Back in January, a team of researchers proposed the existence of a ninth planet on the edge of our solar system. The team came to the conclusion using a mathematical model that suggested that a distant planet - about the size of Neptune - was influencing the orbital path of six objects in the Kuiper Belt, a mysterious area that scientists believe is filled with asteroids and other icy objects.
"It's almost like having six hands on a clock all moving at different rates, and when you happen to look up, they're all in exactly the same place," said Mike Brown, who conducted the original research suggesting the planet's existence along with Konstantin Batygin. "Basically it shouldn't happen randomly. So we thought something else must be shaping these orbits."
Not long afterwards, another research team narrowed down the area of the planet's supposed location, and yet another claimed that Planet Nine is crossing high-eccentricity KBOs due to orbital resonance.
"The extreme Kuiper belt objects we investigate in our paper are distinct from the others because they all have very distant, very elliptical orbits, but their closest approach to the Sun isn't really close enough for them to meaningfully interact with Neptune," the researchers wrote in the paper. "So we have these six observed objects whose orbits are currently fairly unaffected by the known planets in our Solar System. But if there's another, as yet unobserved planet located a few hundred AU from the Sun, these six objects would be affected by that planet."
Now, Brown and Batygin claim to have found another small object that is located in the exact location that their model predicts, further supporting the existence of a mysterious ninth planet.
Hey Planet Nine fans, a new eccentric KBO was discovered. And it is exactly where Planet Nine says it should be. pic.twitter.com/oZn0RDq8JF
— Mike Brown (@plutokiller) March 24, 2016
Although none of these claims have yet to be presented in a peer-reviewed journal or verified with other scientists, the Canada France Hawaii Telescope, which is currently in the midst of examining the far reaches of our solar system for the Outer Solar System Origins Survey, will be able to verify the claims as it discovers new Kuiper Belt objects.
If Planet Nine is proven to exist, Brown and Batygin claim that there will be no debate about its classification as a true planet.
