Planetary

“Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space...” Douglas Adams

This past week scientists at Caltech announced that they have some evidence of an actual ninth planet well beyond the orbits of the rest. In 2014 two guys published a paper about 13 objects in the Kuiper Belt that had strange orbits. This paper piqued the interest of some others, and they began a year long look at these KBOs (Kuiper Belt Objects).

What was strange about them is that they were all on elliptical orbits that all point in the same direction. Also they were in a tilted orbit of about thirty degrees off from the plane of orbit of the other planets. In our solar system the odds of that would be about .007 percent. Yeah pretty low.

So they threw different ideas in and shot them down as they came. Back and forth until finally they put a planet in, with a mass about 10 times that of Earth, and found that if the closest apporach to the sun of said planet was 180 degrees away from the closest orbit of the KBOs everything lined up.

This planet, as I said, would be about 10 times the mass of the Earth, it would likely be a gaseous planet close to Uranus and Neptune. It would have an orbit that would be an average of about 20 times that if Neptune. And in case you want to know that distance, Neptune orbits around 2.8 million miles from the sun. So this orbit would be huge and would make one trip around the sun in about 10-20 thousand years.

There is more evidence and answers by having a large planet like this in this weird orbit as well.

"A good theory should not only explain things that you set out to explain. It should hopefully explain things that you didn't set out to explain and make predictions that are testable," says Batygin.

Right now there are three known objects that travel in a perpendicular orbit to the planetary plane. While they were running the models, it also put these in their place. This is awesome to me. I mean we can tell there are planets around stars, by reading the dimming of their light, at light years away, yet we can still find something amazing in our own backyard. Sometimes things rather absurd end up being real.

Conspiracy theorists are already saying this is the fabled planet Nibiru that the ancient Sumerians supposedly said existed thousands of years ago. Even if it is not the same, it gives even more things to add to our great imagination. More fuel to feed excitement and fan the fires of our young to want to learn more, be more, explore everything. I think even if this turns out to be something else, or just a coincidence, this is exciting.