The two named the planet the Kuiper Belt Planet. It is five times the size of Earth.The Solar System family in question is not Planet Nine, which was predicted by a number of astronomers.
CLEAR — Pluto lost its status as a planet and was expelled from our solar system. The Milky Way Galaxy now contains only eight planets; Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
However, Patryk Sofia Lykawka and Takashi Ito, astronomers from Osaka Kindai University and the Tokyo National Astronomical Observatory, posit that another planet is hiding in the Kuiper Belt, or behind Pluto.
The Kuiper belt is a donut-shaped ring that extends just beyond the orbit of Neptune. The planet referred to by the two researchers is called the Kuiper Belt Planet (KBP), and it is 500 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun.
UA is the distance between the Earth and the Sun. So, 500 UA is five hundred times the distance between Earth and the Sun.
KBP is estimated to be three times larger than Earth. However, the planet’s temperature is too cold to be inhabited by humans.
“We predict the existence of Earth-like planets,” Ito and Lykawka said in the published paper The Astronomical Journal. “It is entirely plausible that such an ancient object could have survived in the distant Kuiper Belt as a KBP, given that many such objects existed early in our solar system.”
The Kuiper Belt contains millions of icy objects which are called Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) because they are outside Neptune. TNO is thought to be the remnants of the solar system’s formation and consists of a mixture of rock, amorphous carbon, and volatile ice and methane
“TNO’s orbits can indicate the presence of undiscovered planets in the outer reaches of our solar system,” said the Japanese team.
Ito and Lykawka say some of the objects have strange orbits, which suggests they are being pulled by something larger nearby.
The Kuiper Belt also contains a large population of highly tilted objects that orbit the sun. Computer simulations show the KPB hypothesis is responsible for this impact.
“We determined that an Earth-like planet located in a distant, tilted orbit could explain three basic properties of the more distant Kuiper Belt,” the two wrote.
But both said they were only predicting, not confirming, the existence of KBP so more research is needed.
KBP is not Planet Nine, which was first hypothesized. Planet Nine is much more massive and is thought to lie on a much more distant orbit.
Planet Nine, or Planet Nine, was first theorized by experts from Caltech in 2014 when they noticed that the orbit of the farthest TNO was being disrupted.
Astronomers claim that this can be explained by the gravitational pull of Planet Nine in our solar system, which orbits 20 times farther from the Sun than Neptune.
But until now astronomers only had indirect evidence of the existence of Planet Nine. Even some astronomers aren’t sure.
According to those who are not convinced, if there is a Planet Nine it is in the outer part of our solar system, or outside the Kuiper Belt, not in it.
2023-09-03 06:01:43
#Japanese #Astronomers #Predict #Large #Planet #Kuiper #Belt #Jernih.co
