Monday, March 21, 2022 – 16:21 WIB
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VIVA – Search Planet Nine again failed. In a paper published December 23, 2021 in The Astrophysical Journal, scientists examine more than six years of telescope data in an attempt to identify potential signs of Planet Nine in the southern sky.
Captured with the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile, South America between 2013 and 2019, the observations cover about 87 percent of the sky visible from the Southern Hemisphere.
While the team identified more than three thousand candidate light sources that lie between 400-800 astronomical units (AU), none of these candidates could be confirmed as planets.
“No significant signs were found,” they said Live ScienceMonday, March 21, 2022.
Despite the failure, the fruitless search did not deny the existence of theoretical planets. This will narrow down where the planet is hiding, and find out its properties.
In the end the study only covered between 10-20 percent of the planet’s possible locations in the sky. Astronomers first started the search for Planet Nine in 2016 or 10 years after Pluto downgraded from its position as the ninth planet of the Solar System to become a dwarf planet.
Astronomers noticed that the six rocky objects beyond Neptune’s orbit were clustered in a strange way. The farthest point in its orbit is farther from the Sun than the closest point of its orbit.
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