Ever since astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Michael Brown hypothesized in 2016 that an undiscovered planet hidden in the far reaches of the solar system was responsible for the odd orbits of the dwarf planets that lurk there, astrophysicists have searched in vain for this enigmatic ninth planet. But other theories have alsoread more
New computer modeling of the early Solar System has found that there were probably more planets orbiting the Sun billions of years ago, but were either destroyed in planetary collisions, lost to the depths of interstellar space as rogue planets, or possibly still part of our cosmic family, a darkread more
Earlier this year, strong evidence for the existence of a massive, undiscovered planet that orbits beyond the reaches of Pluto was presented by the California Institute of Technology, having run detailed computer simulations of the orbits of known trans-Neptunian objects. The simulations showed that the existing orbits of these objects couldn’t follow their current paths without the presence of another planet, approximately ten times the mass of the Earth, with an orbit that comes no closer than 30.5 billion km (19 billion miles) to the Sun.
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