[T@T]

Planet X found?

Ninth planet may have been discovered, researchers say.

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have found evidence in the outer solar system of an object that could be a real ninth planet.

Nicknamed Planet Nine, it has a mass that of 10x of Earth and orbits about 20 times farther from the sun" than Neptune. That means "it would take this new planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make just one full orbit around the sun," according to Caltech.

Researchers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown haven't actually seen the planet, but other research helped lead them to conclude that there is one. Basically, they found that certain objects in the Kuiper Belt -- the field of icy objects and debris beyond Neptune -- had orbits that peculiarly pointed in the same direction.

Over time, mathematical modeling and computer simulation led them to the conclusion that a planet was exerting the gravity necessary to shape these orbits.
Batygin and Brown inferred its presence from the peculiar clustering of six previously known objects that orbit beyond Neptune. They say there’s only a 0.007% chance, or about one in 15,000, that the clustering could be a coincidence. Instead, they say, a planet with the mass of 10 Earths has shepherded the six objects into their strange elliptical orbits, tilted out of the plane of the solar system.

Caltech is pretty confident Planet Nine is large enough to rule out any debate about whether it's a true planet -- unlike Pluto, which got the boot in 2006.

Brown, who played a role in Pluto's demotion to a dwarf planet, says "all those people who are mad that Pluto is no longer a planet can be thrilled to know that there is a real planet out there still to be found. Now we can go and find this planet and make the solar system have nine planets once again."

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/...n-solar-system

Maybe they found the cause for earths 26,000,000 year mass extinction cycle