Our solar system is only one of millions of planetary systems that exist in the Milky Way galaxy. The solar system has four terrestrial planets, and four planets that are gaseous and do not have solid surfaces and are rocky.
The four terrestrial planets are those that rotate closest to the sun, namely Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. These terrestrial planets are small compared to the outer planets located further away at the edge of our solar system, namely Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
Since Pluto was demoted to dwarf planet status, our solar system officially has eight planets. However, scientists have long suspected that there is a mysterious planet called the ninth planet that orbits the sun from behind the darkness.
Hidden behind the Blue Monster
Neptune, which is often called the Blue Giant, is in an orbital location that is 30 times farther from the sun, compared to the distance from the sun to Earth. Not far from its orbit, lies the Kuiper Belt, which is a giant ring formed from billions of very low temperature celestial objects.
Behind this Blue Giant is thought to be what is predicted to be the ninth planet. The gravitational effect can explain why the dwarf planets at the edge of our solar system have elliptical orbits, which are different from the orbits of the other eight planets, which are almost round.
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Astronomers have investigated how and where the planet, thought to be the ninth planet, orbits the sun. They used computer simulations to image the farthest edges of our solar system, adding space objects with different orbits, as well as varying masses, until the results matched the data already collected.
Simulation results show that the ninth planet may be located 20 times farther from the sun than Neptune. Apart from that, this most mysterious celestial object may have a mass 10 times heavier than Earth. The light takes four days to get there. For comparison, sunlight only takes 8 minutes 19 seconds to reach Earth, which is about 150 million kilometers away.
Therefore, determining the location of the planet, which is still a hypothesis, is very difficult. All objects that are far from the light source reflect only a small amount of light.
The Hubble Telescope succeeded in identifying an exoplanet orbiting a twin star that is approximately the same distance as the ninth planet. This could also provide interesting clues about planets whose whereabouts are still being tracked. (ml/us)
2024-01-16 16:06:00
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