Planet Nine SHOCK: Hunt is on to locate 'faint' Planet 9 - 'There's lot of sky to observe - Express.co.uk

The challenge has been likened to finding a planet-sized needle in a cosmic haystack. This because there is so much sky to search with only a limited number of surveys, equipment, and time available. University of Pennsylvania Professor Cullen Blake said: “Planet Nine is faint, and the problem is that you have to scan the whole sky and you have to see it move.

“There is a lot of sky to observe, and we don’t really have a single facility to look for it.”

By studying and finding new trans-Neptunian objects, pieces of rock and ice that are found in a region beyond Neptune, researchers can learn how our solar system began, a profound question that has long perplexed astronomers.

Combining different types of surveys could help astronomers find planets at the edge of the solar system.

Cosmic microwave background (CMB) surveys are one option to calculate the age and makeup of distant materials.

And optical surveys can spot moving objects as they pass in front of stars as well as measuring the movement itself.

However the problem is combing through the data collected from CMB and optical surveys together.

There is much excitement in the scientific community about the upcoming Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) and its ability to detect Planet Nine.

LSST is an optical survey capable of detecting a single Earth-mass planet as far away as 1,000 astronomical units (AU) – 1,000 times the distance between Earth and the Sun.

While there is so far no concrete evidence yet of Planet Nine, finding new objects in the Kuiper belt is still exciting.

University of Pennsylvania Professor Masao Sako said: “It is actually more scientifically useful.

“We can study things like the distribution of the orbital elements because the way that they are distributed tells us things about the formation and history of the solar system.”

And after the New Horizons flyby of Ultima Thule earlier this year, the ability to track small, distant objects is becoming increasingly-important for missions across the sky and on the ground.

The hunt for Planet Nine really began in 2014, when astronomers Chad Trujillo and Scott Sheppard proposed the existence of a large "perturber" far beyond Neptune.

Such a planet, the scientists said, could explain eccentric features in the orbits of two dwarf planets, along with a few other distant objects.

In January of 2016, Caltech researcher Dr Konstantin Batygin released more evidence for the hypothetical world, which he named Planet Nine.

The Caltech researchers also attempted to characterise the world, estimating that it is perhaps 10 times larger than Earth and orbits about 600 AU from the Sun on average.

Further detections of distant objects with oddball orbits followed.

And astronomers have now spotted 14 bodies that bear the imprint of a perturber's tug.

Dr Konstantin Batygin added: ”The evidence for Planet Nine is really, really solid,” pegging the probability of planet Nine’s existence at "over 90 percent”.

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