Discovery of a new planet in our solar system

 Scientists say they've spotted a huge planet deep in our solar system

For over a century, astronomers have wondered if there's an extra planet in our Solar System that we haven't been able to detect yet. It seems like we get another "Planet Nine" candidate, formerly known as Planet X, before Pluto was demoted, every few years, and none have been confirmed. But the possibility has never quite been discarded. Scientists believe that they've discovered a new planet which may be part of the Earth's solar system. Now, an international team of researchers have made a new detection that they say could be a sign of a hidden world, poetically, unearthing what went overlooked in very old data. Thanks to advancing technology such as the James Webb Space Telescope, science boffins are constantly discovering more and more about our cosmos. 

Their findings suggest that the elusive planet could be up to five to ten times the mass of Earth, and is so far out in the Solar System that it takes 10,000 years to orbit the Sun. In recent years alone we've seen images from further away than people from just 20 years ago might have ever imagined, while the Mars Rover continues to beam back interesting signs of life on Mars. With billionaires keen to get involved in the space industry, our discoveries are only going to increase, although whether renowned astronaut Katy Perry will have anything to do with them, it's not so sure. The latest discovery was found right on the edge of the solar system, much like the child picked last in PE, and is approximately 46.5 billion to 65.1 billion miles away. "It is pretty amazing to think that something as big as Neptune could be sitting out there and no one would have ever noticed it," Gary Bernstein, an astronomer at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the study, said. "But if you put it far enough away, it gets fainter and fainter very fast."

Scientists are still divided over whether this actually exists. NASA named the alleged planet 'Planet X', which will no doubt delight Elon Musk. Fortunately, naming rights usually go to the ones who discovered it, and given the on-going theme of Greek and Roman mythological gods, it's unlikely that it will stay as Planet X for too much longer. One of the strongest hints of an undiscovered planet lies in the Kuiper Belt, a disc of icy objects beyond the orbit of Neptune that's home to comets and dwarf planets like Pluto. The unusually clustered orbits of some of the objects are there, including the dwarf planet Sedna, can be conveniently explained by the existence of a stealthy world pulling their gravitational strings. While Pluto was infamously reclassified back in 2006, Planet X is actually around 20 times farther away from the sun than Pluto is, so it must be a real kick in the teeth for fans of the dwarf planet that this new kid on the block might be taking its place.

A team of astronomers from Taiwan, Japan, and Australia used 40 years' worth of data from two space probes to track the astral object, which they believe could be an ice planet similar to Neptune or Uranus. If there is a planet lurking out there, it should reflect some sunlight that we could detect. For their study, the researchers focused on invisible light, using two infrared surveys of the night sky that were conducted 23 years apart. This time gap would allow them to see a distant, slow-moving object like what Planet Nine is thought to be, represented as a pair of dots, one of its position before, one after. It was back in 2016 when evidence of a large gravitational force far beyond Neptune was first noticed. In a breakdown of Planet Nine, NASA said: "It could also make our solar system seem a little more 'normal.' "Surveys of planets around other stars in our galaxy have found the most common types to be 'super Earths' and their cousins, bigger than Earth, but smaller than Neptune. "Yet none of this kind exist in our solar system. Planet Nine would help fill that gap." From there, the team identified thirteen candidate dot pairs which showed positioning consistent with a moving planet. One of the pairs had the same colour and brightness, suggesting that both of the dots were from the same object. This, the researchers argue, could be our mysterious undiscovered world. "I felt very excited," lead author Terry Long Phan, an astronomer at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, said. "It's motivated us a lot." However, some scientists say the candidate for Planet X found in this new study would actually be a completely different planet because it's much further away, and would also disprove the original Planet X hypothesis as if both planets existed they would make each other's orbits unstable. Others thought the 'faint dots' used as evidence of Planet X wouldn't stand up to much scrutiny as the findings are reviewed.

But others in the field are skeptical. The detected signals are extremely faint and could be random noise or another object. And we could be jumping the gun on those suspicious Kuiper Belt orbits, because we have limited observations of the objects which reside there. For those of you hoping to learn about some signs of life on Planet X then unfortunately it's a bad news. Life there isn't likely to be easy, with only extremophiles, microbes that can survive and thrive in incredibly harsh conditions, seemingly capable of existing there. This likely won't be the last you hear about Planet X, and it could soon be officially classified as the ninth planet (sorry Pluto) in our solar system. "It would be really cool if there was some kind of pattern there," Samantha Lawler, an astronomer at the University of Regina, said. "But I am not convinced, with current data, that you can't just go with the simplest explanation." Planet Nine or no Planet Nine, we'll soon have a chance to get a closer look than ever with the launch of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile this year, which astronomers anticipate will reveal tens of thousands of objects in the Kuiper Belt.