Yeah, they're probably discovering a lot of things they aren't informing the public about.
In 2005, the discovery of the dwarf planet Eris by Caltech astronomer Mike Brown and his colleagues ultimately led to Pluto being demoted as the ninth planet of the Solar System a year later. Brown took to his status as the man who relegated Pluto with aplomb; his handle on Twitter is, rather appropriately, “plutokiller.”
But new research, published today in The Astronomical Journal by Brown and his colleague Konstantin Batygin, is sure to cause a stir. He is proposing the existence of a real ninth planet of the Solar System, dubbed “Planet Nine” and ostentatiously nicknamed “Phattie,” that would be almost the size of Neptune.
The planet has not been observed; rather, the astronomers have put together a mathematical model that infers its existence. “We have a gravitational signature of a giant planet in the outer Solar System,” Batygin told Nature. But interestingly, they say that some of the most powerful telescopes on Earth at the moment may be capable of spotting it – and it may already be hiding in existing images.
Evidence for Planet Nine comes from the observed motion of objects in the Kuiper Belt, a vast region of comets beyond the orbit of Pluto. According to the paper, it suggests there is a planet ten times the mass of Earth on a hugely elliptical orbit around the Sun, completing an orbit every 10,000 to 20,000 years and never getting closer than 200 times the Earth-Sun distance.
A hefty degree of skepticism is certainly needed, though. After all, the infamous Planet X and the mythical Nibiru have been circling in astronomy and conspiracy circles for years. Planet Nine has not even been seen yet; it’s too early to say it exists for definite. But Brown himself is confident.
“OK, OK, I am now willing to admit: I DO believe that the solar system has nine planets,” he wrote on Twitter.
Read more:
Astronomers Think They've Discovered A Neptune-Sized Ninth Planet Beyond Pluto
That is such a cool photo!! Just imagine how many undiscovered planets are really out there I bet there are unending new worlds that never stop and just keep going into infinity, we will never know and that super sucks...