Solar system's planet nine is invisible in telescopes, claims astronomers
New Delhi : Our solar system holds a kitty of unexplained science. For long time scientists are perplexed about the existence of ninth planet which is located on the icy out edges of the solar system. In 2017, NASA scientists officially claimed that it is harder to imagine our solar system without a planet nine. Now again, the mysterious planet is back in the limelight.
Scientists say that the ninth planet is 10 times the mass of Earth and 20 times farther from the sun than Neptune. Astronomers try their best to take shots of the existing planet but it’s surprising that till date, no telescope has been able to capture it.
"Every time we take a picture, there is this possibility that Planet Nine exists in the shot," Surhud More, an astronomer at the University of Tokyo told the Washington Post.
Michael Brown, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, says that it could be remarkably invisible to existing observatories.
To inform, the existence of ninth planet in the solar system was first suggested by experts at Caltech in 2016, after they spotted a group of icy objects in the Kuiper Belt on the edges of the solar system have tilted orbits
"There are now five different lines of observational evidence pointing to the existence of Planet Nine," Konstantin Batygin, a planetary astrophysicist at Caltech in Pasadena, California, had said in the NASA 2017 press release.
"If you were to remove this explanation and imagine Planet Nine does not exist, then you generate more problems than you solve. All of a sudden, you have five different puzzles, and you must come up with five different theories to explain them," he added
Following the aforesaid clues, astronomers then came up with computer simulations that further supported Planet Nine theory. The addition of ninth planet in the solar system matched the properties of proposed by the Caltech researchers.
For now, scientists are finding new ways to confirm the existence of planet nine in the solar system. It is likely that they will find out reason behind the planet's heat glow.
