The presence of a mysterious ninth planet in our Solar System is still contentious, but the search for it has led researchers to discover more and new objects far beyond the orbit of Neptune.
Artist’s Opinion of Planet Nine.
US astronomers Scott Sheppard, Chadwick Trujillo, and David Tholen have witnessed numerous trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) while conducting the biggest, deepest survey of the remote Solar System.
Between the new discoveries, there is 2014 FE72.The first distant object whose orbit lies totally beyond Neptune. The object stretches very far from the midpoint of the Solar System, 3,000 times the Earth-Sun distance. It is so far away that gravity from other stars and the enormous tides cause its movement.
US astronomers Scott Sheppard from the Carnegie Institution for Science said in a statement, “Objects found far beyond Neptune hold the key to unlocking our Solar System’s origins and evolution. Though we believe there are thousands of these small objects, we have not found every one of them yet, because they are so far away. The smaller objects can lead us to the much bigger planet we think exists out there. The more we discover, the better we will be able to understand what is going on in the outer Solar System.”
Most of the trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) appear to be grouping in a certain direction, which has directed scientists to guess about the presence of a large planet, up to 15 times the mass of Earth, whose gravity is pushing maximum smaller objects discovered in a certain region.
This movement seems so well established that it was reasonably astonishing for the scientists to find one object, 2013 FT28, which does not totally match with the others. It is seems directing in the same direction of Planet Nine.
Image shows the orbits of the new and previously known extremely distant Solar System objects. The clustering of most of these TNOs’ orbits indicates that there could be a very large and very distant undiscovered planet. Robin Dienel.
Though the grouping movement appears to be weaker in this paper, acknowledged for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, the scientists think we still do not know much to make confident statements about the presence of Planet Nine.
Sheppard added “Right now we are dealing with very low-number statistics, so we do not truly understand what is happening in the outer Solar System. Greater numbers of extreme trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) must be found to fully define the structure of our outer Solar System. We are now in a same situation as in the mid-19th century when Alexis Bouvard noticed Uranus’ orbital motion was peculiar, which eventually directed to the discovery of Neptune.”
