The main part of the Kuiper Belt begins at Neptune’s orbit. Credit NASA
Planet Nine, a new “Earth Like” planet far away from the sun has been discovered. The planet, if it is indeed one, would be the farthest from the sun, making it the ninth in our solar system. So, we may just have found a replacement for Pluto which lost its designation as a full-fledged planet a number of years ago.
This should not be confused with the object scientists discovered a number of years ago in the same area of space that was dubbed Planet Nine. But it was research into that body which led to the discovery of what could really be the ninth planet of System Sol.
This all sounds really exciting, doesn’t it? It could really be possible for colonization someday of another world right here in our own solar system.
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But before you get too excited about this, Planet Nine is located billions of miles away from Neptune – 500 times the distance from the sun as the Earth – and would be too cold for habitation by people. There is also no way to know now if there is any water there or even an atmosphere.
Astronomers Patryk Sofia Lykawka of Japan’s Kindai University and Takashi Ito from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan conducted research on Planet Nine, which they published in the Astronomical Journal. The planet is located in the Kuiper Belt.
NASA explains that similar to the asteroid belt, the Kuiper Belt is a region of leftovers from the solar system’s early history. Like the asteroid belt, it has also been shaped by a giant planet, although it’s more of a thick disk (like a donut) than a thin belt.
The scientists explained that they detected smaller objects that appeared to be orbiting a larger object. The larger object must have a large enough mass for this to be the case and so, since it orbits the sun, it could be called a planet.
“We determined that an Earth-like planet located on a distant and inclined orbit can explain three fundamental properties of the distant Kuiper Belt,” said the scientists.
“We predict the existence of an Earth-like planet and several TNOs on peculiar orbits in the outer solar system, which can serve as observationally testable signatures of the putative planet’s perturbations,” they added.
“It is plausible that a primordial planetary body could survive in the distant Kuiper Belt as a KBP, as many such bodies existed in the early solar system.”
