If in the beginning these were timid assumptions, albeit based on calculations, now everything is very serious.
The ninth planet (Planet Nine), according to the latest statement by NASA scientists, does exist and astronomers are determined to find it in the near future. New evidence obtained by NASA scientists indicates that our solar system would be very different if the "invisible" ninth planet did not actually exist.
Where is this ninth planet of the solar system?
The hypothetical ninth planet, according to preliminary calculations, is approximately 10 times more massive than the Earth. It is located in the darkness of outer space practically on the outer border of the solar system, 20 times farther from the sun than Neptune. In recent years, astronomers have discovered in our system many anomalous features that can be explained only by the presence of the ninth planet, and only a small matter remains, to confirm this it is necessary to find the point in space where the ninth planet is at a given time.
“We now have five independent 'lines' of evidence for the existence of a ninth planet, obtained through astronomical observations," says Konstantin Batygin, planetary scientist and astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "If we remove from all this the assumption of the existence of a ninth planet, then we will get many more new problems than solutions received. We will have to come up with as many as five new independent theories, which should agree with each other in one way or another."
Using a computer model of the solar system with the ninth planet present in it, Batygin's group demonstrated that a sufficiently large number of objects should be present in the system, the orbital plane of which is inclined at a certain angle to the plane of the solar system. And now astronomers already know about the existence of five such objects. In addition to this evidence, scientists have shown that the presence of the ninth planet caused the plane of rotation of all planets in the system to tilt to the equatorial plane of the Sun, the difference between which is six degrees.
Another manifestation of the influence of the ninth planet, scientists believe that all objects in the Kuiper belt rotate in the opposite direction from everything else in the solar system. "No other model can explain the strangeness of the trajectories of these objects" - says Batygin - "These objects were 'pulled' from their original orbit by the ninth planet, and the gravity of Neptune again directed them into the system."
In their further research, scientists plan to use the Subaru Telescope located at the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii. With his help, they hope to find the ninth planet in the near future and find out where it really came from.
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But back in 2012, according to the calculations of an astronomer from Brazil, there is a rather large space object beyond the orbit of Neptune, which can be recognized as the ninth planet.
With this assumption, an astronomer from the Brazilian National Observatory, Rodney da Silva Gomes, made. He drew attention to the deviation from the data of calculations of the orbits of six objects in the Kuiper belt, among which a contender for the title of a dwarf planet - Sedna.
According to him, there are several explanations for the unusual behavior of some objects in the belt. The simplest is the existence of a large body, a planet that changes their orbits with its gravity.
In 2015, astronomers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena reported the discovery of a Neptune-sized object outside Pluto's orbit, which is 10 times heavier than Earth. The authors published the results of the search for Planet X in The Astronomical Journal, and Science News briefly tells about them.
The planet revolves around the Sun in an elongated orbit (and in a plane inclined relative to the Earth's orbit) with a period of 15 thousand years. Its chemical composition is similar to that of the gas giants Uranus and Neptune. According to Brown and Batygin, the object 4.5 billion years ago was knocked out of the protoplanetary disk near the Sun.