Planet 9 would be one of the most mysterious things in our solar system if it existed. Some people may disagree with me, and they may say they have evidence as to why it exists, but new evidence will show that it’s much more likely that Planet 9 is just an astronomical anomaly. Today, we are going to talk about what Planet 9 is supposed to be, why people think it exists, and the compelling evidence against that claim.
Planet 9 was supposedly discovered by Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin in 2015. They didn’t actually see it, just evidence that it existed because they calculated that something was pulling on Neptune’s orbit, stretching it. It’s also called “Planet X”, and it should be 10x the mass of Earth and 5000x the mass of Pluto.
Planet 9 was discovered because of an unknown mass in Neptune’s orbit. They originally thought it to be Pluto, or the Kuiper Belt (A ring of asteroids orbiting the sun behind Neptune), but calculations showed that they didn’t have enough mass to pull on Neptune like that. They reasoned that Planet 9 must be a huge planet, but far away so that it could alter the orbit of Neptune without being seen by telescopes.
Planet X may exist, and there is evidence supporting so, but there is a big main reason it doesn’t in reality. Astronomers have done some more math to show that Planet 9 is an illusion or a mirage you might say. When Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin first discovered it, they might have not been looking in the right place, when trying to find out what was pulling on Neptune. Also, when they tried to figure out the qualities of the planet, they used 6 trans-Neptunian objects as a point of reference, but that was biased, since other objects changed the answer, causing the studies finding’s to be weakly supported.
Overall, I think we need to put more work into Planet X, and see if it actually exists, because finding it could increase the scope of our solar system far more than we presently believe it to be. Thanks for reading.