Planetologists from Spain have discovered unusual anomalies in the motion of comets and asteroids beyond the orbits of Pluto and Neptune, indicating once again the existence of a giant "planet X". This is stated in an article published in the journal MNRAS Letters.
“If these objects behave in the same way as comets in Jupiter, then we have found evidence of their active interaction with a large planet located at a distance of 300-400 astronomical units from the Sun. We believe that what we have seen cannot simply be attributed to observation errors,”says Carlos de la Fuente Marcos from the University of Madrid (Spain).
In early January last year, two famous planetary scientists, Mike Brown and his colleague at the California Institute of Technology, Konstantin Batygin, announced that they had succeeded in calculating the position of the mysterious "planet X" - the ninth planet in the solar system, located 41 billion kilometers from the Sun and weighing 10 times larger than Earth.
Due to the huge distance to this planet - one revolution around the Sun, "planet X", according to scientists, makes 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.
Despite the long search for "planet X", which are now engaged in at once ten large groups of astronomers, so far it was not possible to find traces of it. This led many scientists to believe that the ninth planet of the solar system does not exist, and its traces arose in the data of Batygin and Brown due to random coincidences in the orbits of the small number of dwarf planets beyond the orbit of Pluto, which we now know.
De la Fuente Marcos and his colleagues, having built an ultra-accurate model of the outskirts of the solar system and analyzed how comets and large asteroids move in the Kuiper belt, came to the conclusion that in fact "planet X" does exist.
As the Spanish astronomer explains, he was interested in one subtle property of these comets - the point at which they intersect the plane of the solar system if their orbit is strongly tilted relative to the orbits of most planets. The location of these points, according to de la Fuente Marcos, will be very different depending on whether "planet X" exists or not.
If the planet of Batygin and Brown is a fiction, then these points should be scattered over space in a completely random way, otherwise they will be concentrated in two specific regions of the solar system, where they will be "driven" by the attraction of "planet X".
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After analyzing the motion of 28 such comets and 24 centaur asteroids, de la Fuente Marcos and his colleagues found that their orbits crossed the plane of the solar system at two points distant from the Sun about 300 and 400 times more than the Earth. Scientists believe that this is another piece of evidence in favor of the existence of the "X-planet".