After U.S. astronomers announced the possibility of a ninth planet past Neptune last month but admitted they did not know where the 10,000 to 20,000-year orbit is located, a group of French scientists announced Tuesday that they have narrowed the search area down, according to CTV News.
The team used data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which is currently orbiting Saturn, in order to exclude two zones and narrow down the possible search area by 50 percent.
"We have cut the work in half," said Jacques Laskar, co-author of the study.
Laskar and his team believe that if Cassini extends its mission end-date from next year to 2020, the search field for Planet Nine, which was was initially predicted using mathematical modeling and computer simulations, can be narrowed down even more.
The team predicted that if Planet Nine was located somewhere on the far side of its orbit around the sun, its effects on the inner planets would conflict with the original predictions of the model, allowing them to conclude that it could not lie within 1,000 astronomical units from the sun, according to Space.com.
"It's a state-of-the-art calculation and a very clever idea," said Konstantin Batygin, another co-author of the study. "It is wonderful to see that members of the community are presenting their own proposals on how to best optimize the observational search for Planet Nine. This is exactly what Mike [Brown] and I hoped for."
While the findings are promising, mathematical predictions do not have a great track record with astronomers. When it comes to pinpointing the location of a new planet, the method has only been successful with Neptune, Mirror Daily reported.
The new data is available for pre-print on arXiv and will be published in an upcoming issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics.
