Mysterious mini-planets found lurking in far reaches of the solar system - Metro.co.uk

This is Neptune, a large and very cold gas giant which is almost three billion miles away from Earth (Image: Nasa)

A vast swarm of micro-worlds has been found in a mysterious area of our solar system beyond the chilly ice giant Neptune’s orbit.

Astronomers spotted more than 300 ‘trans-Neptunian’ objects in the far reaches of humanity’s home star system.

These are minor planets and are part of a large population of objects orbiting in a region past Neptune.

The most famous trans- Neptunian object is Pluto, although this classification is controversial because some stargazers think it’s a proper planet even though it was downgraded to the status of ‘dwarf planet’ in 2006.

Researchers from Penn University were looking for dark matter when they observed the new micro-worlds.

It’s hoped that studying these new objects will help to solve the mystery of Planet 9 – a hypothetical huge world believed to exist way out towards the edge of our solar system.

The planet Pluto is pictured in a handout image made up of four images from New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) taken in July 2015 combined with color data from the Ralph instrument to create this enhanced color global view. NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Handout via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS - THIS IMAGE WAS PROVIDED BY A THIRD PARTY. — Pluto is regarded as a trans-Neptunian object (Image: Nasa)

Professors Gary Bernstein said: ‘There are lots of ideas about giant planets that used to be in the solar system and aren’t there anymore, or planets that are far away and massive but too faint for us to have noticed yet.

‘Making the catalogue is the fun discovery part. Then when you create this resource; you can compare what you did find to what somebody’s theory said you should find.’

Last year scientists offered a new theory to explain why they haven’t been able to see Planet 9, suggesting it was a ‘primordial black hole’ the size of a bowling ball with enough gravitational pull to affect the chunks of ice and rock way out in the reaches of space.

Primordial black holes haven’t been proven to exist yet – but it’s believed they are much smaller black holes that formed during the big bang.

Planet 9 has also not yet been officially discovered, but its presence was inferred by analysis of trans-Neptunian objects.

Observations of these objects revealed ‘gravitational anomalies’ which may have been caused by the push and pull of a large planet.

Astronomers have also glimpsed a number of ‘microlensing events’, which is a phenomenon caused when passing light ‘bends’ under the influence of a large object’s gravitational pull.

The Planet 9 object could be one rogue hole that was ‘captured’ by the sun and steered into orbit around it or part of a larger population.

In an early version of a study published on Arxiv, scientists wrote: ‘We highlight that the anomalous orbits of Trans-Neptunian Objects and an excess in microlensing events… can be simultaneously explained by a new population of astrophysical bodies with mass several times that of Earth.’

(M Weiss/CfA) — Primordial black holes haven’t actually been proven to exist yet (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

‘We take these objects to be primordial black holes and point out the orbits of Trans-Neptunian Objects would be altered if one of these holes was captured by the Solar System, in line with the Planet 9 hypothesis.

‘Capture of a free-floating planet is a leading explanation for the origin of Planet 9 and we show that the probability of capturing a PBH instead is comparable.’

It’s hard enough to spot a planet at the fringes of our solar system, let alone a mini black hole. But these ancient holes may give off ‘annihilation signals’.

This doesn’t mean they sound an alarm before they decide to attack but is the name for a process predicted to take place within ‘dark matter halos’ believed to surround the holes.

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