The search for the mysterious "planet X" on the outskirts of the solar system made its discoverers believe that the location of the other eight planets and small celestial bodies is much more difficult to explain in its absence than in its presence, NASA reports.
“There are five indications at once that the ninth planet of the solar system exists. If you imagine that it does not exist, you will have to explain these five features of the solar system and solve many other problems. Five independent problems will appear at once, each of which will have to be explained separately,”said Konstantin Batygin, an astronomer from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (USA).
In early January last year, Batygin and his colleague at the institute, Michael Brown (Michael Brown) announced that they were able to calculate the position of the mysterious "planet X" - the ninth planet of the solar system, located 41 billion kilometers from the Sun and weighing 10 times more than Earth.
Due to the huge distance to this planet, according to scientists, it makes one revolution around the Sun every 15 thousand years. It is not yet known where it is, and there is no evidence of its existence, in addition to the strange nature of the movement of a number of dwarf planets and asteroids in the Kuiper belt - a dump of "space building materials" beyond the orbits of Neptune and Pluto.
Only an approximate orbit of this object is known, tilted to the plane of rotation of the rest of the planets by 30 degrees, and now scientists are competing in who will be the first to discover the "planet X" or to prove that it does not actually exist.
Batygin and Brown recently got the opportunity to start searching for "X-planet" using the Subaru telescope in Hawaii, whose guidance allowed scientists to observe its supposed orbit for almost a week. These observations, as noted by Brown himself, were completed successfully, and now his team is trying to find traces of the ninth planet in the images that they managed to collect during this time.
According to Batygin, these data and other recent observations allowed him to find new hints that "planet X" most likely exists. In particular, Brown and Batygin recently found an entire brood of dwarf planets in the Kuiper belt, orbiting in very unusual orbits.
These celestial bodies, as noted by the planetary scientist, rotate in the opposite direction compared to the Earth and other planets, and at the same time their orbits are very strongly inclined in relation to the "pancake" of the solar system. Both are not predicted by the classical model of the formation of the Sun and its planetary family.
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“The strangeness of these orbits cannot be explained in any other way, except by adding 'planet X' to the model of the solar system. Its presence in itself leads to the birth of such objects and their unusual orbits - its attraction should eject some of the small bodies from the Kuiper belt outside the plane of the solar system, and then Neptune should attract them to itself and put them in their current orbits,”explains the Russian American planetary scientist.
As Batygin and Brown hope, the data they collected on Subaru will help them establish the exact position of the ninth planet and reveal its real physical characteristics. In addition, according to Batygin, they will help to understand where the "X planet" came from and whether it is a native inhabitant of the solar system or a migrant from another star system.
