May 31, 2018

The Huge and Mysterious Planet Nine

This isn’t Pluto we’re talking about. Planet Nine is a planet predicted to be about 10 times the mass of our Earth orbiting somewhere in the distant solar system. It was predicted back in 2014 and we have been finding more and more confirmations of it in our solar system ever since.

The main evidence for Planet Nine’s existence lies in the strange patterns observed in Kuiper Belt objects out beyond Neptune. A cluster of these objects have been observed with identically shaped orbits that all travel in the same direction rather than having the random orbits we expect them to. The orbits are also tilted away from our own under what seems like the influence of a larger source of gravity. While there is a 1 in 14,000th chance that this could be a coincidence, scientists agree that with the increasing amount of evidence, it is extremely unlikely that this is all random. The most compelling solution, by far, is the existence of this ever elusive Planet Nine. The Kuiper Belt itself can’t be the cause of these anomalies since it would have to be 100 times larger to have that effect on this cluster of objects.

The proposition is that Planet Nine and the KB objects are in a resonance with one another, similar to the orbital resonance that Pluto and Neptune share. This means that their orbits come into contact with one another and are in sync but the planets and objects themselves never touch.

Read more at https://medium.com/@Ella_alderson/the-huge-and-mysterious-planet-nine-918b961e4aba

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