Look up at the night sky and find the famous three stars of Orion’s Belt. Then extend the line between them up and to the right towards the constellation of Taurus, The Bull. Halfway between them sits a small patch of otherwise unremarkable sky that could well be home to one of the most famous finds in astronomical history – a ninth planet orbiting the Sun. It isn’t every day a new planet is discovered in the Solar System. In fact, by one measure, it has only happened twice before in all of human history with Uranus (1781) and Neptune (1846). All the other planets have been known since antiquity and were never really ‘discovered’. Objects such as Ceres (the largest asteroid) and Pluto were once deemed part of the planet club, but have since had their membership revoked. William Herschel, Urbain Le Verrier, Johann Gottfried Galle and John Couch Adams are the only astronomers to ever find a new planet that is still considered as such.
That elite list may soon be about to grow. CalTech astronomers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin are among the frontrunners to join it. Back in 2016 they went public with the radical notion that the roll call of planets orbiting the Sun isn’t finished. They had noticed a handful of small worlds beyond Neptune behaving mysteriously, and considered that perhaps a ninth planet could account for their strange motion. “We were confident that another planet could explain the features of the outer Solar System,” says Batygin. They’ve been scouring the sky for this object, but so far it has escaped them. For now, this potential world goes by the moniker of Planet Nine. If and when it is discovered, it will be named after a Roman or Greek deity, just like the other planets.
LONG-DISTANCE RELATIONSHIP
This story is from the January - February 2020 edition of BBC Earth.
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This story is from the January - February 2020 edition of BBC Earth.
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