Our solar system is a pretty busy place. Millions of objects are moving, from planets to satellites, comets and asteroids. And every year we discover more objects (usually small asteroids or fast comets) that call the Solar System home.

By 1846 astronomers had found all eight major planets. But that doesn’t stop us from searching for more. Over the last 100 years, we have found smaller distant objects that we call dwarf planets, which we now classify as Pluto. The discovery of some of these dwarf planets has given us reason to believe that something else may be lurking on the outskirts of the solar system.

Could there be a ninth planet?

There’s a good reason why astronomers have spent hundreds of hours searching for the ninth planet, known as “Planet Nine” or “Planet X.” This is because the solar system as we know it wouldn’t make much sense without it. Every object in our solar system revolves around the sun. Some move fast, some move slowly, but they all move according to the laws of gravity. Everything that has mass has gravity, including you and me. The heavier something is, the stronger the gravitational force.

The planet’s gravity is so great that it affects movement around it. We call this “gravitational pull”. The Earth’s gravitational force holds everything on the ground.

Additionally, our Sun has the greatest gravitational pull of all objects in the Solar System, and therefore planets revolve around it. Our biggest clue about a possible ninth planet comes from our understanding of gravitational pull.

unexpected behavior

When we look at very distant objects like the dwarf planets beyond Pluto, we see that their orbits are somewhat unexpected. They move in very large elliptical (oval) orbits, clustered together and at an angle to the rest of the Solar System.

When astronomers use a computer to simulate what gravitational forces are required to make these objects move in this way, they discover that a planet at least ten times the size of Earth would be needed to do it.

This is very exciting! But then the question arises: Where is this planet? The problem we have now is trying to verify whether these predictions and models are correct. The only way to do this is to find the ninth planet, which is definitely easier said than done.

The hunt continues

Scientists around the world have been searching for visible evidence of the ninth planet for many years. Based on computer models, we believe the ninth planet is at least 20 times farther from the Sun than Neptune. We try to detect it by looking for the sunlight it can reflect, just as the Moon shines at night from reflected sunlight.

But because the ninth planet is so far from the Sun, we expect it to be very faint and difficult to see even with the best telescopes on Earth. And we can’t call him at any time of the year. We only have small night windows where conditions have to be just right. In particular, we have to wait for a moonless night and the place where we observe is facing the right side of the sky.

But don’t lose hope yet. In the next decade, new telescopes will be built and new studies of the sky will begin. They may give us the opportunity to prove or disprove the existence of the ninth planet.