Whether there is a ninth planet in the solar system has always been a subject of exploration by astronomers. (Shutterstock)
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In the past, there were nine planets around the sun, but after Pluto was downgraded, there were still eight planets in the solar system. But what if there was another planet lurking in the far outer reaches of our solar system?
Astronomers recently published a paper in the “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” (MNRAS Letters) that there may not only be comets at the outermost edge of the solar system. They calculated that there may be a planet hidden in the “Oort cloud” (Oort cloud), which may Sex is 7%.
The Oort cloud, where the comet resides, is an unimaginably large spherical region of ice and rock. The distance from the edge of the Oort cloud to the sun is tens of thousands of times that from the earth to the sun. According to the researchers’ computer simulations, about one in every 200 to 3,000 stars could host a planet this far away.
“It’s very likely that the solar system will capture an Oort cloud planet,” added study co-author Nathan Kaib, an astronomer at the Planetary Science Institute, adding that this class of hidden “strangers” is definitely the one that should exist , but has received relatively little attention so far.
Planets exiled to the Oort cloud?
If there is a planet in the Oort cloud, it must be an ice giant. When large planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus or Neptune form, they are born as twins. The problem is that these giant planets have considerable gravitational pull, and then, like quarreling siblings, often collide with each other. These thrusts can destabilize a young solar system, sometimes causing one of the planets to be kicked out of the system or exiled to the outer reaches of the solar system, in rather strange orbits.
Sean Raymond (Sean Raymond), a researcher at the University of Bordeaux’s Astrophysics Laboratory, the first author of the paper, said, “The surviving planets have highly eccentric orbits, like scars from their violent (collision) past.” This means that Not only would an exiled Oort cloud planet be very far away from its star, but its orbit would be elongated, more like the ellipse of a comet than the near-perfect circle Earth orbits around the sun. The great distance makes it hard to see, and if it does exist, it’s so faint it’s almost invisible, so it’s hard to spot.
“If there’s a Neptune-sized planet in our own Oort cloud, chances are we haven’t found it yet,” said MIT astronomer Malena Rice, who was not involved in the study. Agree. “Surprisingly, it’s sometimes easier to find planets hundreds of light-years away than planets in our backyard!”
Oort cloud planet VS. Xplanet
Astronomers have scoured the Oort Cloud and, more recently, the Kuiper Belt for decades, hoping to find the elusive “hypothetical Planet X.” Planet X, also known as Planet Nine, is a Neptune-sized planet thought to orbit 60 billion miles (about 96.5 billion kilometers) from the sun.
Caltech astronomers Mike Brown (Mike Brown) and Konstantin Batygin (Konstantin Batygin) inferred from observations of multiple celestial bodies in the Kuiper belt that there must be a huge object like Planet X, but This theory has not been proven.
However, the Oort cloud planet that Raymond’s research team discovered is not the same Planet X that Brown and Batygin have been looking for.
Although the hypothetical Oort cloud planet is far away and has an extended, highly eccentric orbit, the similarities end there. Kebe explained that the Oort cloud planets in their simulation would be much, at least 10 times farther than the predicted orbits of Planet Nine. Their simulations were unable to place the planet in an orbit similar to that of Planet Nine. ◇
