NASA researchers have not found any evidence that the hypothesized elusive object "Planet X' exists.
It has been suggested that this phantom, also dubbed "Nemesis" and "Tyche," orbits farther out than Pluto, a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory news release reported.
The researchers looked at WISE data that covers the entire sky in infrared light and were not able to find evidence of the planet. The data suggests no planet the size of Saturn or larger exists at a distance of 10,000 astronomical units and no Jupiter-sized planet is present at 26,000 au.
"The outer solar system probably does not contain a large gas giant planet, or a small, companion star," Kevin Luhman of the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds at Penn State University, said in the news release.
While the study failed to discover an unknown planet orbiting in our solar system, it did help uncover a number of stars and brown dwarfs in neighboring regions.
"Neighboring star systems that have been hiding in plain sight just jump out in the WISE data," Ned Wright of the University of California, Los Angeles, the principal investigator of the mission, said in the news release.
The WISE study found "3,525 stars and brown dwarfs within 500 light-years of our sun," the news release reported.
"We're finding objects that were totally overlooked before," Davy Kirkpatrick of NASA's Infrared and Processing Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology said in the news release.
The idea of Planet X came from a suspected "regular timing" of mass extinctions. Some have speculated that an undiscovered planet could sweep through an outer band of comets and send them hurtling towards Earth.
"We think there are even more stars out there left to find with WISE. We don't know our own sun's backyard as well as you might think," Wright said.
