Planet Nine BREAKTHROUGH: New evidence shows Planet Nine is BIGGER than Earth - Express.co.uk

Planet Nine is a hypothetical world beyond the reach of Earth’s telescopes, believed to be the eighth planet of our system. The mystery world was first proposed by astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown in 2016, but definite evidence is yet to be found. However, a new study published in the journal Physics Reports may have just unlocked a new piece of the puzzle. The new study led by Profesor Batygin has prosed Planet Nine is a super-Earth of sorts – a planet between five to 10 times the size of our home world.

Professor Batygin, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) said: “At five Earth masses, Planet Nine is likely to be very reminiscent of a typical extrasolar super-Earth.”

Super-Earths are celestial bodies considerably bigger and heavier than our Earth but not on the same magnitude as Jupiter or Saturn.

Planet Nine is a popular theory among astronomers because its existence would explain certain oddities in the orbits of objects beyond Neptune.

Astronomers note bodies in the Kuiper Belt, a field of icy rocks barreling around the Sun, tend to group together as if attracted by something.

In a different study, published in The Astronomical Journal in January 2019, Professors Brown and Batygin argued there are two plausible explanations for this behaviour.

Observational bias influencing astronomers’ observations or the presence of a large and undetected planet.

If confirmed, Planet Nine would become the eighth planet in our system, bar Pluto, to be discovered in 170 years.

In the more recent study, Professors Batygin and co-authors proposed Planet Nine orbits the Sun from a distance between 400 to 800 astronomical units (au) from the Sun.

Just one astronomical unit is the distance from the Earth to the Sun and measures about 93 million miles (149.6million km).

This would place Planet Nine between 37,182,323,000 miles and 74,364,646,000 miles from the Sun.

In their study, the authors wrote: “This paper reviews the observational motivation, dynamical constraints, and prospects for detection of this proposed object known as Planet Nine.”

US space agency NASA has also shown interest in the Planet Nine theory, sometimes referring to it in the past as Planet X.

NASA said, if true, it may take Planer Nine anywhere between 10,000 and 20,000 Earth years to orbit the Sun.

The planet would also be situated about 20-times farther from the Sun than the orbit of Neptune.

However, NASA said: “The announcement does not mean there is a new planet in our solar system.

“The existence of this distant world is only theoretical at this point and no direct observation of the object nicknamed ‘Planet Nine’ have been made.”

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