Of course, this is contingent on the IRAS/AKARI object not simply being a much smaller object closer to us, or random noise that appears in the scans, something that stands to be resolved when the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, currently being constructed in Chile’s Atacama Desert, begins releasing data in 2027.